Although there are numerous pieces of radical feminist literature which enable readers to understand how the domain of sex is utilized to perpetuate patriarchal principles, Dworkin’s Intercourse may be the single most important one with regard to this topic. From Chapter 1 on, she reveals how the concept and reality of intercourse is organized around patriarchal patterns of thinking about women. As the text unfolds, Dworkin references another text entitled The Kreutzer Sonata in a manner which shows the reader how sex operates as a medium through which male contempt for female existence becomes evident. Specifically, she notes that The Kreutzer Sonata involves the author using the details of his sexual intercourse with his wife to convey his “deep repugnance” (4) for her. The repugnance is linked to ongoing sexual desire, and this reality might cause the reader to infer that the male character in the text is perhaps disgusted with both women generally and his inability to repress or control erotic desire for one woman (his wife Sophie) specifically. Irrespective of the origins and nature of his male desires, it is important to note that their sexual interactions culminate in him setting his wife aside with “rude indifference or cold distaste” (4). In making this culmination plain, Dworkin enables the reader to understand that prototypical manifestations of male sexuality involve first using female bodies to satisfy desire and subsequently viewing the woman who was used with sullen disregard.[i]
As the text continues, the reader becomes more acutely aware of the aura of negativity Dworkin attaches to sex. In Chapter 2, she asserts that intercourse produces an internal landscape marked by
violent upheaval, a wild and ultimately cruel disregard of human individuality, a brazen, high-strung wanting that is absolute and imperishable, not attached to personality, no respecter of boundaries; ending not in sexual climax but in a human tragedy of failed relationships, vengeful bitterness in an aftermath of sexual heat, personality corroded by too much endurance of undesired, habitual intercourse, conflict, a wearing away of vitality in the numbness finally of habit or compulsion or the loneliness of separation (25).
Here, the reader can juxtapose Dworkin’s concept of intercourse to popular patriarchal narratives which indoctrinate girls and women in propaganda regarding sex being a special, sacred experience which reflects intimacy, tenderness, excitement, pleasure, and/or attentiveness shared with a male who has expressed ongoing, unending devotion to them. Dworkin’s understanding of what intercourse oftentimes can be and frequently involves is instructional; we learn (and not for the first time, if we have been keeping up with our radical feminist analysis of the patriarchal world created by men who love prostitution and pornography) that intercourse oftentimes involves violence. We also come to understand that intercourse can be an unpleasurable practice which, rather than ending in an exhilarating orgasm, results in broken relationships. As the chapter continues, Dworkin’s lugubrious, pessimistic attitude towards intercourse continues and she notes that the tension created by it “is painful, lonely—apart or in sex, the sex being doomed by the necessity, the inevitability, of becoming separate, absolutely separate, again” (28). This part of the text enables the reader to grasp that sex operates as a site which induces separation, with this reality contradicting the normative narrative regarding intercourse creating unity between two distinct people who somehow become one during the act. The primacy placed on separation reemphasizes how a sense of loneliness and isolation can permeate itself into any space, including those we think will enable us to experience intimate, authentic connection.
At first, it seems that Chapter 2 might wind up being gender neutral commentary regarding the risks and pitfalls of intercourse as they pertain to all people regardless of sex; it is not. As the chapter progresses, Andrea Dworkin references other texts in which the male proclivity for violence in context of sexual experiences becomes evident. For example, Dworkin references the book The Face of Another. In this book, a male character loses the skin of his face and makes a mask in order to continue having sex with his wife because she is repelled by the sight of his skinless face. The wearing of the mask escalates the psychoanalytic dimensions of their relationship, with the wife never experiencing substantive transcendence or transformation as they copulate this way. The husband asserts that it is the (presumably awkward and dissociative) practice of wearing the mask that prevents him from taking off his metaphysical “mask” and being vulnerable during acts of intimacy; the wife asserts that his opacity is rooted in his selfishness. In response to the humiliation he feels regarding being made vulnerable in acts of intimacy with his wife that pull him into a sphere of vulnerability even as she keeps him at arm’s length, the male character shoots her. In reflecting on this aspect of plot development, the reader can locate the feminist import of the narrative. While intercourse is problematic in and of itself, it is increasingly so when women venture to share intimate space with men because of the male tendency to allow violence to permeate all aspects of their lives–including their sex lives.
The negative aura Dworkin attaches to intercourse is reemphasized when she summarizes elements of another text, The Rose Tattoo by Tennessee Williams. Dworkin details events pertaining to the sex lives of central characters Serafina and her husband, Rosario, including the wife’s perception that she sexually “owns” her male partner due to intercourse. This inversion of the patriarchal order in which men are powerful and women are powerless in the domain of intercourse is subsequently subverted, however; when her husband dies, Serafina goes into a prolonged state of mourning. Specifically, she isolates herself within her house for a total of three years. Within the house, the ashes of her deceased husband reside in an urn which functions as an aspect of a religious shrine. In her analysis of this extended mourning, Dworkin asserts that it is “a prolonged sex act, lovemaking that never reaches a climax but becomes more and more fevered, a sexual obsession that is a passion sustained into near madness” (48). Here, Dworkin’s bleak interpretation of intercourse becomes evident as sex becomes synonymous with memories of death and dying that never end and, in being sustained indefinitely, induce a cognitive state that approaches insanity.
As Chapter 4 unfolds, the reader becomes cognizant of Dworkin’s acute awareness of normative narratives regarding intercourse. Specifically, Dworkin writes
In Amerika, there is the nearly universal conviction–or so it appears–that sex (fucking) is good and that liking it is right: morally right; a sign of human health; nearly a standard for citizenship. Even those who believe in original sin andhave a theology of hellfire and damnation express the Amerikan creed, an optimism that glows in the dark: sex is good, healthy, wholesome, pleasant, fun; we like it, we enjoy it, we want it, we are cheerful about it…(59)
Dworkin’s awareness of normative paradigms that guide most people’s understanding of intercourse functions as the point of departure for her analysis of how this positive outlook towards sex aligns itself with patriarchal paradigms. Positivity marries patriarchy in a process through which, because we are supposed to believe that sex is good and thereby have a positive attitude about it, women need to be taught how to please their husbands sexually so sex can keep being had (since, after all, sex is the pathway to happiness). In conveying this reality, Dworkin references how
Marabel Morgan’s The Total Woman (a manual for wives who want to get their husbands to fuck them and maintain a cheerful attitude and a belief in God all at the same time) spawned classes all over the United States, including in churches, to teach conservative, Christian women how to act out the so-called fantasies of their husbands with costumes and props (59-60)
Here, the reader is exposed to one of patriarchy’s most effective tools of the trade: finding women who will promote its propaganda so that slavish, subordinate behavior that might be deemed questionable is less questionable because it is being promoted by a member of one’s own sex and therefore must be rooted in reason, love, concern, or some kind of deeper and more empathic understanding of how delicate matters such as sex should unfold. Within this specific manifestation of women purporting patriarchal views for the men who benefit from the normalization of female sexual servitude, the dehumanizing, degrading process of reducing a woman-subject to a sex-object transpires in context of encouraging female people to deidentify with any identity they’ve been able to develop by adopting clothing that masks their true selves. (This is what costumes and props do, and this is what they are meant to do–hide the true self while displaying an invented one. Self becomes other and, within this sexualized framework, the self-as-subject becomes self-as-object and therefore not-a-self-at-all given our binary-based understanding of subjects and objects.)
Although Dworkin offers many important insights regarding the lackluster nature of intercourse, I submit that her most substantive supposition unfolds with stunning lucidity at the onset of Chapter 5. Here, she writes
Intercourse is commonly written about and comprehended as a form of possession or an act of possession in which, during which, because of which, a man inhabits a woman, physically covering her and overwhelming her and at the same time penetrating her; and this physical relation to her— over her and inside her— is his possession of her. He has her, or, when he is done, he has had her. By thrusting into her, he takes her over. His thrusting into her is taken to be her capitulation to him as a conqueror; it is a physical surrender of herself to him; he occupies and rules her, expresses his elemental dominance over her, by his possession of her in the fuck (79).
These sentences are important because they demystify intercourse and display it as what it can be and often is: a patriarchal process which involves men possessing women. Yet Dworkin takes her analysis beyond just the negative import we might attach to intercourse upon noting that it constitutes the site of men oppressing women by possessing them. She also asserts that intercourse is the sphere through which men occupy women.[ii] This term suggests that women have lost the agency and autonomy which is associated with being a self who, in being a self, takes up space in various modes of self-expression. To be occupied means to no longer take up space for oneself but rather to have lost space so that another individual can abide in one’s space; the female self thus lacks space, loses space, or is spaceless in intercourse where her vagina is penetrated by a penis. Capitulated, occupied, possessed, and conquered: these are the concepts that Dworkin attaches intercourse to. And these are the concepts which help the reader understand the radical, dissident outlook that she has towards intercourse. Rather than perpetuate the normative idea that sex can and does make us happy and subsequently using that logic as motivation to go out and tell women that they should learn how to engage in intercourse in ways that please men and thus will presumably make them happy, too, Dworkin adopts a refreshingly cautionary tone which is rooted in radicalism rather than conservatism. Specifically, her wary disposition towards intercourse is not rooted in conservative mantras regarding what morality is and how being resistant to intercourse proves that one is indeed moral; instead, the wariness results from awareness of how sex is a domain through which women can be subordinated and therefore denied their subjectivity.
Viewed as a whole, Dworkin’s Intercourse is an incredibly important book for those seeking to expand their consciousness regarding what radical feminism is while also learning to think about intercourse in non-patriarchal ways. Many people will not wish to depart from normative, patriarchal ways of viewing intercourse because doing so challenges the legitimacy of the institutions (like marriage and procreation) which give them their (typically false or superficial) identity. It is the role that Intercourse can play in challenging the viability and desirability of intercourse and the normative, patriarchal institutions attached to it that makes the book dangerous. The danger is that the ideas in the text might cause the reader to question whether her or his sexual and social practices make sense. This questioning can produce internal and external tensions which result in disloyalty to patriarchal norms. Therefore, the book is dangerous because it is dissident, and its dissidence can lead to substantive dissonance. Good.
[i] This patriarchal pattern surfaces in a plethora of literary texts, including the rape of Tamar as recorded in II Samuel 13. After raping Tamar, Amnon tells her to get out of his sight and forces her to leave his room, thereby compounding the reader’s ability to grasp how male force is used both to convey perverse desire for a female being and the perverse authority to express indifference and contempt for the individual who has been used.
[ii] The word “occupy” is important here because it conveys that aspect of patriarchy which involves denying women space; this process transpires in innumerable ways, including the process of manspreading. This process transpires when men sit in public transport spaces like buses with their legs apart. This stance enables men to take up more than one seat and has been cited as evidence of the form of male entitlement which involves men feeling as if there is nothing wrong with them occupying a disproportionate amount of space.
