Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

degrading. The only freedom imaginable in this act of intercoursewas freedom based on an irrevocable and unbreachablefemale will given play in a body honestly her own. Thiswas an eloquent answer to reading the meaning of intercoursethe other way: by its nature, intercourse mandated that thewoman must be lesser in power and in privacy. Instead, saidWoodhull, the woman must be king. Her humanity requiredsexual sovereignty.Male-dominant gender hierarchy, however, seems immuneto reform by reasoned or visionary argument or by changes insexual styles, either personal or social. This may be because intercourseitself is immune to reform. In it, female is bottom,stigmatized. Intercourse remains a means or the means ofphysiologically making a woman inferior: communicating toher cell by cell her own inferior status, impressing it on her,burning it into her by shoving it into her, over and over, pushingand thrusting until she gives up and gives in—which iscalled surrender in the male lexicon. In the experience of intercourse,she loses the capacity for integrity because her body—the basis of privacy and freedom in the material world for allhuman beings—is entered and occupied; the boundaries of herphysical body are—neutrally speaking—violated. What is takenfrom her in that act is not recoverable, and she spends herlife—wanting, after all, to have something—pretending thatpleasure is in being reduced through intercourse to insignificance.She will not have an orgasm—maybe because she hashuman pride and she resents captivity; but also she will not orcannot rebel—not enough for it to matter, to end male dominanceover her. She learns to eroticize powerlessness and selfannihilation.The very boundaries of her own body becomemeaningless to her, and even worse, useless to her. The trans-