Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

Occupation/Collaborationnot at the point of entry into our own bodies, sometimes bythose we barely know. Certainly they did not come from there,not originally, not from this womb belonging to this womanwho is being fucked now. And so we have once again thegeneric meaning of intercourse— he has to climb back intosome womb, maternal enough; he has to enter it and surviveeven coronation and decapitation. She is made for that; andwhat can it matter to him that in entering her, he is entering thisone, real, unique individual.And what is entry for her? Entry is the first acceptance inher body that she is generic, not individual; that she is one of amany that is antagonistic to the individual interpretation shemight have of her own worth, purpose, or intention. Entered,she accepts her subservience to his psychological purpose ifnothing else; she accepts being confused with his mother andhis Aunt Mary and the little girl with whom he used to play“ Doctor. ” Entered, she finds herself depersonalized into afunction and worth less to him than he is worth to himself: becausehe broke through, pushed in, entered. Without himthere, she is supposed to feel empty, though there is no vacuumthere, not physiologically. Entered, she finds herself accusedof regicide at the end. The king dead, the muscles of thevagina contract again, suggesting that this will never be easy,never be solved. Lovely Freud, of course, having discoveredprojection but always missing the point, wrote to Jung: “ Inprivate I have always thought of Adonis as the penis; thewoman’s joy when the god she had thought dead rises again istoo transparent! ” 13 Something, indeed, is too transparent;women’s joy tends to be opaque.Entered, she has mostly given something up: to Adonis, theking, the coronation, the decapitation for which she is then