Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

castration, the blood, the slime, the filth. “ Oh yes, ” wroteFreud to Jung, “ I forgot to say that menstrual blood must becounted as excrement. ” 42Women are also wittily rebuked for having filthy genitals.Restif de la Bretonne, who was famous in the eighteenth centuryfor sophisticated literary pornography, not overtly sadisticbut astonishingly condescending, wrote in one of hisfictions (a priest giving advice to a new courtesan):“And, most important o f all, you must observe frequent ablutionsin the torrid zone o f your anatomy! A woman, like therooms o f houses in the city o f Amsterdam— which are washedthree or four times a day— must observe the most careful hygienein these parts. ” 43Amsterdam being frigid, not torrid, he has mixed his metaphors:or not.Sexologist C. A. Tripp, recently in vogue, finds a materialbasis for the pervasive and longstanding conviction thatwomen are genitally dirty: “fishlike vaginal odors. ”44Because ofthis stink, the belief that women are unclean “has invaded onereligion after the other in the form of charges of defilement. ”45Van De Velde before him found that “ extremely disgusting resultsoccur when, owing to neglect of personal cleanlinesswhere it is most needed, the natural local secretion becomesmixed with the products of urination, menstruation, and evenwith excrement! ”46For Yeats, “ . . . Love has pitched his mansion/in the houseof excrement” ; 47 and Strindberg, his opposite in virtuallyevery way, too gynophobic to say what he meant, put the filthon the other end— “ I could, I suppose, get girls, but where sex