Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

authority behind the book—behind each and every choice—ismine. In formal terms, then, Intercourse is arrogant, cold, andremorseless. You, the reader, will not be looking at me, the girl;you will be looking at them. In Intercourse I created an intellectualand imaginative environment in which you can see them.The very fact that I usurp their place—make them my characters—lessensthe unexamined authority that goes not with theirart but with their gender. I love the literature these men created;but I will not live my life as if they are real and I am not.Nor will I tolerate the continuing assumption that they knowmore about women than we know about ourselves. And I donot believe that they know more about intercourse. Habits ofdeference can be broken, and it is up to writers to break them.Submission can be refused; and I refuse it.O f course, men have read and do read Intercourse. Manylike it and understand it. Some few have been thrilled by it—itsuggests to them a new possibility of freedom, a new sexualethic: and they do not want to be users. Some men respond tothe radicalism of Intercourse: the ideas, the prose, the structure,the questions that both underlie and intentionally subvertmeaning. But if one’s sexual experience has always and withoutexception been based on dominance—not only overt actsbut also metaphysical and ontological assumptions—how canone read this book? The end of male dominance wouldmean—in the understanding of such a man—the end of sex. Ifone has eroticized a differential in power that allows for forceas a natural and inevitable part of intercourse, how could oneunderstand that this book does not say that all men are rapistsor that all intercourse is rape? Equality in the realm of sex is anantisexual idea if sex requires dominance in order to registeras sensation. As sad as I am to say it, the limits of the old