To call intercourse “sex” or conflate it with women’s or even men’s sexual pleasure is not simply misguided, but rather, a deliberate and effective means of normalizing female submission and suffering and increasing men’s individual and collective power.

...

Because PIV and its attendant harms affect all women, across time and place, and is central to our suffering and our political and interpersonal standing, and because men’s political and interpersonal standing increase as ours decrease, intercourse should rightly be seen as the foundation of patriarchy itself...intercourse continues to be very much a political act and a political institution that is supportive of male power, and obviously so: the “Big 3″ of the patriarchal institutions, namely, medicine, religion and law, all attach to women’s bodies and women’s lives at the moment of conception.