Intercourse (book) - Thesis

Thesis

In Intercourse, Dworkin extended her earlier analysis of pornography to a discussion of heterosexual intercourse itself. In works such as Woman Hating and Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Dworkin had argued that pornography and erotic literature in patriarchal societies consistently eroticized women's sexual subordination to men, and often overt acts of exploitation or violence. In Intercourse, she went on to argue that that sort of sexual subordination was central to men's and women's experiences of sexual intercourse in a male supremacist society, and reinforced throughout mainstream culture, including not only pornography but also in classic works of male-centric literature.

Extensively discussing works such as The Kreutzer Sonata, Madame Bovary, and Dracula (and citing from religious texts, legal commentary, and pornography), Dworkin argued that the depictions of intercourse in mainstream art and culture consistently emphasized heterosexual intercourse as the only or the most genuine form of "real" sex; that they portrayed intercourse in violent or invasive terms; that they portrayed the violence or invasiveness as central to its eroticism; and that they often united it with male contempt for, revulsion towards, or even murder of, the "carnal" woman. She argued that this kind of depiction enforced a male-centric and coercive view of sexuality, and that, when the cultural attitudes combine with the material conditions of women's lives in a sexist society, the experience of heterosexual intercourse itself becomes a central part of men's subordination of women, experienced as a form of "occupation" (cf. Chapter 7, "Occupation/Collaboration") that is nevertheless expected to be pleasurable for women and to define their very status as women. Dworkin describes the view of intercourse enforced by saying:

This is nihilism, or this is truth. He has to push in past boundaries. There is the outline of a body, distinct, separate, its integrity an illusion, a tragic deception, because unseen there is a slit between the legs, and he has to push into it. There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist with intercourse: with being entered. The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is persistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center. She is occupied--physically, internally, in her privacy. ... There is no analogue anywhere among subordinated groups of people to this experience of being made for intercourse: for penetration, entry, occupation. There is no analogue in occupied countries or in dominated races or in imprisoned dissidents or in colonialized cultures or in the submission of children to adults or in the atrocities that have marked the twentieth century ranging from Auschwitz to the Gulag. There is nothing exactly the same, and this is not because the political invasion and significance of intercourse is banal up against these other hierarchies and brutalities. Intercourse is a particular reality for women as an inferior class; and it has, in it, as part of it, violation of boundaries, taking over, occupation, destruction of privacy, all of which are construed to be normal and also fundamental to continuing human existence. There is nothing that happens to any other civilly inferior people that is the same in its meaning and in its effect even when those people are forced into sexual availability, heterosexual or homosexual; while the subject people, for instance, may be forced to have intercourse with those who dominate them, the God who does not exist did not make human existence, broadly speaking, dependent on their compliance. The political meaning of intercourse for women is the fundamental question of feminism and freedom: can an occupied people--physically occupied inside, internally invaded--be free; can those with a metaphysically compromised privacy have self-determination; can those without a biologically based physical integrity have self-respect?

— Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, 122-124