Intercourse

Intercourse

Andrea Dworkin

Language: English

Pages: 352

ISBN: 0465017525

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Andrea Dworkin, once called “Feminism’s Malcolm X,” has been worshipped, reviled, criticized, and analyzed-but never ignored. The power of her writing, the passion of her ideals, and the ferocity of her intellect have spurred the arguments and activism of two generations of feminists. Now the book that she’s best known for-in which she provoked the argument that ultimately split apart the feminist movement-is being reissued for the young women and men of the twenty-first century. Intercourse enraged as many readers as it inspired when it was first published in 1987. In it, Dworkin argues that in a male supremacist society, sex between men and women constitutes a central part of women’s subordination to men. (This argument was quickly-and falsely-simplified to “all sex is rape” in the public arena, adding fire to Dworkin’s already radical persona.) In her introduction to this twentieth-anniversary edition of Intercourse, Ariel Levy, the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, discusses the circumstances of Dworkin’s untimely death in the spring of 2005, and the enormous impact of her life and work. Dworkin’s argument, she points out, is the stickiest question of feminism: Can a woman fight the power when he shares her bed?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

simple ability to love, so hard to save because hope is so hard to save, especially when it must coexist with knowledge: Yet, hope-the hope that we, human beings, can be better than we are-dies hard; perhaps one can no longer live if one allows *The values in the fiction and the essays are very much the samethough the subject of the essays is not fucking-and I have quoted from both throughout using the essays to illuminate the world·view in the novels. INTERCOURSE IN A MAN-MADE WORLD the hope

everybody that likes to be debased, but I don't think life's that simple.'''26 Leona wanted love, not pain; her loyalty, her faith, could not conquer or heal hatred. There is no analysis of Leona's life in the book, not what drove her or why, except that her humanity, her capacity to love, comes from what she has already suffered; her bravery in surviving her husband, her family, the loss of her child, leaving the South to try to make a new life, trying to love, a hard case, a black man whom she

Virginity was freedom from the real meaning of being female; it was not just another style of being female. Being female meant tiny 106 THE FEMALE CONDITION boundaries and degraded possibilities; social inferiority and sexual subordination; obedience to men; surrender to male force or violence; sexual accessibility to men or withdrawal from the world; and civil insignificance. Unlike the feminine virgins who accepted the social subordination while exempting themselves from the sex on which it

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. A human being has a body that is inviolate; and when it

contempt-that no threat seems empty. Intercourse does not say, forgive me and love me. It does not say, I forgive you, I love you. For a woman writer to thrive (or, arguably, to survive) in these current hard times, forgiveness and love must be sub text. No. I say no. Can a man read Intercourse? Can a man read a book written by a woman in which she uses language without its ever becoming decorative or pretty? Can a man read a book written by a woman in which she, the author, has a direct

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