Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin

337 Pages·1610·5.55 MB·English

Published by Basic Books
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Copyright © 1987 by Andrea Dworkin
Preface copyright © 1995, 1997 by Andrea Dworkin
Foreword copyright © 2006 by Ariel Levy
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be repro­
duced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quota­
tions embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park
Ave. South, New York, New York 10016.
Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
First Basic Books edition 2007
Reprinted by arrangement with Free Press Paperbacks, a Division of Simon &: Schuster
ISBN-13: 978-0-465-01752-2
ISBN-10: 0-465-01752-5
Permission has generously been granted to include in this volume quotations from: Kobo Abe,
The Box Man, trans. E. Dale Saunders, copyright © 1980 Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; Kobo Abe,
The Woman in the Dunes, trans. E. Dale Saunders, copyright © 1972 Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
and Martin Seeker and Warburg, Ltd.: James Baldwin, Another Country, copyright © i960,
1962 by James Baldwin, reprinted by permission of Doubleday &: Company, Inc.; The Living
Theatre, Paradise Now, copyright © 1971 Random House, Inc. with the permission of Judith
Malina; Regine Pernoud, Joan of Arc, trans. Edward Hyams, copyright © 1966 by Regine
Pemoud, reprinted with permission of Stein and Day Publishers; Isaac Bashevis Singer, Satan
in Goray, copyright © 1955 by Isaac Bashevis Singer, copyright renewed 1983 by Isaac Bashe­
vis Singer, reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc.; Leo Tolstoy, The
Kreutzer Sonata, in The Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, trans. Louise and Ayler Maude,
copyright © 1924 Oxford University Press (Oxford, England); Tennessee Williams, The Rose
Tattoo, copyright © 1950, 1951 by Tennessee Williams, reprinted by permission of New Direc­
tions Publishing Corporation; Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, copyright ©
1947 by Tennessee Williams, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corpora­
tion; Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke, copyright © 1948 by Tennessee Williams,
reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation; William Butler Yeats,
“Easter 1916” and “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop, ” in The Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by
Richard J. Finneran, copyright © 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1961 by
Bertha Georgie Yeats, reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Company.
10987654321
All changed, chor M. S.Fanged utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
W. B. Yeats
"Easter 1916”
True rebels, after all, are as rare as true lovers,
and, in both cases, to mistake a fever
for a passion can destroy one’s life.
James Baldwin
No Name in the Street
He lost no time, got his belt undone,
said “I could go through you like butter. ”
Edna O’Brien
Night
CONTENTS
Foreword by Ariel Levy xi
Preface xxix
part one ~ INTERCOURSE IN A MAN-MADE WORLD
1 Repulsion 3
2 Skinless 25
3 Stigma 45
4 Communion 59
5 Possession 79
part two ~ THE FEMALE CONDITION
6 Virginity 103
7 Occupation/Collaboration 153
part three ~ POWER, STATUS, AND HATE
8 Law 185
9 Dirt/Death 213
Acknowledgments 249
Notes 251
Bibliography 267
Index 305
FOREWORD
Like most writers, Andrea Dworkin thought her work was
underappreciated in her lifetime. Like very few of them, she
was right. Dworkin the persona—the mythical figure, the in­
verted sex symbol—eclipsed Dworkin the writer in the public
imagination. There are many more people who have strong
feelings about her than there are people who have actually
read her work.
If this is the first book of hers you’ve encountered, brace
yourself—she had a voice like no other. Perhaps the most
prominent quality of Dworkin’s writing is its ferocity: its re­
lentless intellectual and ideological confidence, its refusal to
collapse into what Dworkin called “the quintessential feminine
pose. ” Though she bragged she used “language without its ever
becoming decorative or pretty, ” there is elegance as well as ag­
gression in Dworkin’s sentences. She had a particular gift for
conveying abstract concepts through acute, unusual metaphors.
“It’s not as if there’s an empty patch that one can see and so one
can say, ‘There’s my ignorance; it’s about ten by ten and a
dozen feet high and someday someone will fill in the empty
patch,” ’ she wrote in her memoir, Heartbreak. (She was talking
about male writers. ) She could be lyrical in her descriptions;
Bessie Smith’s voice “tramped through your three-dimensional
body but gracefully, a spartan, bearlike ballet.” And she could
be very funny. Of a grade-school teacher who gave her trouble,
Dworkin says, “I knew I’d get her someday and this is it: eat
shit, bitch. No one said that sisterhood was easy. ”
But when most people think of Andrea Dworkin, they think
of two things: overalls (her uniform) and the idea that all sex is
rape. That was the notorious interpretation of Intercourse by
many when it first came out in 1987, and as Dworkin put it in
her preface nine years later, the book is “still being reviled in
print by people who have never read it, reduced to slogans by
journalists posing as critics or sages or deep thinkers, treated as
if it were odious and hateful by every asshole who thinks that
what will heal this violent world is more respect for dead white
men.” Intercourse is an inventive, combative, and wildly com­
plicated piece of work, and to imagine that all there is between
these covers is the assertion that all sex is rape is about as so­
phisticated as reducing Proust to a pile of madeleine crumbs.
But you don’t have to be an asshole—or even a journalist—
to take issue with some of what Dworkin said. Fury and drama
characterize her rhetorical style, extremism her ideas, and In­
tercourse is perhaps her most radical work. “Am I saying I
know more than men about fucking? Yes, I am, ” she tells us.
And in a typical Dworkin flourish, she refuses to leave it at that;
she gives her reader no room to soften her meaning through
misinterpretation.
“Not just different: more and better, ” she writes, “deeper
and wider, the way anyone used knows the user. ” There is not
a doubt in her mind that she’s right, and she consciously re­
jects a writing style that is placating or solicitous: she’s not
that kind of girl.
She begins with an exploration of several (very different)
male writers’ depictions of female sexuality. We are shown, gen­
tly at first, forcefully as her text builds momentum, how much
of literature positions women as not fully human or as filthy.
With characteristic swagger, Dworkin compares Intercourse to
Dante’s Inferno, its spiraling structure descending into ever
deeper circles of hell. If Dworkin’s own vision of sex and soci­
ety is extreme, we soon remember that so too is the context
within which she writes. “The normal fuck by the normal man
is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in
a mode of predation: colonializing, forceful (manly) or nearly
violent; the sexual act that by nature makes her his. ” There is
the Bible to teach us this, of course, but then there is also Tol­
stoy, Freud, Mailer, and so on. From these texts Dworkin
extracts the belief system we know—but sometimes like to for­
get—has governed gender relations in the West throughout
the course of our history: that women are entities to be taken
and possessed—walking, talking currency.
Dworkin asseverates an alternative, a way of representing and
having sex that dissolves boundaries and offers not only inti­
macy but merged humanity... a kind of magic, fleeting selfless­
ness. “There is no physical distance, no self-consciousness,
nothing withdrawn or private or alienated, no existence outside
physical touch. The skin collapses as a boundary—it has no
meaning; time is gone—it too has no meaning; there is no out­
side. ” In these passages, Dworkin is a poet of erotic love, an in­
carnation that would shock those who have her figured as the
embodiment of antisex. The profound passion she envisions
does not even require an enduring emotional tie: “In fucking,
the deepest emotions one has about life as a whole are ex­
pressed, even with a stranger, however random or impersonal