Who's on Top?

Next Tuesday night at 9pm at the Women's Center, we will be having a discussion/study break about... Who's on Top? After our last event about the Hook-Up Culture at Yale, we realized that there had been very little discussion about the act of penetrative sex itself. It's sort of a hard topic to broach, and as such, I think that it's often hard for us to think of how sex and misogyny may be intertwined. So, I envision that we will talk about sex in two ways. The first is in light of of Andrea Dworkin's article http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin /IntercourseI.html that an attendee at our last event sent to me afterwords. Dworkin argues that intercourse and patriarchy are inseparable--or that, in the context of patriarchy, they are inseparable. I'm not sure that I necessarily believe the relationship is inevitable; however, it does seem to me that the way we experience and practice sex is probably somewhat patriarchal. I mean, even in colloquialisms about sex, we situate men in the active tense and women in the passive (getting pounded, for example). The woman is getting, and the man is doing. I would hazard a guess, and I would love it if someone would/could correct me here, that the way most people practice sex most of the time reflects this dichotomy. Hence the title: Who's on top?