Source of book: I own this
This is my selection for Women’s History
Month this year.
Back in my embarrassing Rush
Limbaugh days, Andrea Dworkin was the poster woman for “Feminazis” - those man
hating, unattractive, bitter, angry creatures of myth that were the only
alternative to accepting patriarchy.
As one who reads quite a bit, and
did back then as well, I already had some doubts about whether Dworkin was
really as described - political discourse tends toward straw manning anyway,
and I eventually realized how dependent the right wing was and is on this
technique.
But my true interest in Dworkin
really started just over a decade ago. And no, it wasn’t primarily that I
started reading feminist texts for Women’s History Month.
It was actually because
patriarchist and white supremacist “pastor” Doug Wilson caused a big kerfuffle
with a statement about sexual intercourse that sounded….exactly like what
Andrea Dworkin supposedly said about sex. And you know, there is a striking similarity.
Here is Wilson:
In
other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian
pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman
receives, surrenders, accepts.
…
Men
dream of being rapists, and women find themselves wistfully reading novels in
which someone ravishes the “soon to be made willing” heroine.
…
True
authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity.
You can read the whole thing and
some good commentary on the late Rachel
Held Evans’ blog.
And here is Dworkin:
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
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.
Wow.
It is unmistakable that both
writers use the same terms, the same ideas, the same basic view of what fucking
means in our culture.
There is a difference, of course.
Dworkin finds this status quo to be morally unacceptable, abhorrent to women,
and degrading.
Wilson finds it necessary to get
his little rocks off.
Of course, Wilson is an evil man
to the core, and every time he opens his mouth it is to do something horrible.
From his defense of slavery to his AIDS denialism to his protection of a
pedophile from justice, leading to the further sexual abuse of an infant. He’s
that kind of awful.
And, to be fair to Dworkin, there
are indeed a LOT of males out there in our culture who are every bit as
predatory in their approach to sex as Dworkin describes. Sadly, we just put a
bunch of them in charge of our government. I’m not kidding. Being a sexual
predator seems to be a job qualification for the Trump administration.
So, with that preface, let me
explain my choice of this book for this year’s Women’s History Month selection.
As Ariel Levy puts it in the
foreword:
There are many more people who have strong feelings about
[Dworkin] than there are people who have actually read her work.
Having read Intercourse,
her best known and most controversial book (at least in right wing circles), I
can say that I definitely have opinions about the book - there are some things
I disagree with, but many many more that I agree with.
Also, with the exception of one
chapter - which I quoted from above - this book is not at all what I was
expecting. The first half is actually all about literature: she analyzes the
works of five male authors and how they portray female sexuality.
Later chapters too bring in a lot
of literature, which is fascinating - Simone de Beauvoir also discusses authors
and how they write about women in The Second Sex. This is an interesting
approach, one that probably resonates best with literary sorts like myself, and
less with sexist dicks like Limbaugh and Trump and Wilson.
The book also discusses law and
history, particularly the Western version, and brings out how all too often,
subjugation of women is deeply rooted in toxic theology. Dworkin is well
informed and quite interesting in her discussion of all of these.
So, I actually enjoyed this
book for reasons I did not anticipate.
Let me also note that Dworkin the
person was controversial across the political spectrum. The right wing needs
little if any explanation - any woman who challenged the patriarchy was and is
their enemy.
But the Left is more interesting.
Dworkin was opposed to pornography, and worked to get laws passed banning it.
These were overturned quickly by the courts, but the whole movement meant that
Dworkin had to work with right wingers opposed to any form of female equality.
This was seen as a sellout, but also a deep division within feminism itself. As
the foreword points out, this seems relatively quaint these days, as porn is
far more ubiquitous than in the 1980s, and less clearly a feminism issue.
(Ditto for sex work generally, which can be exploitative, but tends to
be more so when it is suppressed and driven underground. That topic is beyond
the scope of the book or this post.)
Dworkin was also accused by other
feminists as being a “man hater” - the same epithet used by the right. This is
not entirely accurate, but it is understandable. She certainly pulled zero
punches when it came to calling out bad male behavior, and she (accurately)
noted that patriarchal culture taints everything, and even effects the way good
men think and act, even if they try to fight against the current.
She also was sexually complicated
herself. Her long-term partner, John Stoltenberg, was a man. He was gay, and
after his death, partnered with another man. (And the two of them were
non-monogamous during their relationship.) Dworkin considered herself primarily
a lesbian, but had sex with men as well. This despite her view in this book of
intercourse as inherently tied up with hierarchy.
So yes, a bit of a prickly,
complicated, yet fascinating person. It also helps to understand her history of
being sexually abused since childhood, as this does color her views. Which is
perfectly understandable.
In fact, what I would say my
biggest disagreements with her all stem from my own experience of mutually
satisfying, consensual, loving sex with my own partner. I find this more
achievable than she did, and so I am more optimistic about the future of intercourse
in a feminist world.
[Side note here: in my experience,
the idea that feminists hate men is so obviously and ludicrously false. Of the
heterosexual (or bisexual) feminist women I know, many of them are incredibly
devoted spouses. I can’t find it now, but there was a study recently that found
that feminist women actually have higher opinions about men than anti-feminist
women. This may be because the kinds of men who prefer feminists as partners
are a lot more emotionally mature and thus easier to live with…)
So, with that, let’s dive into
some quotes and ideas.
Dworkin is nothing if not snarky
and acerbic, which is probably why she is used as a poster-feminist by the
right. She does not try to play nice. She does not “put a feminine softness”
into her writing. Her words are weapons, and often razor sharp. Which is
actually something I enjoy. I prefer witty women who can sling words.
One final note here: the title is
“Intercourse” - something you can print on a book without fully risking
obscenity charges. Specifically, however, she is referring to one particular
sex act: the penetration of a vagina by a penis. Throughout, she usually refers
to this as “the fuck.” It is clear that this isn’t sex generally, which
embraces a whole constellation of acts and experiences, but specifically a
penis penetrating a vagina. Keep this in mind throughout.
Her own preface (written for a
later edition) has some real gems. Such as this one.
Intercourse is still being reviled in print by people
who have not 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.
Oh wait, that’s the MAGA project,
right? And the right wing and Fundie position as well. All those women and
minorities and young people - they are what is ruining the world.
Dworkin describes her book in
stark terms.
In formal terms, then, Intercourse is arrogant, cold,
and remorseless.
She also notes that in some cases,
men will actually like the book. I noted this line, because I was curious as to
whether it would apply to me. And I think it does.
Of course, men have read and do read Intercourse. Many
like it and understand it. Some few have been thrilled by it - it suggests to
them a new possibility of freedom, a new sexual ethic: and they do not want to
be users.
This is in contrast to the men who
have never experienced sexuality as anything other than dominance, and who thus
see the end of patriarchy and male dominance as the end of sex itself. Doug
Wilson is clearly this kind of a man. As are Trump and Musk and others of their
ilk.
I will point out later in the book
where I think her sexual ethic very much matches mine. I came to many of the
same conclusions as she does through my own experience, reading, and
thinking.
I will mention here that the
preface also talks about what she sees as the negative effects of the Sexual
Revolution, namely that there is pressure put on females to be always available
for sex. She sees this compulsory sexuality to be just another manifestation of
patriarchy, and I tend to agree. For a more detailed discussion of this idea, I
recommend Ace:
What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by
Angela Chen, which I read earlier this year. There are actually a lot
of overlapping ideas and discussions for these two books.
As I noted, I don’t really agree
with her views on porn and sex work. Not because I am here to defend porn use
of sleeping with sex workers, but because I think there is ample evidence that
criminalization actually leads to greater exploitation and violence towards
women. A woman with her own Only Fans account is far less exploited than one
dependent on a violent pimp for protection from the law. (Charles Dickens got
it, by the way, focusing on Fagan and the way the law failed to protect women,
rather than calling for the arrest of Nancy…)
With that introduction from the
author, any guesses as to where the book starts its discussion?
That’s right, she dives in with The
Kreutzer Sonata!
Did you see that one coming?
Neither did I, and I am the weird person who not only has read that Tolstoy
novella, but considers it one of the most
influential books I ever read.
And man, does Dworkin do a
fantastic job of discussing it.
For those not familiar with it, it
is the story of a man who murders his wife when he catches her cheating on him.
He is acquitted (because of the law of the time that allowed a husband to kill
his wife and her lover with little if any consequence), but he feels tremendous
guilt.
Not because he killed her. But
because the murder started when he had intercourse with her.
As I said, influential. This was
one reason I knew that I needed to talk with my future wife a lot about sex and
expectations and her needs. I did not want sex and marriage to be like Tolstoy
portrays it.
The sad thing is, not only did
Tolstoy have this really fucked up view of sexuality - he believed that humans
should stop having sex altogether - he was far too much like the protagonist of
the story. He was a horrible husband, brutal and dismissive of his wife. And he
never lived up to his goals. He kept going back to her, fucking her,
impregnating her, and then hating her afterward.
The repulsion, Tolstoy insists, requires scrutiny and,
ultimately, disavowal; the sex act that causes it needs to be eliminated. The
radical social change demanded by Tolstoy in this story - the end of
intercourse - is a measured repudiation of gynocide: in order not to kill
women, he said, we must stop fucking them.
Say what? That really is the weird
thing about Tolstoy - and indeed about so many of the writers and others quoted
in this book.
I personally cannot understand
having sex with a woman and then feeling repulsed by her, grossed out, filled
with hate. That’s just….I don’t even know what to say.
No, I do not find female bodies
gross. At all. They are beautiful and desirable. I do not find menstruation to
be a turnoff - it’s just natural. I do not find female genitals ugly. Quite the
contrary.
And really, my overwhelming
feeling after having sex is love, closeness, a desire to snuggle. I simply
cannot identify AT ALL with the kind of man who feels repulsion, disgust, or
hate. I will never understand that.
Throughout the story, Tolstoy
equates fucking with violence and murder. But it is more than that. He cannot
see her as an actual human, a full person. She seems most human only when she
is being stabbed to death.
In this story of killing, the killing begins when the man
starts using the woman up; pillaging her physical resources of sex and
strength. He is calloused to her well-being because her well-being is not
compatible with his fucking - and it is the fucking he wants, not the woman as
a person.
This will be a theme throughout
the book: men wanting to fuck, but not caring about the woman as a person. This
is, in my view, backwards. Seeing and treating a woman like a person and caring
for her needs will actually lead to better intercourse - and more of it. I
mean, don’t we all do more of what we find pleasant and less of what we find
unpleasant, given the choice?
Tolstoy had no idea what he was
missing, in my opinion. He had a wife he could have loved, rather than
dehumanized. He is weirdly like Kerouac, having fairly good self-awareness of
his flaws, but lacking the ability or will to change them.
That said, I know there are all
too many men out there like this. How did poor Sophie feel about all this? I
mean, she was the devoted wife, who transcribed for him, bore a lot of
children, many of whom died in infancy, managed his estate, published his books,
and arguably did more for him than he did for himself or her combined, and put
up with him for decades.
We have her journals, and they
paint a sad picture. She said she hated “his coldness, his terrible coldness”
toward her. She hated that he would only show interest in her when he needed
something or wanted to fuck, and treated her with indifference the rest of the
time. What she really craved, she said, was “warm gentle affection.”
Is that really too much to ask?
Here, I am 100% with Sophie. I do not ever want my partner to feel she is being
starved of warm gentle affection, that I am only interested in her when I want
sex. A full relationship is so much more satisfying.
Overall, this chapter on Tolstoy
was my favorite of the book, simply because finding someone else who cares so
deeply about a book that is meaningful to me is wonderful. But there is a lot
more to come.
The next chapter is all about Kobo
Abe, who I confess I had never heard of, let alone read. I might have to remedy
that. Even if I hadn’t read his works, though, there are some interesting ideas
in this chapter as well. The opening paragraph is interesting.
Sexual intercourse is not intrinsically banal, though
pop-culture magazines like Esquire and Cosmopolitan would suggest
that it is. It is intense, often desperate. The internal landscape is 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. The experience of fucking
changes people, so that they are often lost to each other and slowly they are
lost to human hope. The pain of having been exposed, so naked, emotional and
physical alienation or violent retaliation against anyone who gets too
close.
This is one of the passages where
I wonder if her history of being abused is a factor. This seems a rather
unpleasant experience of sex and relationships. It isn’t wrong so much
as it isn’t universal. It hasn’t been my experience. Yes, it can be emotional
and even sometimes feral. But not like that. Perhaps my female readers can
comment on how much their own experiences felt like this or not?
I am not able to comment much on
the books discussed in this chapter as I am unfamiliar with them. However,
there is one line from The Face of Another that I found quite good. This
is from the protagonist’s wife to him.
You don’t need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because
any stranger for you is simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don’t
ever again want to return to such a desert of mirrors.
Unlike Tolstoy, Abe seems more
capable of writing from the woman’s viewpoint as well. I am kind of intrigued
by the quotes and might have to try one of Abe’s books, although The Woman
in the Dunes sounds a bit disturbing and rapey. (Which is the point of the
discussion.)
One of Dworkin’s points in this
chapter is this:
The violence that men dream and the violence that they do
ensures that they are lonely forever.
One can see this in incels, but
also with the many, many men that fail to connected with others, particularly
their partners, but even with friends. This is indeed the male half of the
tragedy of patriarchy and toxic masculinity. It severs men from human
connection.
The next chapter discusses Tennessee
Williams, of all people. I wasn’t really expecting that, because Williams
was, well, GAY and all. But on closer examination, he wrote a lot about
heterosexual power dynamics as well, and quite well about dysfunctional
heterosexual intercourse.
Williams famously wrote detailed
instructions for his plays, delineating the characters in depth. Stanley, in A
Streetcar Named Desire is described thusly.
Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and
attitudes. Since earliest manhood the center of his life has been pleasure with
women, the giving and taking of it, not with weak indulgence, dependently, but
with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens. Branching
out from this complete and satisfying center are all the auxiliary channels of
his life, such as his heartiness with men, his appreciation of rough humor, his
love of good drink and food and games, his car, his radio, everything that is
his, that bears his emblem of the gaudy seed-bearer.
I was reminded of something recent
with that description, J.
D. Vance’s awkward equating of manliness (the masculinity supposedly lost
in our time) with among other things, making jokes with the guys.
I suspect that what Vance has in
mind isn’t the fast-flying puns and dad jokes that a few friends and I enjoy.
Rather, Williams has the right idea in his “heartiness with me”: the
appreciation of “rough humor.” In other words, sexual jokes demeaning to women.
To be clear, Stanley is not the
hero of Streetcar. He is the villain, using and abusing women, even
raping them and leaving them to commit suicide. This is the natural behavior of
those who embrace this kind of “masculinity.”
The next chapter examines another
gay author: James Baldwin. Again, this is an unexpected yet perceptive choice.
Particular attention is paid to two books: Giovanni’s
Room, which I have read, and Another Country, which I have not -
but now really want to read. Both books, especially the latter, address the way
race and gender intersect with sexuality.
There are a few quotes from
Baldwin in the chapter that I think are crucial truths.
“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy
the man who hated and this was an immutable law.”
“People pay for what they do, and, still more, what they have
allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives
they lead.”
This is true in the sense of
sexuality, for sure. Hating women the way so many men do leads to living lives
that are lonely and sad and disconnected. It also holds true for other
relationships, as I have all too much experience with my own parents and other
right-wing former friends. In the book, Dworkin describes it as this:
And in this morality, when fucking is hatred, when fucking is
revenge, then fucking is hell: a destruction in violence and suffering of
self-knowledge and self-esteem; the destruction of a human being, someone else
perhaps, certainly oneself.
The final chapter expressly about
literature examines the more fantastic stories of Isaac
Bashivis Singer. Speaking of which, that author was the subject of my very
first book post on Facebook, which eventually led to this blog.
As I mentioned, it is the
supernatural stories that are discussed here, with their really weird
sex stuff. It is this chapter that contains that quote that I used to open this
post, which parallels Doug Wilson’s ideas. The chapter is entitled
“Possession,” which is fitting because the stories are about humans being
possessed and/or fucked by supernatural and often malevolent (but not always)
beings.
The chapter also quotes someone
who came decades before Wilson, Theodore Van De Velde, who, in his advice book,
Ideal Marriage, seems to have shared Wilson’s belief that sex is all
about male aggression and possession of a woman.
Dworkin also perceptively points
out that when it comes to gender roles, the terms “God” and “Nature” are
largely interchangeable. Both preachers and naturalistic advice givers tend to
simply reify existing patriarchal ideas using the deity of their choice.
The normal fuck by a normal man is taken to be an act of
invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation: colonizing, forceful
(manly) or nearly violent; the sexual act by its nature makes her his. God made
it so, or nature did, according to the faith of the explainer of events and
values. Both conceptual systems - the theological and the biological - are
loyal to the creed of male dominance and maintain that intercourse is the
elemental (not socialized) expression of male and female, which in turn are the
elemental (not socialized) essences of men and women.
Ah yes. It all comes back to
gender essentialism in the end, doesn’t it? And pity the poor man or woman who
fails to exemplify the essentialism in every point.
Dworkin goes on to question why we
even call it “penetration” rather than “envelopment” - and she also notes all
of the phobias regarding loss of the penis within the vagina. It is the
assumption of male supremacy which gives this meaning to the fuck, not the
other way around.
Remarkably, it is not the man who is considered possessed in
intercourse, even though he (his penis) is buried inside another human being;
and his penis is surrounded by strong muscles that contract like a fist
shutting tight and release with a force that pushes hard on the tender thing,
always so vulnerable no matter how hard. He is not possessed even though his
penis is gone - disappeared inside someone else, enveloped, smothered, in the
muscled lining of flesh that he never sees, only feels, gripping, releasing,
gripping, tighter, harder, firmer, then pushing out: and can he get out
alive? seems a fundamental anxiety that fuels male sexual compulsiveness
and the whole discipline of depth psychology. The man is not possessed in
fucking even though he is terrified of castration; even though he sometimes
thinks - singly or collectively in a culture - that the vagina has teeth; but
he goes inside anyway, out of compulsion, obsession: not obsessed with her, a
particular woman; but with it, getting inside.
There is more - and Dworkin makes
a good case. I mean, we males get our life force sucked out of us by a woman,
then we shrink, fall back exhausted. So why does culture insist that the fuck
is possession of a woman? It is a curious artifact of male supremacy.
So, instead of intercourse being
something mutual, it becomes all about power.
For women, being sexually possessed by men is more
pedestrian. Women have been chattels to men as wives, as prostitutes, as sexual
and reproductive servants. Being owned and being fucked are or have been
virtually synonymous experiences in the lives of women. He owns you; he fucks
you. The fucking conveys the quality of the ownership: he owns you inside
out.
She also talks about the female
experience of this cultural reality.
Therefore, women feel the fuck - when it works, when it
overwhelms - as possession; and feel possession as deeply erotic; and value
annihilation of the self in sex as proof of the man’s desire or love, its
awesome intensity. And therefore, being possessed is phenomenologically real
for women; and sex itself is an experience of diminishing self-possession, an
erosion of self.
Here, I am unqualified to express
much of an opinion, although I can say that as to the male side of
things, I haven’t ever experienced sex as “possession.” I find it to be about
mutual pleasure, the melding of two into one flesh, and about deep
connection.
But how about women? What do they
experience this as? I suspect from what many women have gone on the record as
saying regarding Wilson and the other theobros that they do not find possession
to be erotic at all, contrary to his claims. So I would be curious to hear
female perspectives on this. Obviously, human sexuality is a broad spectrum,
not a binary or black and white.
As I have noted a few times now,
my main disagreement with Dworkin is based on my experience. But she is right
about the culture in general, I would say. Particularly conservative
subcultures here in the United States.
In this chapter, Dworkin also
notes that for all our claims that sex is a personal matter, it really
isn’t.
Each act of possession is sensual and singular; but
possession also has a communal dimension to it, the community regulating, to a
staggering degree, the social and sexual boundaries of possession - the meaning
of the fuck, the degree of public complicity in maintaining each erotic
relationship, what aspects of possession can and cannot be shown or
acknowledged in the public realm, the role of the fuck in controlling
women.
I can surely attest to this having
grown up in a Fundie subculture, and finding as an adult that all too many
people seemed to think they had a say, not so much about my sex life per se,
but about the meaning of my sexual connection to my wife, her body, and
our public affection. It was a bit surprising. And it very much was all about
the control of women.
After these first five chapters,
Dworkin then moves to a couple of chapters more broadly about culture, grouped
as “the female condition.” The first is on virginity, and focuses a lot on Joan
of Arc. There are definitely some interesting ideas in this section,
particularly about the relative privileges of male and female, and the desire
of many women - Joan and my wife included - to take on the power and role of a
man in society, rejecting female subservience.
One interesting note is this one,
which we word nerds knew already, but many fail to appreciate:
Joan wanted to be virtuous in the old sense, before the
Christians got hold of it: virtuous meant brave, valiant. She
incarnated virtue in its original meaning: strength or manliness. Her virginity
was an essential element of her virility, her autonomy, her rebellious and
intransigent self-definition. Virginity was freedom from the real meaning of
being female; it was not just another style of being female.
It is rather interesting that my
wife and I got married fairly young. She had no particular interest in getting
married before she met me. Most likely, she could have lived a long and happy
life as a single woman working in the medical field following her calling. But we
fell in love. And she recognized that I saw her virtue in the
original meaning, and admired it. We were a match that defied gender
roles.
Joan was not so fortunate. Her
father tried to force her into a marriage at 16, which she refused. The man was
apparently so put out he sued her in court for “breach of promise.” (That’s an
arcane law school topic if there ever was one.) Just like Taylor
Swift in our time, she fought back and kicked his ass in court.
Her virginity was part of her
power in another way, which is interesting.
It was common belief that the devil could not make a pact
with a virgin; and so virginity would put Joan on God’s side…
Joan was able to survive as long
as she did because of the freedom that her virginity gave her.
Because she found a way to bypass male desire, Joan’s story
illuminates and clarifies to what degree male desire determines a woman’s
possibilities in life: how far, how fast, where, when, and how she can move; by
what means; what activities she can engage in; how circumscribed her physical
freedom is; the total subjugation of her physical form and freedom to what men
what from her.
Dworkin also reminds the reader of
something I have talked about many times before. There is something inherently
cruel and morally bankrupt about the doctrine of hell and salvation as it
became once Christianity became a tool of Empire that was so amply illustrated
by the Inquisition.
Torture was frequently used to get a confession of guilt,
since the confession helped to save the person’s soul and saving the heretic’s
soul was the Church’s divine purpose in these proceedings.
I believe that the core problem is
that “salvation” and indeed Christianity in general has come to mean “believe
the right things, and adopt patriarchal culture” rather than following
Christ. On a related note:
When women rebelled against the Church through sex, the
Inquisition killed them for that. When this one woman rebelled through dress,
the Inquisition killed her for that. Virginity could not buy her life, because
the issue was not ever - and is not now - to have sex or not to have sex; the
issue was compliance with inferior status.
Exactly. I really came to
understand this with the rejection
of my wife by my parents. The issue wasn’t what it was on the surface -
clothing, career, appearance, and the other stupid issue - it was always about
her unwillingness to comply with her inferior status, to “act like a woman.”
Likewise, that is what MAGA is about - putting women (and minorities of all
kinds) firmly back in their place.
And also related to this is
the idea that males serve as mediators between God and females. This was
expressly taught by Bill Gothard and so many others. My wife, like Joan, never
accepted this. Dworkin explains:
She would not give over her direct relationship with God to
the priests; she would not give over her direct relationship with God’s will to
the Church; she would not give over her private conscience to Church policy or
Church practice or Church politics.
Exactly the point, once again.
Women must be free to follow their own consciences, not outsource them to other
people who just happen to possess penises or (like my mother) adopt patriarchal
beliefs as God’s sole truth. My mother in fact never forgave my wife for
refusing to defer to my mother’s wishes instead of her own conscience.
I think this is the part of the
book that I agree with the most. Ultimately, all the sex stuff - the double
standard, the rules, the assumptions - are just expressions of the same belief
that women must embrace their inferior status in society.
The other chapter in this section
is “Occupation/Collaboration,” and further looks at the social issues. Dworkin
argues that intercourse is incompatible with privacy. In order to be entered,
one must have one’s bodily boundaries violated.
There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist
with intercourse: with being entered…A woman has a body that is penetrated in
intercourse: permeable, its corporeal solidness a lie.
While I am unsure if I agree with
everything in this section, I think that it does apply quite well to a certain
kind of male - think Trump and his ilk of course, but “bros” generally. I’ll
quote a few bits.
Intercourse occurs in a context of a power relation that is
pervasive and incontrovertible. The context in which the act takes place,
whatever the meaning of the act in and of itself, is one in which men have
social, economic, political, and physical power over women. Some men do not
have all those kinds of power over all women; but all men have some kinds of
power over all women; and most men have controlling power over what they call their
women - the women they fuck. The power is predetermined by gender, by being
male.
Intercourse as an act often expresses the power men have over
women. Without being what the society recognizes as rape, it is what the
society - when pushed to admit it -recognizes as dominance.
That is perhaps the most stark
version of the argument she makes. Not that all fucking is rape, but that
society sees it as an expression of dominance. And here is yet another way that
this book identifies the Trump sorts:
Intercourse is frequently performed compulsively; and
intercourse frequently requires as a precondition for male performance the
objectification of the female partner. She has to look a certain way, be a
certain type - even conform to preordained behaviors and scripts - for the man
to want to have intercourse and also for the man to be able to have
intercourse. The woman cannot exist before or during the act as a fully
realized, existentially alive individual.
Note Trump’s division of women
into “fuckable objects” and “nasty women I don’t think are fuckable.”
In contrast, I know a lot of men
(myself included) who do in fact see our female partners as fully realized,
existentially alive individuals before and during sex. It would seem weird to
me otherwise.
It is after this that Dworkin
finally starts to reach toward what I see not as merely an ideal for sex, but
indeed the bare baseline of what sex should be.
Women have also wanted intercourse to work in this sense:
women have wanted intercourse to be, for women, an experience of equality and
passion, sensuality and intimacy. Women have a vision of love that includes men
as human too; and women want the human in men, including in the act of
intercourse. Even without the dignity of equal power, women have believed in
the redeeming potential of love.
I mean, isn’t that truly
beautiful? That’s what I want, and what I aspire to create in sex with my wife.
Dworkin further envisions “a mutual lying together in pleasure” - that is, the
“egalitarian pleasure fest” that Doug Wilson eschews. She also sees the ideal
sexual encounter as being much more than intercourse - and I totally agree.
Even if culture seems to think otherwise most of the time.
The culture romanticizes the rapist dimension of the first
time: he will force his way in and hurt her. The event itself is supposed to be
so distinct, so entirely unlike any other experience or category of sensation,
that there is no conception that intercourse can be just part of sex, including
the first time, instead of sex itself. There is no slow opening up, no slow,
gradual entry; no days and months of sensuality prior to entry and no nights
and hours after entry.
There is so much to unpack in this
small passage, which I think is my very favorite of the book. Yes, there is SO
MUCH stupidity in how our society talks about “losing her virginity,” from the
expectation of pain to the “nothing is like the first time” to the idea that
there is something particularly unique and incomparable to that first
penetration. All of these are bullshit on a stick.
First, pain during first
intercourse is not inevitable, and can largely be avoided by proper foreplay
and lubrication. Seriously. How many women have needlessly suffered on their
first night.
Second, first intercourse can be
really good. But it is never going to be as good as it will become with
practice. In fact, I would say that having a sense of humor is the most
important thing to bring to one’s wedding night (or whenever that first act is
done.) You are novices. You can do a good job with preparation, but to become
truly good at making a partner’s body sing, you need to spend hours
getting to know it and practicing. Trust me on this one.
Third, I LOVE Dworkin’s
description here of the slow development of intimacy. Without disclosing
exactly what we did, when, and how, I will say that my wife and I took the time
to do things right. (And I don’t mean we followed the puritanical sex rules of
our religious subculture - we didn’t.)
And by that I mean that we took
months - more than a year in fact - to gradually increase our level of physical
intimacy from that first kiss to full vaginal penetration. Lots of sensuality,
lots of gradual “opening up” of our bodies to each other. And I made sure that
she orgasmed first, nearly every time. “Intercourse” - penetration - “the fuck”
- was not the center of everything. Mutual pleasure was.
And looking back, I have
absolutely zero regrets about what we did, when we did it, or how we did it. It
was beautiful and pleasurable and mutual. That’s how sex should be.
I suspect that if more men
approached sex like this, women would be a lot happier. (And actually, maybe
this is why egalitarian marriages seem to stay together better and be happier
than patriarchal ones…)
That said, there are,
unfortunately, still a lot of men who behave badly. Dworkin notes that
intercourse is no longer necessary for reproduction - artificial insemination
and in vitro techniques work just fine without a penetration by a penis - but
the underlying meaning hasn’t gone away.
Existence does not depend on female compliance, nor on the
violation of female boundaries, nor on lesser female privacy, nor on the
physical occupation of the female body. But the hatred of women is a source of
sexual pleasure for men in its own right. Intercourse appears to be the
expression of that contempt in pure form, in the form of a sexed hierarchy; it
requires no passion or heart because it is power without invention articulating
the arrogance of those who do the fucking. Intercourse is the pure, sterile,
formal expression of men’s contempt for women…
Again, so many men seem to be like
this. They want to fuck, but openly hate women. This is the whole “manosphere”
in a nutshell.
I was intrigued to see that
Dworkin did find one “sexual liberationist” male who she believes actually
abhors rape. Wilhelm Reich opined that in addition to freedom to have sex, a
woman also needed “an undisturbed room, proper contraceptives, a friend who is
capable of live, that is, not a National Socialist…”
Ouch. Yeah, that tracks though.
Nazis - Fascists in general actually - are incapable of love, because they
require hierarchy, in which love cannot exist.
Dworkin later looks at the ways
that certain women become enforcers of that sexual hierarchy, and this too
matches my experience.
Being an object for a man means being alienated from other
women - those like her in status, in inferiority, in sexual function.
Collaboration by women with men to keep women civilly and sexually inferior has
been one of the hallmarks of female subordination; we are ashamed when Freud
notices it, but it is true.
This too has proven true in my
experience. My wife has been targeted in large part not by men, but by women
desperate to keep her in her place along with them.
The final section is also two
chapters, and is entitled “Power, Status, and Hate.” The first chapter is all
about the law. I will mention here that Dworkin is pretty hostile toward
organized religion in general, and specifically American Christianity, which
she sees as hopelessly rooted in ancient cultures that viewed women as chattel.
She is not wrong.
I have written here and there
about this. I’ll recommend Unprotected
Texts for an actual scholarly read about what the Christian and Hebrew
scriptures actually say about sex - it isn’t what we were taught. And also Sex
and the Constitution for information about the Anglo-American legal
approach to sex. I’ll just hit a few highlights of this chapter.
Understanding literally anything
the Bible says about sexuality requires understanding that women were legally
chattel. No different from donkeys, oxen, or slaves. If you don’t start there,
the rest of it seems weird - and indeed thoroughly evil and immoral in many
places. We do not, these days, think it morally acceptable to buy children to
use as sex slaves, for example. But the Bible never condemns that. So maybe
trying to use that book as an instruction book for sexual morals is…of dubious
value.
I think this particular chapter is
one of the best I have read on the subject. Dworkin pulls no punches. She says
it like it is.
For example, why was a man legally
able to rape his wife well into my own lifetime?
The state can manage a sudden and sensitive respect for
privacy when it functions as a prison cell for a woman or child or a slave or
any civilly inferior person. A woman, for instance, inside a man’s privacy,
will never be able to reach or invoke the law even if he is breaking it on her
body. Privacy in sex means that a man has a right to shield himself from state
scrutiny when sexually using civil inferiors.
And this one:
Society justifies its civil subordination of women by virtue
of what it articulates as the “natural” roles of men and women in intercourse;
the “natural” subjugation of women to men in the act. God and nature are not
enemies in this argument; divine law and sociobiologists, for instance, agree
on the general rightness of male dominance. Nature, however, cannot be counted
on. Women do not know how to be women, exactly; men constantly fail to be men.
The rules governing intercourse protect errant human beings from the failures
of their own nature. “Natural” women and “natural” men do not, alas, on their
own, always meet the mark. Nature and pleasure do not always coincide. Male
dominance is not always so certain or so easy. Women not natural enough resent
the presumption of natural inferiority.
Yeah, snarky, but well put. We
claim “this is natural” while exerting tremendous social and legal pressure to
punish those who don’t fit “nature” sufficiently. That has always been the
issue for my wife and I within patriarchal subcultures. I am not enough of a
“man” for them. And she is too much of a “woman” for them to handle.
Another facet of this is the toxic
masculinity that primarily defines “masculinity” as “dominance over women.” It
leads to a paranoia that a man might be too much like a woman in some way, thus
narrowing his world until there is little left except an exercise of raw power
and abuse. (I hope to write about that someday.)
Masculinity itself means being as differentiated from women
as it is possible to be; and so the laws regulating intercourse in general
forbid those sex acts that break down gender barriers and license those sex
acts and conditions that heighten gender polarity and antagonism.
This leads into a really great
discussion of why homosexuality and gender minorities are such a threat to
patriarchy - and why they have been so brutally punished in patriarchal
societies. I recommend reading this chapter for for anyone who has wondered what
the real roots of anti-LGBTQ rules are.
[Related: laws against “sodomy”
have always also forbidden oral and anal sex between heterosexual partners.
Why? Because a man has an anus and a mouth, but not a vagina. Any sex that
doesn’t express the gender polarity is thus forbidden.]
Also discussed in this chapter are
the few (very few) laws that govern male sexual behavior. These are all
rooted in male supremacy as well. Don’t fuck another man’s property. Don’t
treat a man like a woman by fucking him. As Dworkin notes, the spread of
religious fundamentalism and right-wing movements like MAGA are primarily about
undoing the civil and social advances women have made and to reestablish male
power. That these movements also intend to use the law to reduce male/male
conflicts over their female chattel is unsurprising.
The final chapter is “Dirt/Death.”
In it, Dworkin explores both the idea of female bodies as dirty, contaminating,
gross; and the instinct of male power to murder women. It is not a pleasant
one, but it is a worthwhile read. With the obvious “not all men,” it is all too
accurate, and feels borderline terrifying in the Trump era. We have put the
most brutal, stupid, and violent men in power, ones determined to subordinate
women by whatever means necessary.
The opening paragraph is
excellent.
Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens
to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or circles under the eyes.
It is not a superficial flaw in an otherwise perfect picture. It is not a minor
irritation, nor is it a trivial inconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a
regrettable but (frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a “point of
view” that some people with soft skins find “offensive.” It is the deep and
destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and
self-respect, an imposed exile from human worth and human recognition, the
forced alienation of a person from even the possibility of wholeness or
internal integrity.
Also good is this:
Dirty words stay dirty because they express a contempt for
women, or for women and sex, often synonyms, that is real, embedded in hostile
practices that devalue and hurt women…Dirty words stay dirty because they
express a hate for women as inferiors, that hate inextricably, it seems, part
of sex - a hate for women’s genitals, a hate for women’s bodies, a hate for the
insides of women touched in fucking.
And this:
But for sex not to mean dirt - for sex not to be dirty
- the status of women would have to change radically’ there would have to be
equality without equivocation or qualification, social equality for all women,
not personal exemptions from insult for some women in some circumstances. The
next question - a real one and a fascinating one - then is: with women not
dirty, with sex not dirty, could men fuck? To what extent does intercourse
depend on the inferiority of women?
For the Doug Wilsons of the world,
the answer is no. If women are not inferior, men could not fuck. Inferiority is
an “erotic necessity.”
Whatever for the Doug Wilsons of
the world, I at least have found that lovemaking (not mere fucking) is
perfectly compatible with equality. It is a turn on, actually.
Dworkin goes on to connect this to
racism as well. Which is on point. The fetishization of minority women, the
lynching of black men - it’s all connected to misogyny and hatred of
“inferiors.”
Unmanning the man is the primary goal of racism, the
institutionalized rapism of the continuing assault on his manhood resembling
nothing so much as prison rape, the only common form of man-on-man rape.
This dynamic is clear enough in a
quote from Hitler in the book, where he calls Jewish males “sexual savages,”
rapists by nature. You can fill in Trump here with his slander of Hispanic
immigrants, or the long history of panics about black men supposedly obsessed
with raping white women.
So, at the end of the book, there
are a number of takeaways. Our culture has misogyny deeply embedded in it -
that much is beyond obvious in the Trump Era. Sexual intercourse - penis in
vagina - fucking - has, whether we like it or not, a connection to power and
dominance in our culture. This is not its only possible meaning, but it is the
dominant cultural one. Only by separating power from sex through radical
equality of the sexes can fix this, and restore sexuality to the egalitarian
pleasure fest that would be better for women - and men.
[Doug Wilson and Trump and the
rest can go fuck themselves - it’s the only fuck they can be trusted
with.]
***
A good additional read, by Dworkin's long term partner.
