Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

month, parturiates once a year and copulates whenever she hasthe opportunity.I thought it a prettily-balanced sentence. 2Were she loved sufficiently, or even enough, she could not bedespised so much. Were she sexually loved, or even liked, sheand what is done with or to her, in the dark or in the light,would not, could not, exist rooted in the realm of dirt, the contemptfor her apparently absolute and irrevocable; horrible;immovable; help us, Lord; unjust. She is not just less; she andthe sex she incarnates are a species of filth. God will not help,of course: “ For a whore is a deep ditch; and a strange woman isa narrow pit” (Proverbs 23: 27).This dirt in which women are buried alive is not a matter ofattitude; it is not in the eye of the beholder. There is a woman.She lives in a world, this world, in which power is real. Menhave it, generally speaking; she does not because she is awoman. She is devalued not only in people’s thoughts but inthe way she is treated: by individuals because she is not theirequal; by institutions of the society—law, religion, art, education.She is poorer than men in money and in rights; she ispoorer in the freedoms she can actually exercise, includingfreedom of movement and freedom of speech. She must dressin ways that distinguish her on sight from those who havepower. Her behavior must be categorically different from thebehavior of those in power. She is segregated in the job marketand often in social life, but sexual intimacy is forced on her—individuals rarely escape forced sex in a lifetime. The dirt sheis buried alive in is real because the power that devalues her isreal. The ways in which she is devalued are concrete, material,real: sexual, economic, physical, social. They happen to her: