Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

She begins with an exploration of several (very different)male writers’ depictions of female sexuality. We are shown, gentlyat first, forcefully as her text builds momentum, how muchof literature positions women as not fully human or as filthy.With characteristic swagger, Dworkin compares Intercourse toDante’s Inferno, its spiraling structure descending into everdeeper circles of hell. If Dworkin’s own vision of sex and societyis extreme, we soon remember that so too is the contextwithin which she writes. “The normal fuck by the normal manis taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken ina mode of predation: colonializing, forceful (manly) or nearlyviolent; the sexual act that by nature makes her his. ” There isthe Bible to teach us this, of course, but then there is also Tolstoy,Freud, Mailer, and so on. From these texts Dworkinextracts the belief system we know—but sometimes like to forget—has governed gender relations in the West throughoutthe course of our history: that women are entities to be takenand possessed— walking, talking currency.Dworkin asseverates an alternative, a way of representing andhaving sex that dissolves boundaries and offers not only intimacybut merged humanity. . . a kind of magic, fleeting selflessness.“ There is no physical distance, no self-consciousness,nothing withdrawn or private or alienated, no existence outsidephysical touch. The skin collapses as a boundary— it has nomeaning; time is gone— it too has no meaning; there is no outside.” In these passages, Dworkin is a poet of erotic love, an incarnationthat would shock those who have her figured as theembodiment of antisex. The profound passion she envisionsdoes not even require an enduring emotional tie: “ In fucking,the deepest emotions one has about life as a whole are expressed,even with a stranger, however random or impersonal