Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

is concerned I am an aristocrat. I demand that they use soapand a toothbrush. If I fuck once I shall have to pay the slut ahundredfold. And I don’t want to sow my seed in bad soil. . . ”48 Vagina dentata is vivid in Strindberg’s displacementto the mouth.The filth of women is a central conceit in culture: taken tobe a fact; noted, remarked on, explicated, analyzed, poetized,pornographized, satirized: genital filth, menstrual filth, excrementalfilth, filth down there, between the legs, in the hole, thewound oozing blood and slime, dirt and smell; the dirt inherentin the genitals or in her bad character—wash, slut, wash.She is dirt and what she touches is dirt because she contaminates,makes unclean; her dirt is a contagious dirt, defilingwhatever she touches. As Matilda Joslyn Gage wrote in thenineteenth century: “Everything connected with woman washeld to be unclean. It is stated that Agathro desired theSophist Herodes to get ready for him the next morning a vesselfull of pure milk, that is to say which had not been milkedby the hand of a woman. But he perceived as soon as it was offeredto him that it was not such as he desired, protesting thatthe scent of her hands who had milked it offended his nostrils.”49This is a contaminating smell, it spreads like a disease,epidemic; women, sexual lepers, the penis that should bethere rotted away by the disease of being woman; a smelly,dirty gash, diseased, contagious. Men go there for sex, forlove, believing it is a place of filth; finding it dirty and liking itdirty, wanting it dirty and needing it dirty. The dirt, the smell,bring on sex for the man, even if he has to force it on thewoman. In The War of the End of the World, a novel about afundamentalist revolution in the backlands of Brazil, MarioVargas Llosa describes a rape: