sex/intercourse/rape

This was rape because it was not sex. Sex is beautiful, messy, lusty, loud, funny, mutual, consensual, interactive, intimate, unselfish, caring and conscientious. Sex is not some guy acting his sexual fantasy upon a prone, female body.

I was uncomfortable with this paragraph even as I wrote it. Simply because it isn’t true. Or rather it is true but it isn’t. After reading Intercourse I have a fuller understanding of how to say what it is that I was trying to say. Although Andrea says it much better than I do.

Under patriarchy, rape and sex are not discrete either as concepts or as acts. Simply put, male dominance means that sex is some guy acting his sexual fantasy upon the prone body of a woman. That is exactly what fucking is. That is exactly what sex is. What I was trying to describe as sex is not sex simply because sex is male dominance is intercourse is rapist.

Whereas radical feminist lesbian physical/emotional/erotic/loving intimacy is radically Other than sex/rape/intercourse. What I found in the arms of a woman that I loved has nothing to do with what the patriarchy holds up as its model for sexuality. It cannot really call it sex because it isn’t. Physical intimacy of a radically feminist nature cannot be divorced from love, trust, emotional intimacy, care, touch, sensuality, beauty, honesty, mutuality and interaction. Objectification can have no place in, and is completely alien to, Women-Loving, Women-Touching women.

The idea of consent even, has no place in the concept of physical intimacy as a loving, emotional interaction. Yesterday, I was tickling the child that I am nannying. She was giggling and laughing her head off. Then she stopped laughing and turned away. I stopped tickling her. While I am tickling her and she enjoys the interaction, I too experience pleasure. She is giving me clear signals of her enjoyment and I laugh with her. When she turns away and no longer wants the interaction it is pointless to continue to tickle her, I get no pleasure from doing so.

I see erotic interaction in much the same way. My lover (hypothetical lover at the moment as my partner and I broke up earlier this year) and I can come together to enjoy each other through a physical and emotional interaction. If she or I do not, for whatever reason, feel like continuing and we turn away, we must be able to trust each other, and recognise within each other a fully conscious human being, capable of making discrete choices about ourselves and our bodies, that are inviolable. As such, that trust must also be inviolable. We must know that breaking that trust would bring us no pleasure and would ultimately destroy both of us.

I am not so idealistic to believe that all lesbian relationships are modeled on this principle, nor am I so cynical to believe that no men are capable of interacting with women as human beings. I have been objectified by women before and I have met men who are capable of respecting women as discrete, inviolable individuals. This doesn’t mean that fucking isn’t an act of male dominance it just means that lesbianism as an act of political resistance has been co-opted and controlled by the ‘queer’ malestream and that men are not biologically programmed for rape and conquest, they just use that as an excuse.

Translation: it is not because my lover is a woman that means that intimacy between us is not fucking/intercourse/rape. It is because our relations are radically Other than fucking/intercourse/sex/rape.

After reading Intercourse I just cannot see how any woman could disagree with Andrea’s contention. Everything she says is so lucid and honest. It’s like she has the only mirror in the world that is able to reflect the world perfectly and then she has found a way to verbalise that truth even in a language that is not women’s native language. We still speak in our father’s tongue.

I really get her contention in Mercy that women cannot really tell how bad it is and how bad it can get, just being a woman. About how the smallest mercy that god gives us is the erasure of those worst moments, the erasure of our memories. How difficult it is to describe the horror because so much of it is forgotten, and we are grateful.