Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

Louise Colet, who did not have the good sense to take it personally:Brothels provide condoms as protection against catching thepox from infected vaginas. Let us always have a vast condomwithin us to protect the health o f our soul amid the filth intowhich it is plunged. 98His privacy— “a vast condom”—was created by his will and hiswealth, premised on the a priori reality of his physical freedomas a man; his fantasies were elevated to art; his visions weretreated with bed rest. Emma, he had written somewhere afterRodolphe but before Leon, “ now knew the smallness of thepassions that art exaggerated ”" So did he, choosing art oversex, “liberty in a world of fictions. ” 100He may have found distractionor the pleasures of male dominance in intercourse, buthe found his freedom elsewhere.For D. H. Lawrence, with whom we are doomed to be contemporaneouseven though he was born in 1885, virginity was“ her perfect tenderness in the body. ” 101 Andre Brink, whowrites in behalf of freedom in South Africa, imagines that inlosing this “perfect tenderness” a woman wants to be hurt, tobleed:. . . I tried to imagine how you would hurt me and cause me tobleed. I wanted to bleed, mulberry blood for you, for my ownsake too: to know what it meant to be a woman, to be transformedinto a person by you. . . It wasn’t even painful, withbarely a show o f blood.“ Is that all? ” I asked. 102