Slime

The filth of women is a central conceit in culture: taken to be a fact; noted, remarked on, explicated, analyzed, poetized, pornographized, satirized: genital filth, menstrual filth, excremental filth, filth down there, between the legs, in the hole, the wound oozing blood and slime, dirt and smell; the dirt inherent in the genitals or in her bad character – wash, slut, wash.  She is dirt and what she touches is dirt because she contaminates, makes unclean; her dirt is a contagious dirt, defiling whatever she touches.  As Matilda Joslyn Gage wrote in the nineteenth century: “Everything connected with woman was held to be unclean.  It is stated that Agathro desired the Sophist Herodes to get ready for him the next morning a vessel full of pure milk, that is to say which had not been milked by the hand of a woman.  But he perceived as soon as it was offered to him that it was not such as he desired, protesting that the scent of her hands who had milked it offended his nostrils.”  This is a contaminating smell, it spreads like a disease, epidemic; women, sexual lepers, the penis that should be there rotted away by the disease of being a woman; a smelly, dirty gash, diseased, contagious.

Andrea Dworkin in Intercourse, p. 233 (Chapter 9 – Dirt and Death)

…according to Freud, feces, baby, and penis are related in subconscious sexual meaning.  It is true that etymologically baby and penis are related; the word penis comes from the Old English for fetus.  Freud insisted on an important subconscious connection between these two phenomena and the turd in the rectum for this reason: “The relationship between the penis and the passage lined with mucous membrane which it fills and excites already has its prototype in the pregenital, anal-sadistic phase.  The faecal mass…represents as it were the first penis, and the stimulated mucous membrane of the rectum represents that of the vagina.”  In other words, the mucous membrane that the man touches in intercourse with his penis, the vagina, is dirty like a rectum.  The penis evokes the turd in the rectum because the man has the experience of touching a membrane just like the rectal wall. The relationship of the penis to the actual turd is evocative and symbolic, distant.  The rectum and the vagina are analogous in present time.  The vagina of the woman is not phenomenologically distinct from the mucous membrane of the rectum.

Andrea Dworkin in Intercourse, p. 238 (Chapter 9 – Dirt and Death)