Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

speak their language. Our minds think in it. The men are insideus through and through. We hear something, a dim whisper,barely audible, somewhere at the back of the brain; there issome other word, and we think, some of us, sometimes, thatonce it belonged to us.There are female-supremacist models for intercourse thattry to make us the masters of this language that we speak that isnot ours. They evade some fundamental questions about theact itself and acknowledge others. They have in common a gloriousambition to see women self-determining, vigorous andfree lovers who are never demeaned or diminished by force orsubordination, not in society, not in sex. The great advocate ofthe female-first model of intercourse in the nineteenth centurywas Victoria Woodhull. She understood that rape was slavery;not less than slavery in its insult to human integrity and humandignity. She acknowledged some of the fundamental questionsof female freedom presented by intercourse in her imperiousinsistence that women had a natural right— a right that inheredin the nature of intercourse itself— to be entirely selfdetermining,the controlling and dominating partner, the onewhose desire determined the event, the one who both initiatesand is the final authority on what the sex is and will be. Herthinking was not mean-spirited, some silly role reversal tomake a moral point; nor was it a taste for tyranny hidden inwhat pretended to be a sexual ethic. She simply understoodthat women are unspeakably vulnerable in intercourse becauseof the nature of the act— entry, penetration, occupation; andshe understood that in a society of male power, women wereunspeakably exploited in intercourse. Society— men— had toagree to let the woman be the mind, the heart, the lover, the freespirit, the physical vitality behind the act. The commonplace