Intercourse (book)

"Intercourse" (1987, ISBN 0-684-83239-9) is a radical feminist analysis of sexual intercourse in literature and society, written by Andrea Dworkin. "Intercourse" is often said to argue that "all heterosexual sex is rape", based on the line from the book that says "violation is a synonym for intercourse."

Thesis

In "Intercourse", Dworkin extended her earlier analysis of pornography to a discussion of heterosexual intercourse itself. In works such as "Woman Hating" and "Pornography: Men Possessing Women", Dworkin had argued that pornography and erotic literature in patriarchal societies consistently eroticized women's sexual subordination to men, and often overt acts of exploitation or violence. In "Intercourse", she went on to argue that that sort of sexual subordination was central to men's and women's experiences of sexual intercourse in a male supremacist society, and reinforced throughout mainstream culture, including not only pornography but also in classic works of male-centric literature.

Extensively discussing works such as "The Kreutzer Sonata", "Madame Bovary", and "Dracula" (and citing from religious texts, legal commentary, and pornography), Dworkin argued that the depictions of intercourse in mainstream art and culture consistently emphasized heterosexual intercourse as the only or the most genuine form of "real" sex; that they portrayed intercourse in violent or invasive terms; that they portrayed the violence or invasiveness as central to its eroticism; and that they often united it with male contempt for, revulsion towards, or even murder of, the "carnal" woman. She argued that this kind of depiction enforced a male-centric and coercive view of sexuality, and that, when the cultural attitudes combine with the material conditions of women's lives in a sexist society, the experience of heterosexual intercourse itself becomes a central part of men's subordination of women, experienced as a form of "occupation" (cf. [http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/IntercourseI.html Chapter 7, "Occupation/Collaboration"] ) that is nevertheless expected to be pleasurable for women and to define their very status "as women". Dworkin describes the view of intercourse enforced by saying:

quotation|This is nihilism, or this is truth. He has to push in past boundaries. There is the outline of a body, distinct, separate, its integrity an illusion, a tragic deception, because unseen there is a slit between the legs, and he has to push into it. There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist with intercourse: with being entered. The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is persistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center. She is occupied--physically, internally, in her privacy. ...

There is no analogue anywhere among subordinated groups of people to this experience of being made for intercourse: for penetration, entry, occupation. There is no analogue in occupied countries or in dominated races or in imprisoned dissidents or in colonialized cultures or in the submission of children to adults or in the atrocities that have marked the twentieth century ranging from Auschwitz to the Gulag. There is nothing exactly the same, and this is not because the political invasion and significance of intercourse is banal up against these other hierarchies and brutalities. Intercourse is a particular reality for women as an inferior class; and it has, in it, as part of it, violation of boundaries, taking over, occupation, destruction of privacy, all of which are construed to be normal and also fundamental to continuing human existence. There is nothing that happens to any other civilly inferior people that is the same in its meaning and in its effect even when those people are forced into sexual availability, heterosexual or homosexual; while the subject people, for instance, may be forced to have intercourse with those who dominate them, the God who does not exist did not make human existence, broadly speaking, dependent on their compliance. The political meaning of intercourse for women is the fundamental question of feminism and freedom: can an occupied people--physically occupied inside, internally invaded--be free; can those with a metaphysically compromised privacy have self-determination; can those without a biologically based physical integrity have self-respect?|Andrea Dworkin|"Intercourse", 122-124

Controversy

Such descriptions are often cited by Dworkin's critics, claiming that "Intercourse" argued that "All heterosexual intercourse is rape." That statement, however, occurs nowhere in the book, and her comparisons of intercourse to "occupation," "possession," "collaboration," etc. are made in the context of discussions of the way in which intercourse is depicted "the discourse of male truth--literature, science, philosophy, pornography" (122), and the enforcement of those terms through men's social power over women.

Dworkin rejected the interpretation that "All heterosexual intercourse is rape" as a grave misunderstanding of her work [http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/LieDetect.html] . When asked in [http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/MoorcockInterview.html a later interview] , she explained,

Some critics, such as Gene Healy [http://web.archive.org/web/20030516003455/http://criterion.uchicago.edu/issues/ii6/healy.html] and Cathy Young [http://www.reason.com/blog/show/109179.html] claimed that they found Dworkin's explanation hard to square with her frequent willingness to criticize ordinary heterosexual practices as violent or coercive. Young went on to claim that, given Dworkin's expressed views, arguments over whether Dworkin actually said that heterosexual intercourse is rape can be dismissed as "quibbling" [http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/2005/04/the_dworkin_whi_1.shtml] .

Quotations

Reviews

* [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE2DE133DF930A35756C0A961948260 "Ice and Fire" by Andrea Dworkin; "Intercourse" by Andrea Dworkin. "Male and Female, Men and Women"] . Reviewed by Carol Sternhell for the "New York Times" (May 3, 1987).
* [http://maureenmullarkey.com/essays/porn1.html "Intercourse" by Andrea Dworkin; "Feminism Unmodified" by Catharine MacKinnon. "Porn in the U.S.A., Part I"] . Reviewed by Maureen Mullarkey for "The Nation" (May 30, 1987):
* [http://www.isiswomen.org/wia/wia398/vaw00006.html Tenth Anniversary Edition (1997), "Intercourse" by Andrea Dworkin] . Reviewed by Giney Villar for "Women in Action" (3:1998).