Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

scabbard or sheath. The penetration is implicitly conceptualizedas a cutting into, a sadistic, slicing entry, through dirt intodirt: the penis is buried, fucks, and dies. “ Death is genitalized asa return to the womb, ”62writes Norman O. Brown, always incelebration of the act. Coitus takes place in “a womb-cave, ” “thegrave. ” 63 Fornication, he reminds us, comes from the wordfornix, an underground arched vault: as if it, the fornix, were literallyunderground, buried. Actually in ancient Rome prostitutesdid business under the arched vaults throughout thecity— arched bridges over primitive sewers; and fornicationmeant intercourse with the dirty women in dirty, hidden, secretplaces under the bridges that sheltered sewers. In the world ofpsychology, the ecstatic world of Brown or the more tragic, evenmorbid, world of Freud, the death connected with sex is held tobe the death of the penis, trapped in the castrating cave, thevagina. But in the world of real life— and in the subtextualworlds of Brown and Freud and nearly everyone else— men usethe penis to deliver death to women who are, literally, in theirgenitals, dirt to the men. The women are raped as adults or aschildren; prostituted; fucked, then murdered; murdered, thenfucked. These violent degradations are not rare; they are socommonplace that the victims cannot be remembered from oneday to the next, so commonplace that the victims remain namelessin a mass of ordinary names from ordinary places. In thenormal world of everyday, regular culture, women are dirty:brilliantly articulate men on street corners say so with unmatchedeloquence. In the normal but hidden world of everyday,regular sexual exploitation of women as inferiors, thedirty women are sadistically abused because sex itself is usedsadistically; intercourse becomes a form of explicit sadismagainst women. In the heinous, abnormal world of prison and