Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

than a transaction— pleasurable, even all-encompassing, but atransaction— when no hint remains o f the awe that a life inthese circumstances can be conceived. 13It is, finally, the woman’s potential to reproduce that distinguishesand affirms the real man: with the whole meaning ofthe fuck— gender—being resolved by its outcome in producingchildren. Sensual pleasure is not what distinguishes homosexualsodomy from heterosexual fucking: the woman bearing thechild does— in religion, in Mailer.The deep feeling or experience of being a separate racehaunts Proust; having a nature that is itself unnatural; alien inexistence, in being. The act of sodomy is not the crime againstnature; the men themselves are the crime against nature. Thelaw is internalized, a curse on what they are, a ubiquitous andinescapable social stigma:A race upon which a curse is laid and which must live in falsehoodand peijury because it knows that its desire, that whichconstitutes life’s dearest pleasure, is held to be punishable,shameful, an inadmissible th in g;. . . 14The men have become “ abominable” and “ detestable” and“ against nature” ; a separate race. This is because law createsnature. Nature is not, in this sense, trees or weeds or wind. It isgender: what men and women are; what a man is in intercourse,what a woman is in intercourse.The sodomy laws have an affirmative side, rich in meaningand persuasive power. Do not fuck men as if they are women; itis an abomination. The imperative is communicated, in theblank spaces as it were, to fuck women as if women are women: