Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

Romance was her suicidal substitute for action; fantasy her suicidalsubstitute for a real world, a wide world. And intercoursewas her suicidal substitute for freedom.For her creator, Gustave Flaubert, intercourse had been“ always secondary. ” 95 He held back, in brothels picking theugliest prostitute and fucking her without taking his cigar outof his mouth; and to Louise Colet, his lover, he explained:At times I have wanted to give pleasure to a woman, but theidea o f the strange spectacle I should present at the moment ofdoing so made me laugh so much that all my desire melted underthe fire of an inner irony, which sang a hymn o f mockeryand derision within me. 96The intercourse in his novel, however, did involve him. In a letterto Louise Colet, he wrote:I am in full fornication, in the very midst of it: my lovers are sweatingand gasping. This has been one o f the rare days o f my lifepassed completely in illusion, from beginning to en d .. . . Now Ihave great pains in my knees, in my back, and in my head. I feel alike man who has been fucking too much (forgive the expression)—a kind of rapturous lassitude. 97He did not commit suicide, nor was he burned. He wascharged with obscenity on the publication of Madame Bovaryand later acquitted. His own virginity— the literal kind—waslost when the young master, nearly fifteen, forced himself onone of his mother’s maids. He experienced disgust and disappointment.There is no known record of what she experienced.Writing touched him; not much else did. As he wrote