Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin

of laws and other public reforms women’s real status will be low, degraded.
    *Serfdom in Czarist Russia.
    For the man, this right to use a woman’s body, to exploit her in intercourse, has a nightmarish dimension originating in his absolute arrogance, his sense of total possession, which the woman, as an object, must not suborn or he will suffer—the recognition that finally her body is not his being an agony to him, causing him real and unbearable anguish:
“What was terrible, you know, was that I considered myself to have a complete right to her body as if it were my own, and yet at the same time I felt as if I could not control that body, that it was not mine and she could dispose of it not as I wished her to. ” 59
    This anguish ended only with killing her, because only in death was she incapable of defying him, defying and defeating his use of her body as if it were his own. Her death ended his pain, because death ended her rebellion against her object status and her assertion of will in this body that belonged to him. Death ended longings she had, including a desire for affection from, even intercourse with, another man. Death ended her desire, put her back in her place, not wanting, incontestably an object, because objects do not will and want and search and are not subjects in a human quest for love or affection or sex. His wife, in wanting another man, had her own quest for love, her own heart and will and desire, and so he killed her, because he could not stand it. Here is the heart of the contradiction, the internal tension at the center of this sexual system of value and cognition: alive, in rebellion, flesh he is near and inside of, she is not human; with her dead, more objectlike than human, his pain is ended and he recognizes her, for one moment, as human—perhaps because she is now someone he no longer needs to fuck.
    But the killing, according to the killer/husband, was not one gross act of physical and violent rage. Instead, the killing was slow, over the long years of their marriage, a consequence of the sex he wanted from her. In the first month of their marriage she became pregnant; he kept fucking her during her pregnancy: “‘You think I am straying from my subject? Not at all! I am telling youhowI killed my wife. ’” 60 There were continuous pregnancies, but he kept fucking her despite her suffering and despair: “‘so many children! The torments exhausted her! ”’ 61 She learned birth control and became young and energetic and vital again, but then she wanted someone else—she wanted love from someone not “‘befouled by jealousy and all kinds of anger. ’” 62 But the husband kept fucking her anyway, no matter what she wanted, no matter how angry he was. In one violent fight, he wanted to beat her, to kill her; he threw a heavy paperweight at her; she sobbed hysterically and ran from the room, but by morning ‘“she grew quiet, and we made peace under the influence of the feeling we called love. ’” 63 All this sexual use of her was the killing. The physical act of killing—stabbing her with a dagger—is sexual too:
.. I felt, and remember, the momentary resistance of her corset and of something else, and then the plunging of the dagger into something soft. She seized the dagger with her hands, and cut them, but could not hold it back. ” 64
    The woman is physically real during this act of violence for the first time. She is never real in his other descriptions of her behavior, or her person, or his sexual intercourse with her. Then the dagger plunges into something soft and she resists, cutting her hands. When she is dead, bruised, disfigured, inert, a cadaver, he calls her human. The cost of the recognition is death.
    In this story of killing, the killing begins when the man starts using the woman up; pillaging her physical resources of strength and sex. He is calloused to her well-being because her well-being is not compatible with his fucking—and it is the fucking