Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

Bessie Smith’s voice “tramped through your three-dimensionalbody but gracefully, a spartan, bearlike ballet. ” And she couldbe very funny. O f a grade-school teacher who gave her trouble,Dworkin says, “I knew I’d get her someday and this is it: eatshit, bitch. No one said that sisterhood was easy. ”But when most people think of Andrea Dworkin, they thinkof two things: overalls (her uniform) and the idea that all sex isrape. That was the notorious interpretation of Intercourse bymany when it first came out in 1987, and as Dworkin put it inher preface nine years later, the book is “ still being reviled inprint by people who have never read it, reduced to slogans byjournalists posing as critics or sages or deep thinkers, treated asif it were odious and hateful by every asshole who thinks thatwhat will heal this violent world is more respect for dead whitemen. ” Intercourse is an inventive, combative, and wildly complicatedpiece of work, and to imagine that all there is betweenthese covers is the assertion that all sex is rape is about as sophisticatedas reducing Proust to a pile of madeleine crumbs.But you don’t have to be an asshole—or even a journalist—to take issue with some of what Dworkin said. Fury and dramacharacterize her rhetorical style, extremism her ideas, and Intercourseis perhaps her most radical work. “Am I saying Iknow more than men about fucking? Yes, I am, ” she tells us.And in a typical Dworkin flourish, she refuses to leave it at that;she gives her reader no room to soften her meaning throughmisinterpretation.“Not just different: more and better, ” she writes, “deeperand wider, the way anyone used knows the user. ” There is nota doubt in her mind that she’s right, and she consciously rejectsa writing style that is placating or solicitous: she’s notthat kind of girl.