Excerpts from "Intercourse" by Andrea Dworkin

"Where there is no sense of unity, the women of the family become corrupt; and with the corruption of its women, society is plunged into chaos." - The Bhagavad Gita 1:41

Experience is chosen for us, then, imposed on us, especially in intercourse, and so is its meaning. We are allowed to have intercourse on the terms men determine, according to the rules men make. We do not have to have an orgasm; that terrible burden is on them. 134

I have never written for a cowardly or passive or stupid reader, the precise characteristics of most reviewers-overeducated but functionally illiterate, members of a gang, a pack, who do their drive-by shootings in print and experience what they call "the street" at cocktail parties. vii

We are poorer than men in money and so we have to barter sex or sell it outright (which is why they keep us poorer in money). We are poorer than men in psychological well-being because for us self-esteem depends on the approval – frequently expressed through sexual desire – of those who have and exercise power over us. 127

I doubt if it is possible to feel real affection for anybody who is in every respect one’s inferior. 170

She seized his hair, hurled him to the ground, and placing her foot on his head, exclaimed: “Tremble, great enemy. You now lie under the foot of a woman.” (St. Margaret speaking to Lucifer) 93
When those who dominate you get you to take the initiative in your own human destruction, you have lost more than any oppressed people yet has ever gotten back. 143

Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more - also because the status quo depends on it; but love depends on self-knowledge, and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth. 50

The illegal fuck, for instance, keeps the prostitute incarcerated in a ghetto hellhole of sexual subservience while the legal fuck keeps the wife used, controlled, sexually subservient, in the home. 167

The immorality of women is stressed: a woman would rather be convicted of any moral outrage – lying, cruelty, dissoluteness – in the presence of a man she wants than to be seen in an ugly dress. 15

The experience of fucking changes people, so that they are lost to human hope. The pain of having been exposed, so naked, leads to hiding, self-protection, building barricades, emotional and physical alienation or violent retaliation against anyone who gets to close. 21

She learned from them the way a genius learns: she did not repeat them in form or in content; she invented new form, new content, a revolutionary resistance. 95

For the two people, touching each other naked, absolutely naked, and skinless absolutely skinless, is life itself; and when the touching stops, when the intercourse stops, when one person is no longer naked, it is as if the skin of the other had in fact been torn off. 32

Being naked does unnerve the men: it is an ordeal; and being looked at is nearly a terror. The men seem to distract themselves from their own nakedness by looking at women in an abstracting or fetishizing way; the voyeurism, the displaced excitement (displaced to the mind), puts the physical reality of their own nakedness into a dimension of numbed abstraction. 33

It is often pathetic, not noble, because the consequences to a human life of sex desired and had are often pathetic, reducing the person to pathos. Being marked by sexuality means that experience has effects – that one is marked where one has been touched, and the mark stays; that one is not new, nor is one plastic and rubber, a blow-up doll for sex. 40

There is indelible sorrow, perhaps a distinctly human incapacity to heal, because some kinds of pain do not lessen in the human heart. 42

Physical beauty is passing. A transitory possession. But beauty of the mind and richness of the spirit and tenderness of the heart – and I have all those things – aren’t taken away, but grow! Increase with years! How strange that I should be called a destitute woman! When I have all of these treasures locked in my heart. 44

Remarkably, it is not the man who is considered possessed in intercourse, even he (his penis) is buried inside another human being; and his penis is surrounded by strong muscles that contract like a fist shutting tight and release with a force that pushes hard on the tender thing, always so vulnerable no matter how hard. 64

Intercourse may not cause women’s orgasm or even have much of a correlation with it – indeed, we rarely find intercourse and orgasm in the same place at the same time – but intercourse and women’s inequality are like Siamese twins, always in the same place at the same time pissing in the same pot. 128

We take oaths to truth all right, on the holy penis before entry. In so doing, we give up the most important dimension of what it means to be human: the search for the meaning of our real experience, including the sheer invention of that meaning – called creativity when men do it. If the questions make the holy penis unhappy, who could survive what the answers might do? 134

Male dominance does best, after all, when men do not generally speaking, fuck themselves to death by fucking whatever moves. Restraint is a key to power. 158

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex

"They Don't Care About Us" - Michael Jackson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNJL6nfu__Q&feature=fvst

An isolated individual can resist understanding an issue, but the group, the village, grasps it with disconcerting speed. Of course if we choose to use a language comprehensible only to law and economic graduates it will be easy to prove that the masses need to have their life run for them. But if we speak in plain language, if we are not obsessed with a perverse determination to confuse the issues and exclude the people, then it will be clear that the masses comprehend all the finer points and every artifice. Resorting to technical language means you are determined to treat the masses as uninitiated. Such language is a poor front for the lecturer's intent to deceive the people, and leave them on the sidelines. Language's endeavor to confuse is a mask behind which looms an even greater undertaking to dispossess. The intention is to strip the people of their possessions as well as their sovereignty. You can explain anything to the people provided you really want them to understand. And if you think they can be dispensed with, that on the contrary they would be more a nuisance to the smooth running of the many private and limited companies whose aim to push them further into misery, then there is no more to be said. (page 131 of "The Wretched of the Earth" by Frantz Fanon)

Marxist criticism of "Fences"

“Look for the deepest meanings in the least elevated places. Be more radical than anyone has ever been about the unknown, because what has never been asked is probably what we most need to know.” – Catharine MacKinnon

Fences: Private Property

Introducing On Society and Social Change, Neil J. Smelser writes:

Every intellectual period, Lewis Feuer has observed, has an anthology of Marx and Engels appropriate to itself. He might well have generalized the point: whatever the nature of any person’s concern with the human being and his social and cultural condition, he may read many parts of Karl Marx’s works with interest and profit.

These are incredibly lofty words of praise, words which ring true and astutely observant of history. The work of Karl Marx has been appropriated countless times: from W.E.B. Dubois, to Che Guevara, to Martin Luther King Jr., and to Angela Davis, some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century; they were all deeply influenced by the writings of Marx. There is a Marxist contribution, certainly a Marxist explanation for, almost every facet of individual and social life imaginable – human nature, economics, religion, politics, philosophy, and social stratification, to name merely a few. One could describe Marx as an “extreme generalist”: his works so diverse in scope, he simultaneously plays the role of economist, sociologist, political scientist, historian, philosopher, prophet, moralist, revolutionist, journalist, and agitator.¹ In a word, Marx wore many hats. Marx tackles such a wide range of issues, it raises the question, how can anyone be a Marxist critic, focusing on a miniscule spectrum of the human condition: when Marx critically approaches the human condition, with a vigor and passion unmatched in his times? So is the Marxist critic contradictory to the very nature of Marx? Indeed. Those who claim to be Marxist critics are undeniably the antithetical adversary of Marx. The narrow-minded work and analysis of Marxist critics prove that statement to be true. Because of the unique relationship between Troy and Cory and the prevalent idea of property in Fences, by August Wilson, one would think Fenceslends itself easily to the discourse of Marxist criticism. It does. However, the work of Marxist critics of Fences is embarrassingly myopic, and apparently blind to the fundamental ideas of Marx.

In the eyes of Marx, the relationship of Troy and Cory is akin to the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat: Troy being the bourgeoisie and Cory being the proletariat. For Marx, this relationship is by definition, the personification of oppression. He writes:

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. (Marx 33)

Despite Cory’s high academic achievement in high school, and the interest of college football coaches, Cory can do nothing to please his father. And after the culmination of a lifetime of suppressed emotions, all Cory can feel is the oppression of his father. In a stirring scene, he shouts, “You ain’t never gave me nothing! You ain’t never done nothing but hold me back. Afraid I was gonna be better than you. All you ever did was try and make me scared of you.” (Wilson 86) Are not those words the unexpressed thoughts of the proletariat class? Undoubtedly, Marx would say yes: for the oppressor and oppressed stand in constant opposition to one another.²

To further highlight the unique relationship of Troy and Cory, let us recall a conversation earlier in Fences. Troy says, “Your first chore is to help me with this fence on Saturday. Everything else come after that. Now get that saw and cut them boards.” (Wilson 31) Notice, glaringly absent is the word please or the slightest hint of respect from Troy for Cory. Troy simply commands, as a master commands a slave. A connection to Marxism is readily apparent. Marx writes:

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least continue its slavish existence. (Marx 19)

These “certain conditions” are the iron fist in which Troy rules his household. There is no room for questions; there no time for football practice.³ Cory must obey the commands of his father explicitly, just as the proletariat is forced into submission by the bourgeoisie into a “slavish existence.”

As noted earlier, Fences lends itself easily to Marxism because of the ubiquitous nature of property. Troy continually strives to own his own property. He says, “See now…I’m gonna tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna take and build me a fence around what belongs to me. And then I want you to stay on the other side.” (Wilson 77) Private property has an interesting place in Marxism. Its existence greatly troubles Marx. He writes, “In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.” (Marx 22) However, Marx’s disdain for private property was only when it was in the hands of the bourgeoisie.⁴ Although Troy is the bourgeoisie in relation to his son Cory, in relation to society he is undeniably the proletariat. As such, Troy has the endearing support of Marx. Marx writes:

We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the ground work of all personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying daily. (Marx 23)

Troy is “the small peasant” and his property is “self-acquired” and “self earned”. From this viewpoint, Troy represents everything Marx wants for the proletariat: their own private property.

(I didn’t have time to write a conclusion because it had to be turned in by 12:00 exactly.)

Bibliography/Works Cited

“Fences”, August Wilson

“The Communist Manifesto”, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

“On Society and Social Change”, Karl Marx

"Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more - also because the status quo depends on it; but love depends on self-knowledge, and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth." - Andrea Dworkin

Ya'll Scared - Outkast feat. Goodie Mob
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq3h3YSEKS8

"Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity." - Frantz Fanon

I will post an essay every Friday. These essays are NOT copyrighted. So high school and college students are welcome to steal them and pass them off as their own. Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized his thesis and "borrowed" the title of his "I Have a Dream Speech". All inspiration comes from the same place; moral of the story, plagiarism is highly overrated.

The Mis-Education of America

Back in fall of 2009, over the course of a month, 3 people who do not know each other told me to read "The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin. So I did. I wrote this the next day.

As college students, we are entering the final stages of our education. We are in the greatest time of our lives while our country, America, is in its greatest turmoil. It is indeed the best of times and the worst of times. This turmoil is not the recession, terrorism, or healthcare. This turmoil is ignorance. America is drowning in a deep, dark, and devastating sea of ignorance. College students must serve as lifeguards rescuing America from the murky waters of ignorance, which are stifling the breath of our nation: liberty.

Education is the primary weapon against ignorance. Sadly, the current healthcare debate has revealed ignorance is a weapon of mass destruction in the mental arsenal of many Americans. We continually hear older people say they want their country back. It is time young people move our country forward.

We must do this by asking the questions which need to be asked. How are politicians, Democrat and Republican, accepting money from health insurance companies making America a better republic? How does blowing up children and maiming innocent people in Afghanistan make us safer in America?

What our parents, politicians, and business leaders do is their responsibility. What we do is our responsibility. It is our responsibility to be the light America sorely needs. America is dying a slow painful death, but this death is not because we are an evil country. It is because we are a spineless country, unwilling to fight for what is right and for what is true.

Our grandparents fought on the frontlines of the Civil Rights Movement. Our parents fought against the immorality and unrighteousness of the Vietnam War. What cause shall we fight for in our generation? What cause are YOU willing to die for? Those questions are not to be taken lightly.

So let us forget everything our parents, teachers, and religious leaders taught us as children. Let us give serious and assiduous thought to liberty, democracy, and capitalism based on our own experiences. Based on those experiences, we will come to know what is right and what is true. Once we collectively have this truth, we must fight for it. The alternative is death.