Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

initiation of sex and female choice during lovemaking; less romanticizingof rape, at least as an articulated social goal.Those who are political activists working toward the equalityof women have other contextual reforms they want to make:economic equity; women elected to political office; strong,self-respecting role models for girls; emphasis on physicalstrength and self-defense, athletic excellence and endurance;rape laws that work; strategies for decreasing violence againstwomen. These contextual reforms would then provide for thepossibility that intercourse could be experienced in a world ofsocial equality for the sexes. These reforms do not in any wayaddress the question of whether intercourse itself can be anexpression of sexual equality.Life can be better for women—economic and political conditionsimproved—and at the same time the status of womencan remain resistant, indeed impervious, to change: so far inhistory this is precisely the paradigm for social change as it relatesto the condition of women. Reforms are made, importantones; but the status of women relative to men does notchange. Women are still less significant, have less privacy, lessintegrity, less self-determination. This means that women haveless freedom. Freedom is not an abstraction, nor is a little of itenough. A little more of it is not enough either. Having less,being less, impoverished in freedom and rights, women theninevitably have less self-respect: less self-respect than menhave and less self-respect than any human being needs to live abrave and honest life. Intercourse as domination battens onthat awful absence of self-respect. It expands to fill the nearvacuum.The uses of women, now, in intercourse— not theabuses to the extent that they can be separated out—are absolutelypermeated by the reality of male power over women.