Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

apes at all; he is visually impaired— there is nothing bigenough for him to see; he is hearing-impaired— there are notenough screams; he cannot hear. The women in the clandestineprisons, Jews or other racially degraded women in otherplaces, are raped the way women are by men who rape the waymen rape. The bad motives of the men— their racist motives—are a matter for moral indignation, yes; but there is no atrocity.Atrocity— and rape recognized as atrocity— is committedagainst a whole people, men too, unmanning the men, hurtingthem. Otherwise, rape does not count: not as torture; not as intolerableand unconscionable violation. The crimes againstTimerman were crimes: keeping him in jail with special insultsand special malice because he was a Jew; terrorizing his familybecause he was a Jew; punishing him extra and worse becausehe began to fight as a newspaper editor for the disappeared inArgentina and he was a Jew. The “girls” were “girls.” None ofthe “girls” who were raped has brought a book to internationalattention; not yet. The anti-Semitism against him matteredwhen it did matter— and that was a fight— because he was aman; he existed, despite anti-Semitism, recognizably as an individual.Women get raped anyway because they are women:all the same in that regard. The rape of a woman by a racist excitedand incensed by her race is in the realm of ordinary sexualdesire, the kind all men feel, part of a continuum of sexualdesire in which hostility always plays some part; the hostility isusually seen as innocuous; even when identifiable as racism itis not distinct from normal kinds of sexual arousal. As Sartrewrote in Anti-Semite and Jew: “ In Berlin I knew a Protestant inwhom sexual desire took the form of indignation. The sight ofwomen in bathing suits aroused him to fury; he willingly encouragedthat fury and passed his time at swimming pools.