Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you notgive him to eat today? 70Would you not do the same, philosophers of sex and death,Freud, Vargas Llosa, Bataille? Swinburne, Yeats? Nietzsche,Strindberg, Diego Rivera, Eldridge Cleaver, Sartre, Baldwin,Timerman, Reich, Byron, Lawrence, Bettelheim too, forgiveme, would you not do the same? Have you ever done thesame? “We could not stand women speaking the truth, ” wroteJoseph Conrad in a novel. “We could not bear it. It wouldcause infinite misery and bring about the most awful disturbancesin this rather mediocre, but still idealistic fool’s paradisein which each of us lives his own little life— the unit in thegreat sum of existence. And they know it. They are merciful. ” 71Who would not do the same? “ Here and now, ” wrote Bataille,“ I must emphasize that the female partner in eroticism wasseen as the victim, the male as the sacrificer, both during theconsummation losing themselves in the continuity establishedby the first destructive act. ” 72He must emphasize. The imperativeis to emphasize, not to do the same; to do the opposite, notto do the same; to have sex, which means creating a victim—not to do the same.Humans wound genitals in religious rites or for social orsexual reasons, for instance, the great tradition of male supremacyexpressed in the scarification of the female body.Adult male circumcision and subincision are frequently ordealsof manhood, tests of endurance undergone during ceremoniesthat usher in manhood in its most social and significantmeaning: the marked phallus signifies the high status of theadult male. Infant males are circumcised, for instance, in Jewishritual, and as a common hygienic practice in the West.