Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

story, because the sex act makes the killing as fated as if thegods from Olympus had ordained it. The killer’s recognitionof the wife, finally, as human, makes one feel pity and pain. Ahuman life has been taken, horribly; a human being has doneit. For this one moment, even the reader’s interior rage at theauthor’s full-blooded misogyny is stilled in sorrow. In contemporarybooks and films, the murder of a woman is an end in itself.In this sad story, the murder of the woman signifies theimpossibility of physical love in a way that means loss, notsadistic celebration.Tolstoy’s repulsion for woman as such is not modern either.Now, this repulsion is literal and linear: directed especiallyagainst her genitals, also her breasts, also her mouth newly perceivedas a sex organ. It is a goose-stepping hatred of cunt. Thewoman has no human dimension, no human meaning. The repulsionrequires no explanation, no rationalization. She has nointernal life, no human resonance; she needs no human interpretation.Her flesh is hated; she is it without more. The hatredis by rote, with no human individuation, no highfalutin philosophyor pedestrian emotional ambivalence. The repulsion isself-evidently justified by the physical nature of the thing itself;the repulsion inheres in what the thing is. For the male, the repulsionis sexually intense, genitally focused, sexually solipsistic,without any critical or moral self-consciousness.Photograph what she is, painted pink; the camera delivers herup as a dead thing; the picture is of a corpse, embalmed. Thecontemporary novelist does it with words: paints the thing,fucks it, kills it.Tolstoy, in this story, locates his repulsion not in thewoman’s body, not in her inherent nature, but in sexual intercourse,the nature of the act: what it means; the inequality of