Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

always a tension between the law that protects male pow erbasicfundamentalism, religious or secular—and men’s wantingto break that law: exercise the privileges of power for the sakeof pleasure. And so there are political parties and philosophiesthat are in social, civil, and religious conflict; men disagreeabout how much license men should have to break the lawsthat men make to protect male power. * How much license canmen take without destroying the effectiveness of the laws thatformally restrain them in order to protect their power as men?Can men violate the rules that keep gender intact withoutcompromising male dominance: fatally wounding it? Whichlaws are fundamental, essential, to maintaining the authorityof men over women? Which laws are fundamental, essential,to keeping male dominance the basis of how the society is organized,how rights are apportioned, how power is distributed?Which laws can be broken, abandoned, or evenrepealed, without imperiling male supremacy? Can sodomy,for instance, become a legal form of intercourse without irredeemablycompromising male power over women, that powerpremised on men being entirely distinct from women in use,in function, in posture and position, in role, in “nature” ? Orwill the legalization of sodomy—making it a legal form of intercourse—mortallyinjure the class power of men by sanctioninga fuck in which men are treated like women; the*The spread of religious fundamentalism throughout the world rightnow is men retrenching to undo the civil and social advances of women; toreestablish male power as a fundamental reality by reestablishing gender asan absolute. This requires rigorous tightening of restraints on male sexualbehavior as well as intensifying civil and sexual controls on women.