Product Description

Andrea Dworkin, once called "Feminism's Malcolm X," has been worshipped, reviled, criticized, and analyzed-but never ignored. The power of her writing, the passion of her ideals, and the ferocity of her intellect have spurred the arguments and activism of two generations of feminists. Now the book that she's best known for-in which she provoked the argument that ultimately split apart the feminist movement-is being reissued for the young women and men of the twenty-first century.

Intercourse enraged as many readers as it inspired when it was first published in 1987. In it, Dworkin argues that in a male supremacist society, sex between men and women constitutes a central part of women's subordination to men. (This argument was quickly-and falsely-simplified to "all sex is rape" in the public arena, adding fire to Dworkin's already radical persona.)

In her introduction to this twentieth-anniversary edition of Intercourse, Ariel Levy, the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, discusses the circumstances of Dworkin's untimely death in the spring of 2005, and the enormous impact of her life and work. Dworkin's argument, she points out, is the stickiest question of feminism: Can a woman fight the power when he shares her bed?

---

Product Details

Publisher	Basic Books
ISBN	0029079713
Format	Paperback Deluxe Edition
Author	Andrea Dworkin
EAN	9780029079713
Label	Basic Books
Edition	20 Anv
Dewey Decimal Number	306.7
Studio	Basic Books
Number Of Pages	352
Title	Intercourse
Publication Date	2006-11-07
Manufacturer	Basic Books

---

Customer Reviews

Thank you, Andrea Dworkin

Review by S. Schafer, 2009-08-22

The time was the early nineties. I was in a small liberal arts college that was heavily steeped radical feminist thought. We had a "Womyn's Alliance", eco-feminism was spoken there (which connected the rape of the Earth to rape of women), and we had a sexual offense policy that required verbal consent before any sexual advances. Oh, and we had nude co-ed swimming as well, as if to demonstrate just how highly evolved we were.

I was the cofounder of a pro-feminist men's group. A typical topic we'd disucss: is it wrong to fantasize about women while masturbating, and what to do about it? One of us had a girlfriend, the rest of us were too shy to approach women. As well we should have been - one female student invited me to her room and then pulled a knife on me and accused me of sexually intimidating her before I'd even stepped inside.

Dworkin's book helped set me free. It broke the spell.

First, Dworkin actually broke one of the foundational principles of feminism in her book, that gender is socially constructed. This was a silly belief to begin with, not based in fact and demonstrably false, but appealing to those of us who saw masculinity as inherently bad and wishing to change it. No, Dworkin said: women have slits between their legs, and men want to invade these slits, and this invasion of privacy is comparable to "atrocities that have marked the twentieth century ranging from Auschwitz to the Gulag".

Dworkin may have never said that sex is rape. She actually seems to be saying something much stronger: sex is slavery. Sex is colonialism. Sex is genocide. But it's not a social construct.

Against this backdrop, I finally do get a girlfriend, and she wants me to tie her up. She WANTS me to have sex with her. Is she a damaged victim of the patriarchy's brainwashing? Actually, she seems to know what she wants much more clearly than I do, and she seems to be enjoying herself. And then later at this school, I meet a woman who I had always thought was a lesbian but turns out to be bisexual, and she's complaining that the sexual offense policy has made the male students timid and she wishes they were more aggressive.

Reality meets theory and theory loses. The female orgasm alone refutes Dworkin's book. And to look at it more broadly, sexual expression often involves the exchange of power in either direction, and the willing surrender of power in the bedroom is not violation.

Of course true subjugation of women occurs (genital mutilation, etc), and so does rape, and both are very bad things. However, the answer is NOT to pathologize our innate human drives, to try to feminize men in general so they don't rape as much. The answer is to confront the problem behavior.

[...]

2) Evolutionary biology teaches us that females also select males (which is why male birds tend to have pretty plumage), and so women are entirely complicit in our sexual make up. If women had selected for "softer men", that's likely what we would have. But clearly, women throughout the ages have selected for men who are stronger and more aggressive than they are, who are good hunters and can protect them while they are nursing babies. "This is nihilism, or this is truth"

---

Product of a diseased mind.

Review by GangstaLawya, 2009-08-16

Andrea Rita Dworkin had a diseased mind. She rants and raves against nature. It is tantamount to arguing that we are enslaved by food because we have to eat it and calling for a revolution for food abstinence. Mankind cannot sustain itself without intercourse. She's also a hypocrite. She expresses hatred against men (well, non juwish men, actually, if you see her other books) while accusing them of chauvinism, while practicing an extreme form of feminist chauvinism. It reminds me of another juwish writer, Peter Singer of Princeton, who thinks it permissible to murder children post birth while weeping about the holocaust. What is it with that race that they go against everything that is normal and make hypocrisy their ethic? They murder Palestinians and practice nepotism in politics and business and then rant and rave about anti-semitism. Pretty demented stuff.

---

Great Book, Great Author

Review by Sara G. Harden, 2007-12-13

Dworkin is a hero and she speaks the truth. Whether you like it or not its the truth and the truth hurts.

---

Intercourse

Review by R. Swaney, 2007-06-06

After Betty Friedan, Andrea Dworkin seems to top the list as one of the most referenced feminists. Her popularity did not prepare me in the least for what exactly her book de jour is. That is, Intercourse, the book coined as "saying" "all sex is rape," is actually an intriguing literary criticism with a brief peppering of art history. Any quotes I previously listed by Dworkin were taken out of context in that it would only make sense that after Dworkin is read a conversation must occur on art's ability (and lack of) to reflect and represent life.

Dworkin's book begins at Tolstoy and moves through biographies of he and his wife and his literary work The Kreutzer Sonata. The book provides a feminist and specific sexual critique on how sexuality is represented throughout classical, fictional pieces ranging from Tennessee Williams to James Baldwin to Bram Stoker to the Bible and how these works reflect the reality of the culture they were produced in. This bundle of information is presented to the reader and then weaved together in a luxurious manner to critique present views on sexuality. (Absolutely fascinating to me as this is what I did for my late modern art assignment last semester.)

Similar to Reading Lolita in Tehran, it is not necessary that you've actually read any of these works. However, as with any literary criticism it's a bit difficult to rebut or disagree with it without reading the actual texts the critique is based on. Overall, it's a brilliant piece of feminist literature that is blunt and honest and thought provoking. Whether or not you agree with everything (or anything) that Dworkin says, it's a thought stimulating book that consistently questions the reader.

---

Ravings and Ramblings of an Ideologue

Review by John Stanhope, 2007-05-26

Dworkin presumes to tell straight women what their experience of sex is really like. But Dworkin never was a straight woman. When she treats of political subjects, her sexual preference is irrelevant; but when she starts describing experiences she has never had, her preference is relevant and unqualifying.

This pathetic, raving tome is testimony to the power of the PC movement in America. Only in a heavily propagandized atmosphere could such a book be published and taken seriously. It will be out of print very soon, and future generations coming across a rare copy will laugh in amazement at what we printed back in the Twentieth Century. Its illogic and flailing rage will be a negative example to future women writers; that is the only good it will ever do.

---