cover for denying women the right to sexual activity. This is not a narrow
discussion o f laws on prostitution and their sex-discriminatory language or
enforcement. It is a position on what rights are for women, what freedom
is. There is no mention o f marital rape or o f the marital rape exemption as
violations of civil liberties and no discussion whatsoever of sexual coercion
in marriage sanctioned by law in letter and in practice as a violation o f civil
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
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.
