Andrea-DWORKIN-Intercourse-1987
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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 o f 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, cho.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. O f 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 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 if it 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, which 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.