Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

Augustine of lust, “were a chain that I dragged along with me,yet I was afraid to be freed from it . . . ”23In social terms, male dominance does best when men arenot, in Augustine’s words, “more a slave of lust than a true loverof marriage. . . ”24Marriage is the legal ownership of women,the legal intercourse that is the foundation of male authority.The principle that “ the personal is political” belongs topatriarchal law itself, originating there in a virtual synthesis ofintimacy and state policy, the private and the public, the penisand the rule of men. The regulation of men in intercourse is aprime example. It is not enough to have power as a birthright;power must be kept—over living human beings born to rebellion,arguably a human trait, certainly a human potential. Theregulation of men in sex creates a seamless state of being, internaland external; experienced in the world as real and imposedon the body, experienced in the body as real and imposed onthe world; in the body and in the world called “nature.” Therestraint on men, operating inside and outside, is efficient,smart about power. Men were not supposed to fuck until theydropped; there would be fewer foot soldiers in the war and thepsychological or existential burden of carnality is complex, difficult,tending toward a collapse of personality and self-control.And men had an affirmative obligation to use the fuck to createand maintain a social system of power over women, a socialand political system in which the fuck, regulated and restrained,kept women compliant, a sexually subjugated class.Because of how laws organized male sexuality— the sexualpractices and feelings of men—men experienced a physiologicallyreal desire to subjugate women through sex; and to theextent that women were or could be formed by men to desiresubjugation, the system itself was carried on the backs of