Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

23what she wanted, no matter how angry he was. In one violentfight, he wanted to beat her, to kill her; he threw a heavy paperweightat her; she sobbed hysterically and ran from the room,but by morning ‘“ she grew quiet, and we made peace underthe influence of the feeling we called love. ’”63All this sexual useof her was the killing. The physical act of killing— stabbing herwith a dagger— is sexual too:. . I felt, and remember, the momentary resistance o f hercorset and o f something else, and then the plunging o f the daggerinto something soft. She seized the dagger with her hands,and cut them, but could not hold it back. ” 64The woman is physically real during this act of violence for thefirst time. She is never real in his other descriptions of her behavior,or her person, or his sexual intercourse with her. Thenthe dagger plunges into something soft and she resists, cuttingher hands. When she is dead, bruised, disfigured, inert, a cadaver,he calls her human. The cost of the recognition is death.In this story of killing, the killing begins when the man startsusing the woman up; pillaging her physical resources ofstrength and sex. He is calloused to her well-being because herwell-being is not compatible with his fucking— and it is thefucking he wants, not the woman as a person.Tolstoy himself wanted to give up wealth and power— hisestates, his monies from his books, eating meat, his position insociety; he wanted to be simple, nonviolent, and poor. In thisrenunciation of power he included sexual intercourse in principlethough not in practice. In The Kreutzer Sonata he knew, asartists often do, more than he was willing to act on in real life,especially about how women (and one woman in particular)