practices of verbal harassment backed by the threat of physical violence on the streets or in the workplace; woman-hating textbooks used to teach doctors, lawyers, and other professionals misogyny
as a central element of the practice of their profession; woman-
hating art that romanticizes sexual assault, stylizes and celebrates
sexual violence; woman-hating entertainment that makes women as
a class ridiculous, stupid, despicable, and the sexual property of
all men.
Because women are exploited as a sex class for sex, it is impossible to talk about women’s sexuality outside the context of forced sex or, at the least, without reference to forced sex; and yet, to
keep forced sex going and invisible simultaneously, it is discussed
every other w ay, all the time.
The force itself is intrinsically “sexy, ” romanticized, described as
a measure of the desire of an individual man for an individual
woman. Force, duress, subterfuge, threat—all add “sex” to the sex
act by intensifying the femininity of the woman, her status as a
creature of forced sex.
It is through intercourse in particular that men express and
maintain their power and dominance over women. The right of
men to women’s bodies for the purpose of intercourse remains the
heart, soul, and balls of male supremacy: this is true whatever style
of advocacy is used, Right or Left, to justify coital access.
Every woman— no matter what her sexual orientation, personal
sexual likes or dislikes, personal history, political ideology— lives
inside this system of forced sex. This is true even if she has never
personally experienced any sexual coercion, or if she personally
likes intercourse as a form of intim acy, or if she as an individual
has experiences of intercourse that transcend, in her opinion, the
dicta of gender and the institutions of force. This is true even if—
for her— the force is eroticized, essential, central, sacred, meaningful, sublime. This is true even if—for her— she repudiates intercourse and forbids it: if she subjectively lives outside the
laws of gravity, obviously the laws of gravity will intrude. Every
woman is surrounded by this system of forced sex and is encapsulated by it. It acts on her, shapes her, defines her boundaries and her possibilities, tames her, domesticates her, determines the
quality and nature of her privacy: it modifies her. She functions
within it and with constant reference to it. This same system that
she is inside is inside her—metaphorically and literally delivered
into her by intercourse, especially forced intercourse, especially
deep thrusting. Intercourse violates the boundaries of her body,
which is why intercourse is so often referred to as violation. Intercourse as a sex act does not correlate with anything but male power: its frequency and centrality have nothing to do with reproduction, which does not require that intercourse be the central sexual act either in society at large or in any given sexual relationship or encounter; its frequency and centrality have nothing to do with
sexual pleasure for the female or the male, in that pleasure does not
prohibit intercourse but neither does pleasure demand it. Intercourse is synonymous with sex because intercourse is the most systematic expression of male power over women’s bodies, both concrete and emblematic, and as such it is upheld as a male right
by law (divine and secular), custom, practice, culture, and force.
Because intercourse so consistently expresses illegitimate power,
unjust power, wrongful power, it is intrinsically an expression of
the female’s subordinate status, sometimes a celebration of that status. The shame that women feel on being fucked and simultaneously experiencing pleasure in being possessed is the shame of having acknowledged, physically and emotionally, the extent to
which one has internalized and eroticized the subordination. It is a
shame that has in it the kernel of resistance. The woman who says
no to her husband, whatever her reasons, also says no to the state,
no to God, no to the power of men over her, that power being both
personal and institutional. Intercourse is forced on the woman by a
man, his state, his God, and through intercourse an individual is
made into a woman: a woman is made. Whether a woman likes or
does not like, desires or does not desire, to be made a woman does
not change the meaning of the act. “There are many scarcely
nubile girls, ” wrote Colette, “who dream of becoming the show,
the plaything, the licentious masterpiece of some middle-aged man.
It is an ugly dream that is punished by its fulfilment, a morbid
thing, akin to the neuroses of puberty, the habit of eating chalk and
coal, of drinking mouthwash, of reading dirty books and sticking
pins into the palm of the hand. ”4
Forced intercourse in marriage— that is, the right to intercourse
supported by the state in behalf of the husband— provides the context for both rape as commonly understood and incestuous rape.
Marital sex and rape are opposite and opposing forms of sexual
expression only when women are viewed as sexual property: when
rape is seen as the theft of one man’s property by another man. As
soon as the woman as a human being becomes the central figure in
a rape, that is, as soon as she is recognized as a human victim of an
inhumane act, forced sex must be recognized as such, whatever the
relation of the man to his victim. But if forced sex is sanctioned
and protected in marriage, and indeed provides an empirical definition of what women are for, how then does one distinguish so-called consensual, normal sex (intercourse) from rape? There is no
context that is both normal and protected in which the w ill of the
woman is recognized as the essential precondition for sex. It has
been the business of the state to regulate male use of sexual force
against women, not to prohibit it. The state may allow a man to
force his wife but not his daughter, or his wife but not his neighbor’s wife. Rather than prohibiting the use of force against women per se, a male-supremacist state establishes a relationship between
sexual force and normalcy: in marriage, a woman has no right to
refuse her husband intercourse. Limits to the force men can use
have been negotiated by men with one another in their own interests—and are renegotiated in every rape or incest case in which the man is held blameless because force is seen as intrinsically and
properly sexual (that is, normal) when used to effect female sexual
compliance. The society’s opposition to rape is fake because the