Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

to explicate this morality is astonishing in that it necessarilyprecludes any simplistic interpretation of fucking as good orbad, simple pleasure, simple sin. Cheap, propagandistic viewsof fucking— religious, political, or media originated—are repudiatedby the presence of a whole human life with all its worthin the act and at stake; the meaning of this life and its passage isilluminated by the act; the intercourse itself essentially revealswho one is and has been, what one has lost or found, what oneis willing to know, whether with cruelty or grace. This is amorality rooted in passion, in flesh, in a human intimacy inwhich anguish and possibility are each a part of the other andwillful ignorance of the world is the basest sin. And in thismorality, when fucking is hatred, when fucking is revenge, thenfucking is hell: a destruction in violence and suffering of selfknowledgeand self-esteem; the destruction of a human being,someone else perhaps, certainly oneself.Rufus died that way, of hate, self-hate and the hate that hadled inevitably to that self-hate, a hate expressed in sex, in fucking,first with Eric, then with Leona, both white Southerners; ahate that grew too when he sold himself to white men on thestreet for “the bleakly physical exchange, ” 16the sex of havingnothing. Eric had loved Rufus, but for Rufus Eric’s devotionhad been an invitation to the slaughter, and sex the way ofshowing his contempt for Eric’s origins and masculinity. Rufus“despised him because he came from Alabama; perhaps he hadallowed Eric to make love to him in order to despise him morecompletely. ” 17 The abuse of Eric’s inner dignity in sex was anassault on Eric’s right to exist in the world as himself at all; anassault on his identity, his sense of worth, not predetermined byhis privileged white skin because his homosexuality exiled himfrom that circle of well-being and self-satisfaction. Rufus had