Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

Repulsionthe bait in a trap. ’” 56Because she is “‘a means of enjoyment, ” ’57she will always be used as such, and her inferiority will be createdand maintained through that usage of her for enjoyment.No rights to hold government office or other public positions ofcivil or professional power will change her status as long as sheis exploited in sex. The analogy the killer/husband makes is toslavery,* where the institution can be legally invalidated butpeople are kept and used as slaves anyway, being exploited becauseothers profit from the exploitation. Slavery is in the exploitationitself, any kind of forced labor that is done becausepeople who are stronger want it done, including forced sex laborby women simply in response to male desire: “‘Therefore toget rid of slavery it is necessary that people should not wish toprofit by the forced labour of others and should consider it a sinand a shame. ’”58As long as men desire women for intercourse,and women are used as sexual objects, regardless of laws andother public reforms women’s real status will be low, degraded.For the man, this right to use a woman’s body, to exploit herin intercourse, has a nightmarish dimension originating in hisabsolute arrogance, his sense of total possession, which thewoman, as an object, must not suborn or he will suffer— therecognition that finally her body is not his being an agony tohim, causing him real and unbearable anguish:“What was terrible, you know, was that I considered myselfto have a complete right to her body as if it were my own, andyet at the same time I felt as if I could not control that body,that it was not mine and she could dispose of it not as Iwished her to. ”59*Serfdom in Czarist Russia.