Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

it works, of what it means to us. Laws shape the experiences wehave before we have them. Laws significantly predeterminehow we will feel, will understand, what will happen to us inlife. Laws establish for humans the terms of our symbiosis withmale dominance: what it takes from us to sustain itself as anoverall environmental system; what it gives to us to enable us tosurvive as individual organisms inside it. There is an ecology ofmale dominance: a complex, delicate, deliberate interactionbetween it— our rain forest, our desert, our sea— and us, thefragile organisms breathing in and out inside it because of necessity,not choice. On one level, laws are diagrams of that ecology.They show the whole pattern of relations between us, theorganisms, and it, the environment. On another level, the moreimportant one, laws are causal, not illustrative. They make usdo certain things in certain ways. They keep some people ontop and some people on the bottom. They punish those whodo not comply. They force compliance in those who do notwant to be punished. They produce fear. They create order. Inthis, their active meaning, laws are instrumental in organizinghuman energy, creativity, and potential into patterns of actualbehavior, including sexual behavior. The purpose of laws onintercourse in a world of male dominance is to promote thepower of men over women and to keep women sexually subjugated(accessible) to men. These laws— great and small—work.They work by creating gender itself. They say what a man isin intercourse, in rights, in obligations. They say what awoman is in intercourse, in rights, in obligations. They forbidconfusion between male and female. They bifurcate rights, responsibilities,behaviors, so that men and women, in the sameplace at the same time, remain creatures distinct from eachother, strangers, the woman less human than the man, with