Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

directly, most eloquently, in fucking women. Lawrence’s phallicreality meant power over, and his “ordinary, vulgar people”had the same religion. Women stayed dirty because womenstayed inferior. Lawrence wanted to reform an attitude and avocabulary, but he wanted to keep the power relations betweenmen and women the same. Worshipping “ cunt” and hatingwomen were not, in real life, exactly distinguishable anyway—as Freida, Lawrence’s own wife, battered, might have testifiedhad she not valued his life, as he did, more than her own.Change requires a change in power relations, a redistributionof power, an equality of worth that is socially true. The meaningof words that express derision of inferiors does not changeuntil or unless the hate and power they signify change. Currentdogma is to teach by rote that sex is “healthy” as if it existedoutside social relations, as if it had no ties to anything mean orlowdown, to history, to power, to the dispossession of womenfrom freedom. But for sex not to mean dirt—for sex not to bedirty— the status of women would have to change radically;there would have to be equality without equivocation or qualification,social equality for all women, not personal exemptionsfrom insult for some women in some circumstances. The nextquestion— a real one and a fascinating one— then is: withwomen not dirty, with sex not dirty, could men fuck? To whatextent does intercourse depend on the inferiority of women?Racially degraded people—women and men—are also devaluedas dirt: experienced as deep-down filthy; sexualized asdirty; desired as dirty for fucking and for genocide. Racist ideologyspells out how the degraded race is filthy and intenselysexed, dirty and sensual, contaminating. Dirty provokes thesexual interest, the fuck itself, the sexual humiliation, thesexual exploitation, the sex-murder of the racially despised.