Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

pursue sex. The intercourse itself, the submission it engendersin her, the habit of being that it becomes, the need she has forthe pleasure it gives her, changes her without giving her anycapacity to see, to know, or to love. Fucking leads to the loss ofillusion, especially the illusion that love, sex, and sensation arethe same as freedom, as heroism. Emma’s fantasies cannotstand up against the crushing reality of male sexual dominance:the fucking, the boredom, the abandonment. Emma’scorruption is a descent into a sensuality that is greed. For her,for her lovers, pleasure is the exclusive goal of life and onlypleasure is real or worthwhile. While still a virgin—marriedand fucked but still untouched in the carnal sense—Emma hadonly the impoverished inner life of fantasy. Then sensationconsumed that inner life, meager as it was. She is left withnothing inside. Intercourse robs her of any privacy she hashad, even privatized fantasy; and it robs her of all limits, socialand ethical, in the real world. As Flaubert presents it, the corruptioncomes from the intercourse itself: what it means forher to want and to take sensation in sex with the sloppy selfindulgenceof a drunk. This particular point is not about gender:it is not that her adultery has social consequences that areunfair because she is a woman. The men already embody thehuman consequences of this corruption. They are indifferentto human relations and incapable of empathy or understanding.The rest is gender. They have what Emma does not: eachhas an ego and lives in a wide world. Because they have thepower that men have, they are able to take their pleasure whereand when they find it, and each moves on when he is bored, nolonger sufficiently amused. For her, each man is perhaps heronly opportunity; she cannot make opportunities in her confineddomesticity. To keep first the one, then the other, she will