Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

were part of the wealth he owned; and especially about how intercoursewas implicitly violent, predicated as it was on exploitationand objectification. He wanted to beat spears intopruning hooks, this phallic imagery being as close as thenineteenth-century author could come to talking about explicitgenital violence— the penis itself as a weapon in intercoursewith a social inferior. In art, he articulates with almost propheticbrilliance the elements that combine to make and keepwomen inferior, all of them originating, in his view, in sexual intercourse,because sexual intercourse requires objectificationand therefore is exploitation. In life, he blamed and hatedSophie, feeling antagonism and repulsion, because he wantedto fuck her and did fuck her. Satiation did not lead to calm orharmony; it simply produced a hostile indifference, a stylisticmodification of actively expressed repulsion. More than anyother form of privilege, intercourse kept Tolstoy rooted inearthly, arrogant obsession—not poor and simple at all; havingthe right to use another person for pleasure and exercising thatright at will; certainly not nonviolent. He experienced the obsessionas internal violence, violating him, not her. The intensityof wanting was violent—stubborn, cruel, as he called it.The intensity of the act was violent, including in later years sexthat by modern standards was clearly forced. The distaste aftersatiation was hostile, a passive violence of antipathy and indifference.He hated intercourse because of what it did to him,how he felt wanting it, doing it, being done with it. He hatedSophie because he fucked Sophie. For Sophie, being used, beinghated, being fucked, meant loving him as a wife was supposedto. To her diary only she confided that “the main thingis not to love, ” because it is “so painful and humiliating, ” and“all my pride is trampled in the mud. ”65