Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

either mental or physical pain or that pain existed for any prolongedperiod of time. ”8Are you afraid now? How can fear andfreedom coexist for women in intercourse?The role of fear in destroying the integrity of men is easy toarticulate, to understand, hard to overstate. Men are supposedto conquer fear in order to experience freedom. Men are humiliatedby fear, not only in their masculinity but in their rightsand freedoms. Men are diminished by fear; compromised irrevocablyby it because freedom is diminished by it. “Fear hadentered his life, ” novelist Iris Murdoch wrote,and would now be with him forever. How easy it was for the violentto win. Fear was irresistible, fear was king, he had neverreally known this before when he had lived free and without it.Even unreasoning fear could cripple a man forever.. . . Howwell he understood how dictators flourished. T h e little grain o ffear in each life was enough to keep millions quiet. 9Hemingway, using harder prose, wrote the same in book afterbook. But women are supposed to treasure the little grain offear—rub up against it—eroticize it, want it, get excited by it;and the fear could and does keep millions quiet: millions ofwomen; being fucked and silent; upright and silent; waitingand silent; rolled over on and silent; pursued and silent; killed,fucked, and silent. The silence is taken to be appropriate. Thefear is not perceived as compromising or destroying freedom.The dictators do flourish: fuck and flourish.Out of fear and inequality, women hide, use disguises, tryingto pass for indigenous peoples who have a right to be there,even though we cannot pass. Appropriating Octavio Paz’s descriptionof the behavior of Mexicans in Los Angeles—which