Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

stupid reader, the precise characteristics of most reviewers—overeducated but functionally illiterate, members of a gang, apack, who do their drive-by shootings in print and experiencewhat they call “the street” at cocktail parties. “I heard it onthe street, ” they say, meaning a penthouse closer to heaven. Itis no accident that most of the books published in the last fewyears about the decline and fall of Anglo-European culturebecause of the polluting effect of women of all races and somemen of color—and there are a slew of such books—have beenwritten by white-boy journalists. Abandoning the J-schoolethic of “who, what, where, when, how” and the discipline ofHemingway’s lean, masculine prose, they now try to answer“why.” That decline and fall, they say, is because talentless,uppity women infest literature; or because militant feministsare an obstacle to the prorape, prodominance art of talentedliving or dead men; or because the multicultural reader—likely to be female and/or not white—values Alice Walker andToni Morrison above Aristotle and the Marquis de Sade. Hallelujah,I say.Intercourse is a book that moves through the sexed worldof dominance and submission. It moves in descending circles,not in a straight line, and as in a vortex each spiral goesdown deeper. Its formal model is Dante’s Inferno; its lyricaldebt is to Rimbaud; the equality it envisions is rooted in thedreams of women, silent generations, pioneer voices, lonerebels, and masses who agitated, demanded, cried out, brokelaws, and even begged. The begging was a substitute for retaliatoryviolence: doing bodily harm back to those who useor injure you. I want women to be done with begging.The public censure of women as if we are rabid because wespeak without apology about the world in which we live is a