Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

ically and legally separated from the husband before forcedintercourse will be recognized as rape. Some states have actually(by statute) extended the right of marital rape to cohabitingmen or to so-called voluntary social companions. The legalfight here goes right to the heart of women’s legal status andwhether that status will change or not. Will the metaphysicallaws of male dominance articulated in Genesis prevail; or willthe state enforcement of those laws of gender and female inferioritybe ended? Will intercourse remain the fundamental expressionof male rule over women, a legal right protected by thestate especially in marriage; or will this protected institution ofmale dominance— intercourse in marriage— be modified orreformed through changes in statutory laws; and what will theconsequences of such reform be— for men, for women, for intercourse?Or will the rights of husbands over wives be legallyextended to unmarried men over unmarried women so that intercoursefunctions as state-sanctioned domination not only inmarriage but also outside it?The right of a man to use his wife the way he wants has beenthe essential meaning of sexual privacy in law. The state, toquote one Florida legislator who opposed criminalizing rape inmarriage, “has absolutely no business intervening into the sexualrelationship between a husband and a wife. ”33The state, ofcourse, has created that relationship and has protected the husband’sforced access to the wife; and it is the above conceptionof privacy— keeping the wife sexually subjugated to the husbandas a matter of law (statutory, metaphysical, divine)— thatcloaks the abuse of wives in a legitimacy and a secrecy that stopactive, cogent, material interference. The down-to-earth meaningof this privacy was eloquently stated by Bob Wilson, a statesenator from California, talking to women lobbyists in 1979: