Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

go to any length; and the submission charges the sex with humiliationand the humiliation with sex. The boredom too is intrinsicto the sex. Inevitable and terrifying, the men becomecruel in their indifference; and to have them she still submits.Having them means that sensation will prevail over her ownblank, empty life. Her self-destruction, including her death, isthe final reckoning for what she has become: not because she isan adulteress but because she has no integrity, she is nothing.The suicide is her recognition that she has hit bottom. Themen, having the world, have a deeper bottom to hit.Hitting bottom for Emma is classically female in form: thenotary from whom she wants to borrow money will give it toher for sex. '“ I am to be pitied— not to be sold, ” ’92 she tellshim. Desperate for help, she finds Rodolphe, “not seeing thatshe was hastening to offer herself to that which a while agohad so angered her, not in the least conscious of her prostitution.”93 Rock-bottom is having a social inferior want to buyher; and a social superior turn her down, for money and sex.Rock-bottom is the behavior of prostitution, with or withoutthe self-knowledge. Rock-bottom is being vulnerable enoughto have a moneylender make the demand with death the onlyalternative to meeting it. A colleague of her husband wants thegravestone to read Sta viator (“ Rest, traveler” ); but eventuallyhe settles on Amabilen conjugem calcas (“Tread upon a lovingwife” ). Indeed, she had been restless, never loving. As a youngmarried womanshe turned despairing eyes upon the solitude o f her life, seekingafar off some white sail in the mists o f the horizon. She didnot know what this chance would be, what wind would bring ither, towards what shore it would drive her. . . 94