Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

tried to destroy him through sexual contempt; he had “despisedEric’s manhood by treating him as a woman, by tellinghim how inferior he was to a woman, by treating him as nothingmore than a hideous sexual deformity. ” 18Eric ran away to Paris,from Rufus, from his sexual hostility and hate. Near his owndeath, Rufus, on the street and trading his ass for food, knowinghe would rather kill than keep the bargain ('“ I don’t want nomore hands on me, no more, no more, no more. ’” 19), rememberedEric and saw his real life, his real condition, its humanity,the terms of its despair: “He glimpsed, for the first time, the extent,the nature, of Eric’s loneliness, and the danger in whichthis placed him; and wished he had been nicer to him. ”20He rememberedthat Eric had loved him, then Leona had; and thathe had done to Leona what he had done to Eric: “ But Leonahad not been a deformity. And he had used against her the veryepithets he had used against Eric, and in the very same way,with the same roaring in his head and the same intolerable pressurein his chest. ”21 With Leona, the sex had first been forced, ata party; they were strangers but she had gone there with him afterhearing him play his saxophone with a band in a bar; andshe stayed with him, determined to love him, convinced that herlove could heal him of his hate; perhaps having found someonewith whose suffering she identified. Her husband had batteredher and then taken her child from her, convincing her familyand a court that she was an unfit mother because she drank. Especially,Leona understood what it meant to feel worthless.The sex that began in force had some tenderness, somehate:And she carried him, as the sea will carry a boat: with a slow,rocking and rising and falling motion, barely suggestive o f the