Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

concentration camps, dirt, death, and sadism go wild, there beingno limits on what men do to women; yet the elements ofsadism, so extreme, so incomprehensible we insist with blandand committed innocence, are not really unrecognizable. Theymimic with stunning cogency the norms of disparagement andcruelty that constitute fucking male-to-female. The intenselycruel and ugly acts are not genuinely alien from ordinary practicesand meanings. In Treblinka, one sadistic man, twentyyears old, “ slashed open the bellies of the women verticallywith a huge sword, ” this while they were living; after thewomen, disemboweled, were pulled out of the gas chambers,prisoners were forced “to mount them and simulate the act oflove. ”64 Vagina means sheath. Penetration was never meant tobe kind. In pornography, scissors, razors, knives, and daggersare poised at the entrance to the vagina, cuts evident on thedelicate skin of the pubic area, often shaved; or a sword penetratesthe vagina, the woman smiles and smears the blood fromher penetrated vagina all over her own body—eroticized dirt,eroticized sadism, eroticized death— not in a concentrationcamp but sold in a supermarket as mass entertainment, theevisceration happily simulated; or in a snuff film, real; or in asex-murder, real, the vagina not infrequently mutilated with aknife. Zola made clear in La Bete Humaine that one wanted toslice a woman open with scissors “not because she was resistinghim, oh no, it was for the enjoyment of it, because hewanted to. . . ”65 In painting after painting, speaking for thechingada, the screwed one, Frida Kahlo paints the womanvividly wounded, dripping blood; in one, A Few Small Nips,painted in 1935, a naked woman (except for one sock and oneshoe) is on a bed, gashed all over; she is alive, wide-eyed, herbody animated in curves and subtle, living contortion; a man