The fundamentally alien universe that a woman's experience of sex is to me. That mine is to her. So fully do we romanticize heterosexual lovemaking as a communion of souls, a synthesizing of opposites, the fulfillment and expression of our deepest emotional needs, that it's easy to forget just how inaccessible the interior landscapes of male and female sexual embodiment are to each other. Or, perhaps more to the point, how strongly this romanticization invites our forgetfulness, encourages, even mandates that we refuse to see just how deeply, when it comes to sex, physical differences divide us.
This semester, I'm teaching an independent study project in creative nonfiction with two women, each of whom wants to write about gender and sexuality, exploring specifically the meaning and consequence of childhood sexual abuse in her life. One of the books I've asked them to read is Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse, a text which is usually, and I think inaccurately, read as an argument against heterosexual intercourse on the grounds that the nature of the act—man penetrating, woman penetrated—demeans and exploits women by definition. Given the way Dworkin writes, it's not a difficult misreading to come to, and so when they asked me whether Intercourse should indeed be read that way, I suggested we discuss the following excerpt from the section called "Occupation/Collaboration": "The political meaning of intercourse for women is the fundamental question of feminism and freedom: can an occupied people—physically occupied inside, internally invaded—be free…?"
Easy to misinterpret and dismiss—after all, how can a woman who willingly has intercourse be understood as having been invaded, with all the connotations that word carries of warfare and colonization?—Dworkin's question is less about women's personal experience and individual choice than it is about the nature of female identity. For while a clear distinction can generally be assumed, for example, between a woman's experience of rape and her experience of the kind of intercourse that people mean when they use the word lovemaking, focusing on that distinction tends to obscure the fact that sexual intercourse is generally understood in our culture as the defining moment of femaleness and womanhood. More to the point, and this is what I understand the crux of Dworkin's question to be, if a woman cannot be understood to exist fully as a woman—whatever you understand "to exist fully as a woman" to mean—until her body has been "physically occupied inside, internally invaded" by a man, then it doesn't really matter how tender and/or loving and/or intensely pleasurable intercourse is for her, the freedom of her body had already, by definition, been compromised, not merely before she had sex, but even before she was born. And if it is intercourse that makes a woman a woman, or, perhaps more precisely, if what makes a woman a woman in patriarchal culture is her capacity for being genitally penetrated—which means intercourse is both an expression and confirmation of her gender—then the question arises whether the difference between the kind of intercourse most people would describe as lovemaking and the kind we call rape can accurately be characterized as one of kind. Maybe, Dworkin is asking, this difference is more properly seen as one of degree, since in each case a woman is fulfilling the mandate of her socially prescribed gender identity.
I'd come to class prepared with references to passages in my students' own essays that helped to demonstrate the validity of Dworkin's question, but something in the women's eyes told me they'd already gotten it and that to say more than what I have paraphrased above would have been both superfluous and self-serving. For no matter how important I thought Dworkin's question was, it would never mean the same thing to me as it did to them, and so I fell silent, letting the room fill the gap of otherness that had opened up between us; and it was in this silence, watching the faces of these two women who had placed their trust in me both as a teacher and, given what they wanted to write about, as a man, that my imagination made the leap that was the true starting point of this essay: Had I lived a different life—that of my parents, for example, who married when they were in their early twenties—one of these two women was young enough that she could've been my daughter. I don't mean that I felt fatherly towards her, or that she saw me as a father figure, but this abrupt awareness of the age difference between us brought me back to the conversations my wife and I had been having about whether or not to conceive a second child. I thought about how, if that hypothetical offspring had turned out to be a girl, she would have no choice but to grow up in a world where the validity of Dworkin's question was etched irrevocably into her body. I thought about how I would from the first moments of her life face this daughter across the same terrain of difference that was separating me from my students, I thought about how, precisely because she will be my daughter, silence will not be an option.
"And so what," I almost asked myself out loud, "what will I say to her?"
