liberties. The discussion o f rape also makes no reference to marital rape or
the role o f law in upholding it.
tion of his wife. Marriage is the common state of adult women;
women live in a system in which sex is forced on them; and the sex
is intercourse. Women, it is said, have a bad attitude toward sex.
Women, it is not said often enough, have a long-lived resentment
against forced sex and a longing for freedom, which is often expressed as an aversion to sex. It is a fact for women that they must come to terms with forced sex over and over in the course of a
normal life.
Forced sex, usually intercourse, is a central issue in any woman’s
life. She must like it or control it or manipulate it or resist it or
avoid it; she must develop a relationship to it, to the male insistence on intercourse, to the male insistence on her sexual function in relation to him. She will be measured and judged by the nature
and quality of her relationship to intercourse. Her character will be
assessed in terms of her relationship to intercourse, as men evaluate
that relationship. All the possibilities of her body will be reduced
to expressing her relationship to intercourse. Every sign on her
body, every symbol—clothes, posture, hair, ornament—will have
to signal her acceptance of his sex act and the nature of her relationship to it. His sex art, intercourse, explicitly announces his power over her: his possession of her interior; his right to violate
her boundaries. His state promotes and protects his sex act. If she
were not a woman, this intrusion by the state would be recognized
as state coercion, or force. The act itself and the state that protects
it call on force to exercise illegitimate power; and intercourse cannot be analyzed outside this system of force. But the force is hidden and denied by a barrage of propaganda, from pornography to so-called women’s magazines, that seek to persuade that accommodation is pleasure, or that accommodation is femininity, or that accommodation is freedom, or that accommodation is a strategic
means to some degree of self-determination.
The propaganda for femininity (femininity being the apparent
acceptance of sex on male terms with goodwill and demonstrable
good faith, in the form of ritualized obsequiousness) is produced
according to the felt need of men to have intercourse. In a time of
feminist resistance, such propaganda increases in bulk geometrically. The propaganda stresses that intercourse can give a woman pleasure if she does it right: especially if she has the right attitude
toward it and toward the man. The right attitude is to want it. The
right attitude is to desire men because they engage in phallic penetration. The right attitude is to want intercourse because men want it. The right attitude is not to be selfish: especially about
orgasm. This prohibits a sexuality for women outside the boundaries of male dominance. This makes any woman-centered sexuality impossible. What it does make possible is a woman’s continued existence within a system in which men control the valuation of her existence as an individual. This valuation is based on her sexual conformity within a sexual system based on his right to
possess her. Women are brought up to conform: all the rules of
fem ininity— dress, behavior, attitude—essentially break the spirit.
Women are trained to need men, not sexually but m etaphysically.
Women are brought up to be the void that needs filling, the absence that needs presence. Women are brought up to fear men and to know that they must please men and to understand that they
cannot survive without the help of men richer and stronger than
they can be themselves, on their own. Women are brought up to
submit to intercourse— and here the strategy is shrewd— by being
kept ignorant of it. The rules are taught, but the act is hidden.
Girls are taught “love, ” not “fuck. ” Little girls look between their
legs to see if “the hole” is there, get scared thinking about what
“the hole” is for; no one tells them either. Women use their bodies
to attract men; and most women, like the little girls they were, are
astonished by the brutality of the fuck. The importance of this
ignorance about intercourse cannot be overstated: it is as if no girl
would grow up, or accept the hundred million lessons on how to
be a girl, or want boys to like her, if she knew what she was for.
The propaganda for fem ininity assumes that the girl still lives inside the woman; that the lessons of femininity must be taught and
retaught without letup; that the woman left to herself would repudiate the male use of her body, simply not accept it. The propaganda for femininity teaches women over and over, endlessly, that they must like intercourse; and the lesson must be taught over and
over, endlessly, because intercourse does not express their own
sexuality in general and the male use of women rarely has anything
to do with the woman as an individual. The sexuality they are
supposed to like does not recognize, let alone honor, their individuality in any meaningful way. The sexuality they must learn to like is not concerned with desire toward them as distinct personalities—at best they are “types”; nor is it concerned with their own desire toward others.
Despite the propaganda, the mountains of it, intercourse requires force; force is still essential to make women have intercourse—at least in a systematic, sustained way. Despite every single platitude about love, women and men, passion, femininity,
intercourse as health or pleasure or biological necessity, it is forced
sex that keeps intercourse central and it is forced sex that keeps
women in sexual relation to men. If the force were not essential,
the force would not be endemic. If the force were not essential, the
law would not sanction it. If the force were not essential, the force
itself would not be defined as intrinsically “sexy, ” as if in practicing force sex itself is perpetuated.
The first kind of force is physical violence: endemic in rape, battery, assault.
The second kind of force is the power differential between male
and female that intrinsically makes any sex act an act of force: for
instance, the sexual abuse of girls in families.
The third kind of force is economic: keeping women poor to
keep women sexually accessible and sexually compliant.
The fourth kind of force is cultural on a broad scale: woman-
hating propaganda that makes women legitimate and desirable sexual targets; woman-hating laws that either sanction or in their actual application permit sexual abuse of women; woman-hating