Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

sex you’ve been lucky or unlucky enough to have. But the valueof the questioning itself is substantial.Dworkin’s profound and unique legacy was to examine themeaning of the act most of us take to be fundamental to sex,fundamental to human existence. As she puts it, “what intercourseis for women and what it does to women’s identity, privacy,self-respect, self-determination, and integrity areforbidden questions; and yet how can a radical or any womanwho wants freedom not ask precisely these questions? ” Youmay find in reading Dworkin’s work that many of her questionshave never even crossed your mind.If you disagree with her answers, you may still find yourselfindebted to her for helping you discover your own.Dworkin’s description of her own sexual history is often grim,and given the title of the book you are about to read— and thepremise that the personal is political— we are right to considerthis. Though she stated “ I am not an exhibitionist. I don’tshow myself, ” in her book Life and Death, she also wrote “ Ihave used everything I know— my life— to show what I believemust be shown so that it can be faced. ”Dworkin was molested or raped at around age 9; the details,in her writing, and according to her closest friends, are murky,but something bad happened then. In 1965, when Dworkinwas 18 and a freshman at Bennington College, she was arrestedafter participating in a march against the Vietnam War and wastaken to the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village,where she was subjected to a nightmarish internal examby prison doctors.She bled for days afterward. Her family doctor looked at herinjuries and cried.