Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

pie know, how consciousness and self-consciousness areformed, how acts are valued and devalued, how both the licenseto do and the stigma against doing are then expressed in actualsexual behavior, dread, and longing. The society with policepower behind it imposes both restrictions and obligations. Itpunishes forbidden behavior but it also punishes failures tocomply with mandated behavior. Many laws about sex are lawsdemanding sexual compliance, especially from women. Compliancecan occur behind closed doors, out of the public view;but it is not private at all—it is a social act in conformity with asocial requirement; the compliance itself is a building block ofthe society as a whole. Breaking the law is widely construed tobe antisocial; forbidden acts are said to hurt society as a whole;they are social, not private, from the point of view of the law.Intercourse has never been comprehended by law as a privateact of personal freedom except in one limited sense: those whobelong to men as chattel property or who are used by them assexual objects (the modern equivalent of chattel property) canbe encompassed in a man’s privacy such that they disappear altogetherinside it. The state can manage a sudden and sensitiverespect for privacy when it functions as a prison cell for awoman or a child or a slave or any civilly inferior person. Awoman, for instance, inside a man’s privacy, will never be ableto reach or invoke the law even if he is breaking it on her body.Privacy in sex means that a man has a right to shield himselffrom state scrutiny when sexually using civil inferiors.Aside from the disingenuous use of so-called privacy as ameans of protecting the active sexual dominance of men overothers, intercourse is, in essence and in reality, social, not private.Intercourse both presumes and requires a society of at leasttwo persons before it can occur at all; and the state is con­