Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

with imagination is pushed forward by it into a world of possibilityand risk, a distinct world of meaning and choice; not intoa nearly bare junkyard of symbols manipulated to evoke roteresponses. The paring down of the vocabulary of human affectto fuck-related expletives suggests that one destroys the complexityof human response by destroying the language thatcommunicates its existence. “ Sex-negative” is the current secularreductio ad absurdum used to dismiss or discredit ideas,particularly political critiques, that might lead to detumescence.Critiques of rape, pornography, and prostitution are“ sex-negative” without qualification or examination, perhapsbecause so many men use these ignoble routes of access anddomination to get laid, and without them the number of fuckswould so significantly decrease that men might nearly bechaste. There is an awful poverty here, in this time and place: oflanguage, of words that express real states of being; of search, ofquestions; of meaning, of emotional empathy; of imagination.And so, we are inarticulate about sex, even though we talkabout it all the time to say how much we like it— nearly asmuch, one might infer, as jogging. Nothing is one’s own, nothing,certainly not oneself, because the imagination is atrophied,like some limb, dead and hanging useless, and the dull repetitionof programmed sexual fantasy has replaced it.In the novel Another Country by James Baldwin, a talented,tormented, violent black musician named Rufus has committedsuicide. He is tortured by the memory of a white womanhe loved and destroyed. Nothing can assuage his self-hatredfor what he has done to her; he knows what he has done andwhat it means to have done it. Those around him tell him notto know or encourage him to forget. But what he did to her—because she was a white Southern woman— is too close to