Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

We live in the male frame; pinned there. Virginity is ignorance;and knowledge is being transformed by knowledge of aman, not just penetrated, the literal event. Virginity is in notyet having been subsumed: one’s being is still intact, penetratedor not.Bram Stoker’s Dracula was written in 1897. D. H. Lawrencewas still in adolescence and the world unknowingly totteredbetween the Victorian Age and the advent of Lady Chatterley.Dracula was a bridge between the two eras, a mediocre bookbut a surpassingly great myth, a parable of lust and death thatburied the Victorians and let us children of the night rise fromtheir graves.In Dracula, there are two virgins, Lucy and Mina. Theyoung men who are their suitors may well be virgins too, but inhuman society men are rarely ontological virgins.Lucy is the old-fashioned girl, surrounded by suitors,pretty, flirtatious, coy, ornamental; and Mina is the NewWoman, a defender of women’s equal capacities in partnershipwith men: she will learn to type (a man’s job at the time,the typewriter considered heavy machinery) so that she cantype her husband’s notes and papers and be his equal partnerin work. Her feminism is witty and cheeky. She writes in herdiary:Some of the “New Women” writers will some day start an ideathat men and women should be allowed to see each otherasleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the i; NewWoman” won’t condescend in the future to accept; she will dothe proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too!There’s some consolation in that. 106