Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

Repulsionphenomenon, and aversive. The desire is not free-floating orabstract, in the way of French philosophy. There is a realwoman, Sophie, on whose body, inside whom, it is expressed;and when he is done with her, he puts her aside with rude indifferenceor cold distaste.The story is dense, passionate, artful, crazed with misogynyand insight; the real woman was diagnosed in 1910, the lastyear of the Count’s life, as “paranoiac and hysterical, with predominanceof the first. ” 5 The story has an argument: forchastity, against sexual intercourse. The story has an analysis:of the nature of sexual intercourse and its relation to the equalityof the sexes. The woman had an argument: her husbandshould love her as a human being, not only use her as an objectwhen he wanted to fuck her. The woman had an analysis: herhusband was selfish to a rare and horrifying degree, also a hypocrite;people were real to him only insofar as they affected himpersonally; she was real to him only when and because hewanted physical love; he became cold when he was sexuallysated, and indifferent to her. The man— artist and husband,wanting to be a saint, on the path toward the renunciation of allpower, all wealth, all violence— managed not to cut off his noseto spite his face. “A man, ” he wrote in a letter, “ ought not to sethimself the task of chastity, but only the approach towardschastity. ”6And especially, he did not want to be caught. “Andwhat if another baby came? ” wrote the author of The KreutzerSonata a month after finishing it. “ How ashamed I should be,especially in front of my children! They will compare the date[of conception] with that of publication. ” 7 The first publicreading of the story was in October 1889; by December 1890,Sophie was afraid that she was pregnant again (but she wasspared a fourteenth pregnancy).