Andrea Dworkin was a radical feminist and incendiary writer whose works — Woman Hating (1974), Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981), Intercourse (1987) — exposed sex, marriage, and pornography as tools of patriarchal governance and warzones for womanhood. She named them not as private matters but as explicit instruments of political control, insisting that women’s pain was "public", "structural," and "urgent."
I wake inside a border dispute, with curfews imposed on my limbs and custom inspections at my elbows. The neighbourhood smells of cumin and argument. The mirror wants "his" jurisdiction and the law wants maps I can fold under my armpit. I fold today into three, like a receipt for something. The sweat is declared "public" by custom. My sweat is not private— it is legally, culturally, and socially colonised.¹ My body is a territory surveyed by men with markers instead of arms, decrees drafted on the bumps of my skin. There was a season when rent was a mouth and I kept feeding it my name. The men wrote their own commandments and latched them on my thighs. The corridor smelled of stacked metal and Latin smoke— the mirror kept me. I was in the grave. They phrased it "a way to earn wages", but I metamorphosed it as "disappearing in instalments."² Was it an insertable romance built on the love of my body? No. It was a country with checkpoints at my throat. I learnt footsteps; rehearsed consent as choreography; pain as a patriarchal thought. I learnt the bed was an altar and a warzone I didn't commit to. ³ They keep telling me the world is modernised by chimneys now, but first, learn to look under your ceilings. Learn to call this "discomfort" — the tongue of freedom. I want to write that in the margin and underline it thrice, the same way margins are colonised. I want to write this because I do not want to be acquainted with being written. I refuse to be reduced to a footnote in their history. ⁴ The body, calloused with colonialism, now receives its governance through forecasts that are not passed in the parliament. The weather reports of this month read as listicles — bureaucratic commandments dressed as weather bulletins telling me how to survive their storm: (i) One says possession of women is culture. (I taste iron in my morning coffee)⁵ (ii) another says intercourse is a survival bargain — it is not outside power.⁶ (Women make this bargain with the very walls that starve their intestines.) (iii) Another mentions patriarchy is not a private wound as claimed by many like me; it is an infrastructure the country runs. (iv) the most recent one, defines consent by a man — "It is obediently built brick by brick" (I puke out my coffee in metal-scraps)⁷ The weather report was definitely written in a room where our names were jokes. But not this. Not this entry. Never. My body is GDP they never measure: the unpaid labour of kitchens, the interest rate of sons’ futures.⁸ My consent is sold wholesale, cheaper than rice. Patriarchy is not my personal grievance, but it is their structural possession. Generations of intersective patriarchy disguised as courtrooms of mothers weeping in silence; the legislation of fathers with dignity scraped off their moustaches; my body is not your parliament. Consent is not a private transaction billed on receipts of mere mortal satisfaction. You can't disguise your constitutional hunger for power as lust in my bedroom and call that consensual sex. This is the very rape that patriarchy has been imposing on marriages, merely consensual.⁹ Marital rape is the colonisation of consent. It is not intimacy gone wrong; intercourse as a citizenship occupation. It is a legal corruption of consent.¹⁰ When a law exempts the husband, it makes rape a conjugal right. They define "consent", and it is so codified in law and culture, but marriage is the longest war, fought on the battlefield of women’s bodies. How absurd is the legal definition of my rights to be cultured by a mere weather report? Consent written by men in statutes is a map I can fold under my other armpit— but it never guides me. When language is taken from me, I write my own. So tonight, I will practice a different alphabet. A is for autonomy (not advertisement: my body and thoughts are not yours to advertise.) B is for border (the kind daughters draw around their bodies without visas.) C is for consent, that's it. I open my book ''Intercourse" again and note "carpentry of a habit". A habit of remembrance is a war when I think of my father polishing his shoes; my mother counting rice with her tied tongue; and me reading under the table like a smuggler of inherent recipes of this patriarchy. Memory is a political labour.¹¹ I will show you archives, newspaper clippings, and cultural narratives that normalise violence against women, and the mere memory of it. Memory is my first parliament, before any manmade law. We are taught to inherit a god of patience and a calendar of apologies. I am returning a few heirlooms today. I am gargling this "learning". I scratch out the cartographers of this system— men. Every erased name is a debt owed to daughters who will inherit this silence unless recorded otherwise and stamped under the tag of legalisation. I won't stamp my body with their imprints anymore. No. I will write. I will write instructions for a society that forgets its daughters: (i) ''hunger" is not "romance". I won't give you my last piece of bread. It's not love — It's theft. (ii) Stop telling them to survive with hushed moans, rewrite the safety drill instead. (iii) Negotiation for the dignity of their own bodies is collateral. Bargains should be out of the bedrooms. (iv) In law, give teeth to the paper.¹² A paper-law that does not bite is pornography for the state— performative, but not satisfactory. (v) In homes, give doors that lock from the inside and windows that open outwards. That is more needed. Fathers and brothers do not act like gods. (vi) Turn rage into curriculum.¹³ Protest should be the grammar they conjugate before they ever learn the word "obedience." (vii) The daughters will learn. When they say "reasonability"— pass them a ruler and let them measure. (viii) Hold men accountable for memory. ¹⁴ Memory should not be the sole labour of the grieving; it should also be the burden of the guilty. And finally, when the forgetting happens again, as it will cause this society to love amnesia at night, may your law have cultural performance that cannot hide under the cloak of patriarchy anymore. Cause the statute that calls itself secular still blesses fathers with my womb. The Constitution promises equality, but its Article of Protection folds me into a wife before it folds me into a citizen. ¹⁵ Let it be an exhibition of nudity imposed as taxation of bodies rather than offenders. The daughters will know the household is the first step and they'll make forgetting impossible. They'll Learn. Even if it means burning down their own house. This rage is rather political. ¹⁶ If tomorrow is kinder, I will use new verbs — refuse, rebuild, restore, resist, rebirth. I am practising them out loud so the walls learn too. Learn this resistance. Tonight, I will liberate my own territory — and tomorrow, I will not give it back. Take this as law. Take this as a warning. This is anger; this is hope; this is persistence —this is my jurisdiction. This article is written from the perspective of Andrea Dworkin.
I wake inside a border dispute, with curfews imposed on my limbs and custom inspections at my elbows. The neighbourhood smells of cumin and argument. The mirror wants "his" jurisdiction and the law wants maps I can fold under my armpit. I fold today into three, like a receipt for something. The sweat is declared "public" by custom. My sweat is not private— it is legally, culturally, and socially colonised.¹ My body is a territory surveyed by men with markers instead of arms, decrees drafted on the bumps of my skin. There was a season when rent was a mouth and I kept feeding it my name. The men wrote their own commandments and latched them on my thighs. The corridor smelled of stacked metal and Latin smoke— the mirror kept me. I was in the grave. They phrased it "a way to earn wages", but I metamorphosed it as "disappearing in instalments."² Was it an insertable romance built on the love of my body? No. It was a country with checkpoints at my throat. I learnt footsteps; rehearsed consent as choreography; pain as a patriarchal thought. I learnt the bed was an altar and a warzone I didn't commit to. ³ They keep telling me the world is modernised by chimneys now, but first, learn to look under your ceilings. Learn to call this "discomfort" — the tongue of freedom. I want to write that in the margin and underline it thrice, the same way margins are colonised. I want to write this because I do not want to be acquainted with being written. I refuse to be reduced to a footnote in their history. ⁴ The body, calloused with colonialism, now receives its governance through forecasts that are not passed in the parliament. The weather reports of this month read as listicles — bureaucratic commandments dressed as weather bulletins telling me how to survive their storm: (i) One says possession of women is culture. (I taste iron in my morning coffee)⁵ (ii) another says intercourse is a survival bargain — it is not outside power.⁶ (Women make this bargain with the very walls that starve their intestines.) (iii) Another mentions patriarchy is not a private wound as claimed by many like me; it is an infrastructure the country runs. (iv) the most recent one, defines consent by a man — "It is obediently built brick by brick" (I puke out my coffee in metal-scraps)⁷ The weather report was definitely written in a room where our names were jokes. But not this. Not this entry. Never. My body is GDP they never measure: the unpaid labour of kitchens, the interest rate of sons’ futures.⁸ My consent is sold wholesale, cheaper than rice. Patriarchy is not my personal grievance, but it is their structural possession. Generations of intersective patriarchy disguised as courtrooms of mothers weeping in silence; the legislation of fathers with dignity scraped off their moustaches; my body is not your parliament. Consent is not a private transaction billed on receipts of mere mortal satisfaction. You can't disguise your constitutional hunger for power as lust in my bedroom and call that consensual sex. This is the very rape that patriarchy has been imposing on marriages, merely consensual.⁹ Marital rape is the colonisation of consent. It is not intimacy gone wrong; intercourse as a citizenship occupation. It is a legal corruption of consent.¹⁰ When a law exempts the husband, it makes rape a conjugal right. They define "consent", and it is so codified in law and culture, but marriage is the longest war, fought on the battlefield of women’s bodies. How absurd is the legal definition of my rights to be cultured by a mere weather report? Consent written by men in statutes is a map I can fold under my other armpit— but it never guides me. When language is taken from me, I write my own. So tonight, I will practice a different alphabet. A is for autonomy (not advertisement: my body and thoughts are not yours to advertise.) B is for border (the kind daughters draw around their bodies without visas.) C is for consent, that's it. I open my book ''Intercourse" again and note "carpentry of a habit". A habit of remembrance is a war when I think of my father polishing his shoes; my mother counting rice with her tied tongue; and me reading under the table like a smuggler of inherent recipes of this patriarchy. Memory is a political labour.¹¹ I will show you archives, newspaper clippings, and cultural narratives that normalise violence against women, and the mere memory of it. Memory is my first parliament, before any manmade law. We are taught to inherit a god of patience and a calendar of apologies. I am returning a few heirlooms today. I am gargling this "learning". I scratch out the cartographers of this system— men. Every erased name is a debt owed to daughters who will inherit this silence unless recorded otherwise and stamped under the tag of legalisation. I won't stamp my body with their imprints anymore. No. I will write. I will write instructions for a society that forgets its daughters: (i) ''hunger" is not "romance". I won't give you my last piece of bread. It's not love — It's theft. (ii) Stop telling them to survive with hushed moans, rewrite the safety drill instead. (iii) Negotiation for the dignity of their own bodies is collateral. Bargains should be out of the bedrooms. (iv) In law, give teeth to the paper.¹² A paper-law that does not bite is pornography for the state— performative, but not satisfactory. (v) In homes, give doors that lock from the inside and windows that open outwards. That is more needed. Fathers and brothers do not act like gods. (vi) Turn rage into curriculum.¹³ Protest should be the grammar they conjugate before they ever learn the word "obedience." (vii) The daughters will learn. When they say "reasonability"— pass them a ruler and let them measure. (viii) Hold men accountable for memory. ¹⁴ Memory should not be the sole labour of the grieving; it should also be the burden of the guilty. And finally, when the forgetting happens again, as it will cause this society to love amnesia at night, may your law have cultural performance that cannot hide under the cloak of patriarchy anymore. Cause the statute that calls itself secular still blesses fathers with my womb. The Constitution promises equality, but its Article of Protection folds me into a wife before it folds me into a citizen. ¹⁵ Let it be an exhibition of nudity imposed as taxation of bodies rather than offenders. The daughters will know the household is the first step and they'll make forgetting impossible. They'll Learn. Even if it means burning down their own house. This rage is rather political. ¹⁶ If tomorrow is kinder, I will use new verbs — refuse, rebuild, restore, resist, rebirth. I am practising them out loud so the walls learn too. Learn this resistance. Tonight, I will liberate my own territory — and tomorrow, I will not give it back. Take this as law. Take this as a warning. This is anger; this is hope; this is persistence —this is my jurisdiction. This article is written from the perspective of Andrea Dworkin.
Footnotes
¹: See Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (2004): women’s bodies as sites of enclosure and control during the rise of capitalism. ²: Federici, on primitive accumulation and women’s forced labour as the foundation of capitalist discipline. ³: Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (1987): the bed as a site of male power, not merely intimacy. ⁴: Gayatri Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? — the politics of who gets to write history. ⁵: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949): “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” ⁶: Catharine MacKinnon, on sexuality as a political institution that structures power. ⁷: See Exception 2 of Section 375, Indian Penal Code: marital rape exemption. ⁸: According to the ILO, women account for over three-quarters of total unpaid care work, spending significantly more time on it daily compared to men. ⁹: NCRB data: crimes against women within marriage remain underreported and under-penalised. ¹⁰: As of 2025, marital rape is still not criminalised in many countries, including India. ¹¹: See Saidiya Hartman, Venus in Two Acts (2008): memory as a site of historical recovery and resistance. ¹²: Legal statutes need enforceability; see UN Women reports on gender-responsive legislation. ¹³: Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed: education as practice of freedom (here, reframed for feminist anger). ¹⁴: bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: “Love cannot exist in a context of domination.” ¹⁵: On how law prioritises familial roles over personhood — Indian Constitution & personal law debates. ¹⁶: Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action: “Your silence will not protect you.”