Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

including the condition of women, we act as if we are driven bybiology or some metaphysically absolute dogma. We refuse torecognize our possibilities because we refuse to honor the potentialhumans have, including human women, to makechoices. Men too make choices. When will they choose not todespise us?Being female in this world is having been robbed of the potentialfor human choice by men who love to hate us. One doesnot make choices in freedom. Instead, one conforms in bodytype and behavior and values to become an object of male sexualdesire, which requires an abandonment of a wide-rangingcapacity for choice. Objectification may well be the most singlydestructive aspect of gender hierarchy, especially as it exists inrelation to intercourse. The surrender occurs before the actthat is supposed to accomplish the surrender takes place. Shehas given in; why conquer her? The body is violated before theact occurs that is commonly taken to be violation. The privacyof the person is lessened before the privacy of the woman is invaded:she has remade herself so as to prepare the way for theinvasion of privacy that her preparation makes possible. Thesignificance of the human ceases to exist as the value of the objectincreases: an expensive ornament, for instance, she is incapableof human freedom— taking it, knowing it, wanting it,being it. Being an object—living in the realm of male objectification—is abject submission, an abdication of the freedom andintegrity of the body, its privacy, its uniqueness, its worth in andof itself because it is the human body of a human being. Can intercourseexist without objectification? Would intercourse be adifferent phenomenon if it could, if it did? Would it be shorteror longer, happier or sadder; more complex, richer, denser,with a baroque beauty or simpler with an austere beauty; or