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.]
***
