When I was just shy of 19 years old, I lost my virginity. My hymen was split. The sliter splitter upper was a few years older than me, a long time friend. When I say that my first experience of vaginal intercourse was painful that is a gross understatement. I felt like I was being split in two.
There was pleasure on the edges of the experience; my body gave enough of a carrot with the stick, so to speak, that I would actually want to do this incredibly painful thing more than once. The pain was not due to gross ineptitude on my partner’s part, though looking back on it now, a number of things would have made it a bit less painful.
He was gentle and kind and patient, and everything up to vaginal penetration had been lovely, and luckily for me at the time, once in the mix, he was not long at coming to the point.
A few days later, I admitted to him that I had been in some pain, though I did not tell him that I felt "split in two" understanding that that might traumatize him. My admission that it hurt upset him. More accurately, he felt guilty. Great heaping helpings of guilt. You see, at the time, folks with any pretensions to feminism, read Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse.
"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; can those with a metaphysically compromised privacy have self-determination; can those without a biologically based physical integrity have self-respect?" Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse.
This is less about me and more about the way that ideas about sex and sexuality and feminism construct our experiences.
I hated Dworkin for a long time. I refused to read her. Instead, I read around her.
But I know who she is. I understand the impact that she and Catherine MacKinnon had on feminism and culture in the 1980's.
I recently mentioned to colleagues that many well read men from my generation felt scarred by Dworkin’s ideas. They had no idea who I was talking about.
She is out of vogue. No one knows her name.