Forced sex, usually intercourse, is a central issue in any woman’s life. She must like it or control it or manipulate it or resist it or avoid it; she must develop a relationship to it, to the male insistence on intercourse, to the male insistence on her sexual function in relation to him. She will be measured and judged by the nature and quality of her relationship to intercourse. Her character will be assessed in terms of her relationship to intercourse, as men evaluate that relationship. All the possibilities of her body will be reduced to expressing her relationship to intercourse. Every sign on her body, every symbol—clothes, posture, hair, ornament—will have to signal her acceptance of his sex act and the nature of her relationship to it.

The propaganda for femininity (femininity being the apparent acceptance of sex on male terms with goodwill and demonstrable good faith, in the form of ritualized obsequiousness) …stresses that intercourse can give a woman pleasure if she does it right: especially if she has the right attitude toward it and toward the man. The right attitude is to want it. The right attitude is to desire men because they engage in phallic penetration. The right attitude is to want intercourse because men want it. The right attitude is not to be selfish: especially about orgasm. This [ensures] woman’s continued existence within a system in which men control the valuation of her existence as an individual. This valuation is based on her sexual conformity within a sexual system based on his right to possess her. Women are brought up to conform: all the rules of femininity—dress, behavior, attitude—essentially break the spirit. Women are trained to need men, not sexually but metaphysically. Women are brought up to be the void that needs filling, the absence that needs presence. Women are brought up to fear men and to know that they must please men and to understand that they cannot survive without the help of men richer and stronger than they can be themselves, on their own.