I appreciate how Dworkin addresses objectification, pornography, and the politicization of women's bodies in Intercourse. The woman cannot exist before or during the act as a fully realized, existentially alive individual.' She has to look a certain way, be a certain type - even conform to preordained behaviors and scripts - for the man to want to have intercourse and also for the man to be able to have intercourse. 'Intercourse is frequently performed compulsively and intercourse frequently requires as a precondition for male performance the objectification of the female partner.

For example, she analyzes sex in this passage: Rather, she addresses how aspects of sexism seep into sexual relationships between women and men. People think that Dworkin said that 'all heterosexual sex is rape,' when she said no such thing. Andrea Dworkin does the opposite of shy away she tackles sex head on, calling out how sexism affects sex to the detriment of many women. In the United States, sex is everywhere, yet a lot of us shy away from discussions about sex even when those discussions would bring great benefits. Dworkin’s argument, she points out, is the stickiest question of feminism: Can a woman fight the power when he shares her bed?Ī radical feminist text that critiques how heterosexual sex often subjugates women within a patriarchal society. (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. 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. Intercourse enraged as many readers as it inspired when it was first published in 1987. 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. 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.

Andrea Dworkin, once called “Feminism’s Malcolm X,” has been worshipped, reviled, criticized, and analyzed-but never ignored.

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