Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

those demands. It is the best system of colonialization on earth:she takes on the burden, the responsibility, of her own submission,her own objectification. In some systems in which turningthe female into an object for sex requires actual terrorismand maiming— for instance, footbinding or removing the clitoris—the mother does it, having had it done to her by hermother. What men need done to women so that men can haveintercourse with women is done to women so that men willhave intercourse; no matter what the human cost; and it is agross indignity to suggest that when her collaboration is complete—unselfconsciousbecause there is no self and no consciousnessleft— she is free to have freedom in intercourse.When those who dominate you get you to take the initiative inyour own human destruction, you have lost more than any oppressedpeople yet has ever gotten back. Whatever intercourseis, it is not freedom; and if it cannot exist without objectification,it never will be. Instead occupied women will be collaborators,more base in their collaboration than other collaboratorshave ever been: experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority;calling intercourse freedom. It is a tragedy beyond the power oflanguage to convey when what has been imposed on women byforce becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all thewomen say it is so.If intercourse can be an expression of sexual equality, it willhave to survive—on its own merits as it were, having a potentialfor human expression not yet recognized or realized— the destructionof male power over women; and rape and prostitutionwill have to be seen as the institutions that most impede anyexperience of intercourse as freedom— chosen by full humanbeings with full human freedom. Rape and prostitution negateself-determination and choice for women; and anyone who