Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

same time) spawned classes all over the United States, includingin churches, to teach conservative, Christian women howto act out the so-called fantasies of their husbands with costumesand props. The Left prefers many partners to one; andHustler's meat-grinder cover, in which a woman is fed into ameat grinder and comes out as ground beef, expresses itsfood preference. On both Right and Left, a citizen had best beprepared to affirm her loyalty to the act itself. Ambivalence ordissent impugns her credibility; a good attitude is requisitebefore she is allowed to speak—in magazines, on television, inpolitical groups. The tone and general posture of the DallasCowboys Cheerleaders set the standard for a good attitude;not to have one is un-Amerikan and sick too. The social pressureto conform is fierce, ubiquitous, and self-righteous. Lostin the simple-minded prosex chauvinism of Right and Left isthe real meaning of affirmation, or any consciousness of thecomplexity—the emotional tangledness—of a human life. “Itis really quite impossible, ” writes James Baldwin, “ to be affirmativeabout anything which one refuses to question; one isdoomed to remain inarticulate about anything which onehasn’t, by an act of imagination, made one’s own. ”2There isno imagination in fetishlike sexual conformity; and no questionsare being asked in political discourse on sex about hopeand sorrow, intimacy and anguish, communion and loss.Imagination is both aggressive and delicate, a mode of cognitionunmatched in its ability to reveal the hidden meanings inreality now and the likely shape of tomorrow. Imagination isnot a synonym for sexual fantasy, which is only—pathetically—a programmed tape loop repeating repeating in thenarcoleptic mind. Imagination finds new meanings, newforms; complex and empathetic values and acts. The person