Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

no sense of proportion. His antagonism to sexual intercourse isabsolute. His social critique repudiates all the sexual commonplaces,the rites and rituals of socially normal sexuality, includingthe allowed sexual indulgences of unmarried men and theallowed adulteries of married men. His critique is not of superficialconventions or deeper hypocrisies. It is a radical critiqueof the elements of social life that maintain intercourse as a right,as a duty, or as pleasure, no matter what the cost of intercourseas such, no matter to whom. The violence in his marriage—theviolence of feeling and the final act of killing— had for him aninternal logic and inevitability, because intercourse distorts andultimately destroys any potential human equality between menand women by turning women into objects and men into exploiters.He is a political dissident with a social analysis, not apersonal psychology. He is tormented by the depravity of thesex act; but depravity has a political meaning rooted in a comprehension,almost unique in male literature, of the fundamentalsimplicity and destructiveness of sexual exploitation:“the enslavement of woman lies simply in the fact that peopledesire, and think it good, to avail themselves of her as a tool ofenjoyment. Well, and they liberate woman, give her all sorts ofrights equal to man, but continue to regard her as an instrumentof enjoyment, and so educate her in childhood and afterwardsby public opinion. And there she is, still the samehumiliated and depraved slave, and the man still a depravedslave-owner.“They emancipate women in universities and in law courts,but continue to regard her as an object of enjoyment. Teachher, as she is taught among us, to regard herself as such, andshe will always remain an inferior being. ”29