Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

sticklike thing, evokes the hard, sticklike fecal mass in the rectum;and, according to Freud, feces, baby, and penis are relatedin subconscious sexual meaning. It is true that etymologicallybaby and penis are related; the word penis comes from the OldEnglish for fetus. Freud insisted on an important subconsciousconnection between these two phenomena and the turd in therectum for this reason: “The relationship between the penisand the passage lined with mucous membrane which it fills andexcites already has its prototype in the pregenital, anal-sadisticphase. The faecal mass. . . represents as it were the first penis,and the stimulated mucous membrane of the rectum representsthat of the vagina. ”61 In other words, the mucous membrane thatthe man touches in intercourse with his penis, the vagina, isdirty like the rectum. The penis evokes the turd in the rectumbecause the man has the experience of touching a membranejust like the rectal wall. The relationship of the penis to the actualturd is evocative and symbolic, distant. The rectum and thevagina are analogous in present time. The vagina of the womanis not phenomenologically distinct from the mucous membraneof the rectum.For humans, the descent into the excremental is a descentinto sadism and death. For women, being excremental is the dimensionof inferiority that legitimates and makes appropriatesadistic sexual acts that pass as simple sex, a cruelty in sex, thebrutal domination through sexual subjugation of a worthless,essentially scatological thing. The sadism is part of the act of intercourseor an adjunct to it; it is a cruelty of disregard and alsoa brutality of behavior. The descent into death is held to be synonymouswith penile descent into the woman, which endseventually and inevitably in detumescence. Buried in dirt, thepenis strikes, then dies. Vagina comes from the Latin meaning