Intercourse (3 page)

Regardless of how and whether Dworkin practiced lesbianism, the fact remains that it was important to her to be identified as as lesbian. It’s a label many people have difficulty claiming, yet to Dworkin it was a badge of rebellion against the patriarchy, a system she had warred against throughout her entire life. But has the institution of marriage not been a fundamental building block of that very system? Dworkin had questioned and probed and rejected every expression of male dominance she could think of, even intercourse, with remarkable creativity and devotion and yet she married—in secret. Why?

At a memorial for Dworkin held at the National Arts Club in New York City about a month after her death, Stoltenberg suggested to the hundred or so assembled friends and fans that the reason he and Dworkin wed was partly practical. If Dworkin had not been his legal wife, she would not have been covered by his health insurance, and the bills for the frequent surgeries and hospital stays that punctuated the end of her life would have left the couple in financial ruins. So Dworkin had real-world reasons for playing within the rules of the system, even if it was a system she’d always abhorred.

Ah, the real world... it’ll get you every time. In the real world, many women would like to be regarded as sexually attractive, even if we don’t like the reasons why, say, uncomfortable shoes and laboriously blow-dried hair are considered desirable. We know it’s a deranged system, and that our worth—including our self-worth—ought to be measured by the same standards as men’s; that our intellects and talents ought to be more important than our asses. But this is the system. This is the real world. And to act otherwise is to incur consequences: if you are overweight and you wear overalls, you will be mocked. If you don’t—or can’t—get legally married and a health crisis strikes, you will face additional pain.

I like to think that getting married was as much a concession to romanticism as practicality for Dworkin. (By all accounts, her partnership with Stoltenberg was as successful as it was nontraditional: they were soul mates who stuck together for over three decades. ) But as a general rule—and certainly on the page—Dworkin made very, very few concessions indeed. She didn’t shy away from controversy or scorn or conflict. (“She courted it, ” as Susan Brownmiller said to me. “She would hang herself on her own cross. ”) She was a difficult woman and a difficult writer, as she proudly acknowledged. Because if you accept what she’s saying, suddenly you have to question everything: the way you dress, the way you write, your favorite movies, your sense of humor, and yes, the way you fuck.

Good. If you want to feel better, watch a rerun of
Will and Grace.
(Dworkin did; she was watching it the night she died. ) If you want to revel in the exquisite, problematic rituals of femininity, go to a museum... or a mall. But if you want to be morally and intellectually challenged, to be asked impossible questions, to see the mind of a revolutionary in action, read Dworkin.

There is very little I would presume to say on Andrea Dworkin’s behalf, but I will posit the following: she wanted a new and different world, a world that would be unrecognizable in many ways. She wanted to end violence against women and sexual violence in general. But there was one thing she badly wanted that was—and is—entirely possible. She wanted what all writers want and what she actually deserved: to be read.

Ariel Levy

PREFACE

When I finished writing
Intercourse
one colleague advised me to add an introduction to explain what the book said. That way, readers would not be shocked, afraid, or angry, because the ideas would be familiar—prechewed, easier to digest; I would be protected from bad or malicious readings and purposeful distortions; and my eagerness to explain myself would show that I wanted people to like me and my book, the quintessential feminine pose. At least one knee would be visibly bent.

Other colleagues—probably more to the point—told me straight-out to publish it under a pseudonym. I would not; and
Intercourse
became—socially speaking—a Rorschach inkblot in which people saw their fantasy caricatures of me and what they presumed to know about me. First published in the United States in 1987—simultaneously with my novel
Ice and Fire—Intercourse
is still being reviled in print by people who have not read it, reduced to slogans by journalists posing as critics or sages or deep thinkers, treated as if it were odious and hateful by every asshole who thinks that what will heal this violent world is more respect for dead white men.

My colleagues, of course, had been right; but their advice offended me. I have never written for a cowardly or passive or stupid reader, the precise characteristics of most reviewers— overeducated but functionally illiterate, members of a gang, a pack, who do their drive-by shootings in print and experience what they call “the street” at cocktail parties. “I heard it on the street, ” they say, meaning a penthouse closer to heaven. It is no accident that most of the books published in the last few years about the decline and fall of Anglo-European culture because of the polluting effect of women of all races and some men of color—and there are a slew of such books—have been written by white-boy journalists. Abandoning the J-school ethic of “who, what, where, when, how” and the discipline of Hemingway’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 feminists are an obstacle to the prorape, prodominance art of talented living or dead men; or because the multicultural reader— likely to be female and/or not white—values Alice Walker and Toni Morrison above Aristotle and the Marquis de Sade. Hallelujah, I say.

Intercourse
is a book that moves through the sexed world of dominance and submission. It moves in descending circles, not in a straight line, and as in a vortex each spiral goes down deeper. Its formal model is Dante’s
Inferno; its lyrical debt is to Rimbaud; the equality it envisions is rooted in the dreams of women, silent generations, pioneer voices, lone rebels, and masses who agitated, demanded, cried out, broke laws, and even begged. The begging was a substitute for retaliatory violence: doing bodily harm back to those who use or injure you. I want women to be done with begging.

The public censure of women as if we are rabid because we speak without apology about the world in which we live is a strategy of threat that usually works. Men often react to women’s words—speaking and writing—as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men—control, violence, insult, contempt—that no threat seems empty.

Intercourse
does not say, forgive me and love me. It does not say, I forgive you, I love you. For a woman writer to thrive (or, arguably, to survive) in these current hard times, forgiveness and love must be subtext. No. I say no.

Can a man read
Intercourse? Can a man read a book written by a woman in which she uses language without its ever becoming decorative or pretty? Can a man read a book written by a woman in which she, the author, has a direct relationship to experience, ideas, literature, life, including fucking, without mediation—such that what she says and how she says it are not determined by boundaries men have set for her? Can a man read a woman’s work if it does not say what he already knows? Can a man let in a challenge not just to his dominance but to his cognition? And, specifically, am I saying that I know more than men about fucking? Yes, I am. Not just different: more and better, deeper and wider, the way anyone used knows the user.

Intercourse
does not narrate my experience to measure it against Norman Mailer’s or D. H. Lawrence’s. The first-person is embedded in the way the book is built. I use Tolstoy, Kobo Abe, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Flaubert not as authorities but as examples: I use them; I cut and slice into them in order to exhibit them; but the authority behind the book—behind each and every choice—is mine. In formal terms, then,
Intercourse
is arrogant, cold, and remorseless. You, the reader, will not be looking at me, the girl; you will be looking at them. In
Intercourse
I created an intellectual and imaginative environment in which you can see them. The very fact that I usurp their place—make them my characters—lessens the unexamined authority that goes not with their art 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 know more about women than we know about ourselves. And I do not believe that they know more about intercourse. Habits of deference can be broken, and it is up to writers to break them. Submission can be refused; and I refuse it.

Of course, men have read and do read
Intercourse. Many like it and understand it. Some few have been thrilled by it—it suggests to them a new possibility of freedom, a new sexual ethic: and they do not want to be users. Some men respond to the radicalism of
Intercourse: the ideas, the prose, the structure, the questions that both underlie and intentionally subvert meaning. But if one’s sexual experience has always and without exception been based on dominance—not only overt acts but also metaphysical and ontological assumptions—how can one read this book? The end of male dominance would mean—in the understanding of such a man—the end of sex. If one has eroticized a differential in power that allows for force as a natural and inevitable part of intercourse, how could one understand that this book does not say that all men are rapists or that all intercourse is rape? Equality in the realm of sex is an antisexual idea if sex requires dominance in order to register as sensation. As sad as I am to say it, the limits of the old Adam—and die material power he still has, especially in publishing and media—have set limits on the public discourse (by both men and women) about this book.

In general women get to say yea or nay to intercourse, which is taken to be a synonym for sex,
echt
sex. In this reductive brave new world, women like sex or we do not. We are loyal to sex or we are not. The range of emotions and ideas expressed by Tolstoy et al. is literally forbidden to contemporary women. Remorse, sadness, despair, alienation, obsession, fear, greed, hate—all of which men, especially male artists, express—are simple no votes for women. Compliance means yes; a simplistic rah-rah means yes; affirming the implicit right of men to get laid regardless of the consequences to women is a yes. Reacting against force or exploitation means no; affirming pornography and prostitution means yes. “I like it” is the standard for citizenship, and “I want it” pretty much exhausts the First Amendment’s meaning for women. Critical thought or deep feeling puts one into the Puritan camp, that hallucinated place of exile where women with complaints are dumped, after which we can be abandoned. Why—socially speaking—feed a woman you can’t fuck? Why fuck a woman who might ask a question let alone have a complex emotional life or a political idea? I refuse to tolerate this loyalty-oath approach to women and intercourse or women and sexuality or, more to the point, women and men. The pressure on women to say yes now extends to thirteen-year-old girls, who face a social gulag if they are not hot, accommodating, and loyal; increasingly they face violence from teenage boys who think that intercourse is ownership. The refusal to let women feel a whole range of feelings, express a whole range of ideas, address our own experience with an honesty that is not pleasing to men, ask questions that discomfit and antagonize men in their dominance, has simply created a new generation of users and victims—children, boys and girls respectively. The girls are getting fucked but they are not getting free or equal. It is time to notice. They get fucked; they get hit; they get raped— by boyfriends in high school.
Intercourse
wants to change what is happening to those girls.
Intercourse
asks at least some of the right questions.
Intercourse
conveys the density, complexity, and political significance of the act of intercourse: what it means that men—and now boys—feel entitled to come into the privacy of a woman’s body in a context of inequality.
Intercourse
does this outside the boundaries set by men for women. It crosses both substantive and formal boundaries in what it says and how it says it.

For me, the search for truth and change using words is the meaning of writing; the prose, the thinking, the journey is sensuous and demanding. I have always loved the writing that takes one down deep, no matter how strange or bitter or dirty the descent. As a writer, I love the experience of caring, of remembering, of learning more, of asking, of wanting to know and to see and to say.
Intercourse
is search and assertion, passion and fury; and its form—no less than its content— deserves critical scrutiny and respect.

Andrea Dworkin
August 1995
Brooklyn, New York

part one

INTERCOURSE IN
A MAN-MADE WORLD

Beyond a certain point there is no return.
This point has to be reached.

Franz Kafka

chapter one

REPULSION

I
N 1905, AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-FIVE, WITH TWO SICK children, tired, alienated and unhappy in her marriage, Alma Mahler had an argument with her husband, Gustave, during which she told him that his smell repelled her. Her biographer speculates that it was the smell of cigars. In her diary she wrote: “He was a stranger to me, and much about him is still strange to me—and will, I believe, remain so forever... I wonder that we can continue to live together, knowing this. Is it duty? Children? Habit? No, I know that I do really love him and only him... ”
¹

 Soon after, the composer Hans Pfitzner, on a visit to the husband, became infatuated with the wife. They flirted, embraced. On a long afternoon walk, Alma confessed to Gustave. Angry, he left her, and she had to walk home alone. Dusk came, and a stranger followed her. Once home, she told Gustave that a stranger had followed her. He saw it as more proof of her disloyalty. They fought. She went to bed alone. Usually, when Gustave wanted intercourse, he waited until Alma was asleep, or pretended to be; then he would begin his lovemaking. On this night, he came to her knowing she was awake; told her she should read
The Kreutzer Sonata, a short novel by Tolstoy; fucked her; then left. She “lay awake, fearing the future, feeling that she was on the verge of losing her courage and her will to survive. ”
²