Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

less dignity and less freedom, with a lower civil status. Thelaws regulating intercourse are the laws most vital to makinggender a social absolute that appears to have a metaphysicalbase, an inevitability rooted in existence itself. These samelaws regulate—put a brake on— the kind of lust produced bymale dominance, by having sexual rights over inferiors. Theykeep men from destroying through self-indulgence a sophisticatedsystem of power that has lasted too long and ruinedthose who have rebelled against it. “ In the city of the world, ”wrote Augustine, “both the rulers themselves and the peoplethey dominate are dominated by the lust for domination. ”2According to Augustine, the great carnal sins “are hatchedfrom the lust for power, from gratification of the eye, and fromgratification of corrupt nature. . . ”3A former world-class sinnerhimself, astute, keenly aware of the intense carnal pleasuresof lust and domination, he described the quality of lust producedby the passion for dominance:Such lust does not merely invade the whole body and outwardmembers: it takes such complete and passionate possession ofthe whole man, both physically and emotionally, that what resultsis the keenest o f all pleasures on the level o f sensation;and, at the crisis o f excitement, it practically paralyzes allpower o f deliberate thought. 4Before the Fall, Augustine wrote, intercourse could take place“without the passion of lust. ”5God had created male and female;each had an appropriate nature; there were natural,Edenic sex roles in the Garden: “a man and his wife couldplay their active and passive roles in the drama of conceptionwithout the lecherous promptings of lust, with perfect seren­