Intercourse

Andrea Dworkin looks at the act of intercourse through the works of five male writers who have articulated its deeper meanings with particular trenchancy - Tolstoy, Kobo Abe, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Isaac Bashevis Singer - and uses them as a springboard to explore and question every aspect of the myth, meaning and reality of this God-or-nature-created act, and its relation to the sexual, civil and social inferiority of women. What is the meaning of virginity? Is permissiveness necessarily freedom? Do women collaborate to keep men, as it were, on top? What of self-determination, identity, creativity? And where do we go from here?

At once rough and humane, angry and tender, intimate and analyticl, Dworkin asks us to reconsider every implication of an act without we would be extinct. It is a book resonan with the possibilty of human experience – an elightening work, and a major one.

Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005). Intercourse. London: Martin Secker & Warburg Limited, 1987. xi+259pp.