Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

awed by the intensity of that war on top of and inside of theirown bodies, celebrate being the screwed one. The misogynistsare eloquent in condemning the rebels: “ Emancipatedwomen, ” wrote Strindberg, using this euphemism for feminists,“are like an army of whores and would-be whores—professional whores with abnormal inclinations. . . ”34Therebellion itself is the abnormal inclination pluralized byStrindberg’s great hatred of rebel women. The complicitouswomen are flattered by the homage shouted during the fuck;flattered or not, the homage is inevitable, an essential anddefining element in identity and sexuality for women, a complimentimpossible to escape in a woman-hating society wherewomen are sex and dirt in one human body; the screwed one;“passive, inert, and open. . . ” In the more humane and sophisticatedview of Graham Greene, certainly as comparedwith Nietzsche and Strindberg, sex with women, in an earlynovel, brought on “a terror of life, of going on soiling himselfand repenting and soiling himself again. There was, he felt, noescape. ”35 Having had sex, the fictional antihero “longed witha ridiculous pathos for the mere physical purification of abath. ”36The woman, a kept woman though not by him, tellshim: “Tor a day we are disgusted and disappointed and disillusionedand feel dirty all over. But we are clean again in a veryshort time, clean enough to go back and soil ourselves all overagain. ’”37 The self-disgust, feeling dirty, is an outcome of sexoften remarked on in literature; being clean means beingchaste. The character feels himself to be trapped in “ slime” ;he has “wallowed” ; he feels “dirtier.”38Slime is used as a metaphor for corruption, but its meaningis literal too, not specifically in Graham Greene though also inGraham Greene. The man is pulled down and in, the