Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

In Dracula, vampirism is—to be pedestrian in the extreme—a metaphor for intercourse: the great appetite for using and beingused; the annihilation of orgasm; the submission of thefemale to the great hunter; the driving obsessiveness of lust,which destroys both internal peace and any moral constraint;the commonplace victimization of the one taken; the greatcraving, never sated and cruelly impersonal. The act in bloodis virtually a pun in metaphor on intercourse as the origin oflife: reproduction; blood as nurture; the fetus feeding off thewoman’s blood in utero. And with the great wound, the vagina,moved to the throat, there is, like a shadow, the haunting resonanceof the blood-soaked vagina, in menstruation, in childbirth;bleeding when a virgin and fucked. While alive thewomen are virgins in the long duration of the first fuck, thedraining of their blood over time one long, lingering sex act ofpenetration and violation; after death, they are carnal, beingtruly sexed. The women are transformed into predators, greatfoul parasites; and short of that, they have not felt or knownlust or had sex, been touched in a way that transforms being—they have not been fucked. As humans, they begin to learn sexin dying. And the men, the human suitors and husbands, cannotgive the good fuck; instead, they are given a new kind of sextoo, not the fuck but watching—watching the women die. Andwith the great wound, the vagina, moved to the throat, there isthe harbinger of what has become a common practice of sexualassault now: throat rape, deep thrusting into the throat as if itwere a female genital, a vagina, in the manner of the pornographicfilm Deep Throat. But Dracula, the book, the myth,goes beyond metaphor in its intuitive rendering of an oncomingcentury filled with sexual horror: the throat as a female genital;sex and death as synonyms; killing as a sex act; slow dying