Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

ejaculated into her vagina, her capacity to get pregnant redeeminghim from the gender ambiguity of any sex act hemight commit for his own pleasure. She has no right of refusal.She is his; not flesh of his flesh at all in terms of rights or dignityof being but belonging to him in sex, his authority over herexpressed in his sexual rights over her, which, in the end, areabsolute. Inside this system of rights and obligations, forcingintercourse or any other sex act on a wife cannot be rape; theintercourse is legal and so the force used to effect it is legal too.The sanctioning of rape in marriage by law is usually tracedto the jurist Matthew Hale, chief justice in England in the seventeenthcentury. He wrote:But the husband cannot be guilty o f a rape committed by himselfupon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consentand contract the wife hath given up herself in this kindunto the husband which she cannot retract. 31The decision itself, however, suggests that by the seventeenthcentury in England there was a substantial challenge to thesexual rights of a husband over a wife. The husband’s authoritywas rooted in biblical law and enhanced by secular lawsthat had for centuries defined the wife as chattel, forbade herto own her own property, and deprived her of all civil rightsand liberties because of her sex. Contemporary feminists continuethe challenge to male sexual sovereignty over women inmarriage in efforts to criminalize rape in marriage. Traditionalrape laws in modern society “usually define rape as theforcible penetration of the body of a woman, not the wife of theperpetrator. . . ”32Some states have made forced intercoursein marriage a crime. Some states require that the wife be phys­