Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

the Arabs. Fuck means peace. Fuck means peace. ”3Even withthe consent of the flower-child generation to the revision ofmeaning, the meaning of fuck did not change. D. H. Lawrencetried to reinvent the use of so-called obscene words; he believedthat the use of sexual euphemism created the dirty connotationof the more direct language: “ If I use the taboo words,there is a reason. We shall never free the phallic reality from the‘uplift’ taint till we give it its own phallic language, and use theobscene words. ” 4The phallic reality he intended was ecstatic,not dirty, a sacrament of fucking, human worship of a puremasculinity and a pure femininity embodied in, respectively,the penis and the cunt (another word favored by Lawrence).Lawrence himself was forced to recognize “how strong is thewill in ordinary, vulgar people, to do dirt on sex. ”5Even regularworking men, whom he had idolized, “have a disgusting attitudetoward sex, a disgusting contempt of it, a disgusting desireto insult it. If such fellows have intercourse with a woman,they triumphantly feel that they have done her dirt, and nowshe is lower, cheaper, more contemptible than she was before.”6Dirty words stay dirty because they express a contemptfor women, or for women and sex, often synonyms, that is real,embedded in hostile practices that devalue and hurt women;as Lord Byron wrote in a letter— “ I rather look upon love altogetheras a sort of hostile transaction. ” 7Dirty words stay dirtybecause they express a hate for women as inferiors, that hateinextricably, it seems, part of sex— a hate for women’s genitals,a hate for women’s bodies, a hate for the insides of womentouched in fucking. Dirty words stay dirty because they expressa true dimension of women’s inferiority, a forced inferiority,the dirty words part of the ongoing force; the penis itselfsignifying power over women, that power expressed most