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349 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
There is no analogue anywhere among subordinate groups to this experience of being made for intercourse: for penetration, entry, occupation. There is no analog in occupied countries or in dominated races or imprisoned dissidents or in colonized cultures or in the submission of children to adults or in the atrocities that have marked the twentieth century ranging from Auschwitz to the Gulag. There is nothing exactly the same, and this is not because the political invasion and significance of intercourse is banal up against these other hierarchies and brutalities. Intercourse is a particular reality for women as an inferior class; and it has in it, as part of it, violation of boundaries, taking over, occupation, destruction of privacy, all of which are construed to be normal and also fundamental to continuing human existence.