Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

and unremarkable arrogance, that he now sees as the essenceof sexual depravity, and also as a first step toward killing hiswife. Having actually killed, he sees the sex he took forgranted as murderous in its diminution of human life—how itmade women’s humanity invisible, meaningless; but the prerogativesof both sex and class made the exploitation as invisibleas gravity, as certain.Long before he had touched a woman, this depravity, thisexploitation, was rooted in his mind, a form of torment. He wastormented by “‘woman, not some particular woman butwoman as something to be desired, woman, every woman,woman’s nudity. . . ” ’34This impersonal something was at theheart of his desire: objectlike, not human and individual; notsomeone in particular but a body, perhaps a symbol, a configurationof flesh; something to have. The first time he had sexwas “‘something special and pathetic, ”’ “‘I felt sad, so sad thatI wanted to cry. ’”35He describes the sex following that first experienceas addiction, compares having sex with taking morphineor drinking; “‘To be a libertine is a physical conditionlike that of a morphinist, a drunkard, or a smoker, ”’36he says,particularly locating libertinism in how a man looks at awoman, examines her—the behavior most clearly indicatingthe deep, internal process of objectification. Because the manis compulsive, because he objectifies, because he exploits andis therefore depraved, relations with women as human beings—whathe characterizes as “ ‘brotherly relations with awoman’”37—are impossible. The loss of innocence—the loss ofvirginity for a man already socialized to exploit—is a real andirreversible corruption of his capacity to love a woman as a humanbeing. When he marries, he is unable to know or to lovethe woman as an individual. The depravity of being a calloused