Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

that pervades sexual practice and sexual passion. Reproductivetechnologies are strengthening male dominance, invigorating itby providing new ways of policing women’s reproductive capacities,bringing them under stricter male scrutiny and control;and the experimental development of these technologieshas been sadistic, using human women as if they were sexuallaboratory animals—rats, mice, rabbits, cats, with kinky uteri.For increasing numbers of men, bondage and torture of the femalegenitals (that were entered into and occupied in the goodold days) may supplant intercourse as a sexual practice. Thepassion for hurting women is a sexual passion; and sexual hatredof women can be expressed without intercourse.There has always been a peculiar irrationality to all the biologicalarguments that supposedly predetermine the inferiorsocial status of women. Bulls mount cows and baboons dowhatever; but human females do not have estrus or go intoheat. The logical inference is not that we are always availablefor mounting but rather that we are never, strictly speaking,“available.” Nor do animals have cultures; nor do they determinein so many things what they will do and how they will dothem and what the meaning of their own behavior is. They donot decide what their lives will be. Only humans face the oftencomplicated reality of having potential and having to makechoices based on having potential. We are not driven by instinct,at least not much. We have possibilities, and we make upmeanings as we go along. The meanings we create or learn donot exist only in our heads, in ineffable ideas. Our meaningsalso exist in our bodies—what we are, what we do, what wephysically feel, what we physically know; and there is no personalpsychology that is separate from what the body haslearned about life. Yet when we look at the human condition,