Intercourse: The Twentieth Anniversary Edition

334 Pages·2007·7.59 MB·English

by  Andrea Dworkin

INTERCOURSE
Tilt TWfntieth Annivt'nan Edition
Andrea Dworkin
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Published by Basic Books
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Copyright © 1987 by Andrea Dworkin
Preface cop)Tight © 1995, 1997 by Andrea Dworkin
Foreword copyright © 2006 by Arid 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
ISB]';-13: 978-0-465-01752-2
ISBN-IO: 0-465-01752-5
Permission has generously been granteJ to include in this volume quotations from: Kobo Abe,
TIu Box Man, trans. E. Dale Saunders, copyright © 1980 Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; Kobo Abe,
TIu Woman in tltt Dunes, trans. E. Dale Saunders, copyright © 1972 Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
and Martin Secker and Warburg, Ltd.: James Baldwin, AnotheT Country, copyright © 1960,
1962 by James Baldwin, reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.; The Living
Theatre, Paradise Now, copyright © 1971 Random House, Inc. with the permission ofJ udith
Malina; Regine Pernoud, Joan of ATC, trans. Edward Hyams, copyright © 1966 by Regine
Pemoud, reprinted with permission of Stein and Day Publishers; Isaac Bashevis Singer, Satan
;n Garay, 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
Kreutur 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 Strutcar Named Desire, copyright ©
1947 by Tennessee Williams, reprinted by pennission 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 Poe71l.5 of w. B. Yeats, edited by
Richard J. Finneran, copyright © 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1961 by
Bertha Georgie Yeats, reprinted with permi. .i on of Macmillan Publishing Company.
For M. S.
All changed, changed 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 b)' Ariel Lev), Xl
Preface XXlX
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
]I(otes 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;
XI
XII Fore7t'ord
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 al1 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 ajournalist
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 1 saying 1
know more than men about fucking? Yes, 1 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.
XIII
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
xrv
the encounter," she writes. There is room for escape, she sug
gests, even in the here and now, even in the country she refers
to as Amerika (more on this later), from the erotics of power
differential.
But if one finds this kind of sublime sexual release specifi
cally in relinquishing control, what then? What does it mean to
be aroused by dominance in the societal context Dworkin
describes? And ifit turns us on, do we care?
The way women have eroticized sexual possession is of great
interest to Dworkin, of course. "The experience of sexual pos
session for women is real and literal," she writes, "without any
magical or mystical dimension to it: getting fucked and being
owned are inseparably the same; together, being one and the
same, they are sex for women under male dominance as a social
system." She may not have been saying all sex is rape, but
clearly she was suggesting that most sex is something damn
close when you live in a patriarchy ... and where else are we to
live? In this world, whic~ is the only world that exists, "cri
tiques of rape, pornography, and prostitution are 'sex-negative'
without qualification or examination, perhaps because so many
men use these ignoble routes of access and domination to get
laid, and without them the number of fucks would so signifi
cantly decrease that men might nearly be chaste."
Really?
Do we believe that "most women are not distinct, private in
dividuals to most men"? (Still?) Is voluntary intercourse insti
gated by female lust and desire something so uncommon? Are
abuse and plunder the norm, mutual satisfaction the exception
so rare it proves the rule?
Your answer to these questions-and to many others
Dworkin poses in this book-will depend on the experience of
Forrr,'~rd xv
sex you've been lucky or unlucky enough to have. But the value
of the questioning itself is substantial.
Dworkin's profound and unique legacy was to examine the
meaning of the act most of us take to be fundamental to sex,
fundamental to human existence. As she puts it, "what inter
course is for women and what it does to women's identity, pri
vacy, self-respect, self-determination, and integrity are
forbidden questions; and yet how can a radical or any woman
who wants freedom not ask precisely these questions?" You
may find in reading Dworkin's work that many of her ques
tions have never even crossed your mind.
If you disagree with her answers, you may still find yourself
indebted to her for helping you discover your own.
Dworkin's description of her own sexual history is often grim,
and given the title of the book you are about to read-and the
premise that the personal is political-we are right to consider
this. Though she stated "I am not an exhibitionist. I don't
show myself," in her book Life and Death, she also wrote "I
have used everything I know-my life-to show what I believe
must be shown so that it can be faced."
Dworkin was molested or raped at around age 9; the details,
in her writing, and according to her closest friends, are murky,
but something bad happened then. In 1965, when Dworkin
was 18 and a freshman at Bennington College, she was arrested
after participating in a march against the Vietnam War and was
taken to the Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Vil
lage, where she was subjected to a nightmarish internal exam
by prison doctors.
She bled for days afterward. Her family doctor looked at her
injuries and cried.