From: seid@popov.EE.CORNELL.EDU (Steve Seidman)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Incendiary Intercourse
Date: 12 Jan 93 00:23:19 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu
Originator: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu

Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin (1987, The Free Press, Macmillan)
****************************************************************

	Note:  Even if you love/hate Dworkin, or don't care;
	this review has a most excellent and way cool rant
	about Western culture.  Please enjoy this, and I
	promise I use less foul language than Dworkin

*****************************************************************

This book is *not* about intercourse, it's about fucking, and
how women get fucked literally and figuratively.  No doubt,
a foresighted editor suggested the more benign title. In any event,
this has got to be the first book that uses the word fuck
several times a page without being erotic.

This book is *not* about women either; it's mainly about the
culture of the men who
do the fucking.  Through examples from literature 
(mostly novels) Dworkin catalogs many states and expressions
of fucking: men fuck women to dominate, colonize, subjugate, control, possess,
degrade.  Women are also fucked through some
sort of dialectical process that associates women 
with dirt, bad smells, death, castrating devices (eg. toothed vaginas),
and ugliness of female genitals (from a fearful male point of view,
that is).  From an academic Western viewpoint, the bibliography is
fantastic and there is merit to some of
Dworkin's comments (especially the ones related to Freuds thinking).
Fortunately, Dworkin is clever enough to use Freud as an instrument
of understanding rather than mindlessly bashing his writings.

Here is an example of one bright spot in the book:
The chapter on virginity looks at Joan of Arc, and carefully argues
that she was rebelling against her subjugated womans-role; not just
merely a religious fanatic who has recently been rehabilitated
and canonized.  Here Dworkin did take the time to consider the historical
changes in attitudes toward Joan of Arc (an approach that the other
chapters could have greatly benefitted from)  She also looked at
Madame Bovary, another good book to examine.

The book is also marred by some errors.  A political bias is
displayed in her spelling of Amerika, but never supported.  Her style
is to alternate between polemic and literary example.  The polemic
serves to imply disgust, and the literature is to resonate with that
disgust.  Sometimes the connections are rather weak.  For example,
alluding to some testimonies, and novels, Dworkin says "Perhaps incestuous
rape is becoming the  central paradigm for  intercourse 
in our time"  (pg. 194)   Fortunately,
she did say "perhaps"; but I still regard this as unsupported Koookiness.
There is much in this book that overlaps with a more recent book:
Sexual Personae by C. Paglia (ie. the Freudian stuff
plus the idea of culture being a male reaction to females).  Paglia supports
her views with a much wider sweep of Western culture (Visual fine arts,
poetry, some music, besides novels & essays).  However, Paglia absorbs
a more romantic stance (probably from her heros Marquis de Sade & Neitsche)
and tends to revel in the glory of everything; in sharp contrast to
Dworkin's disgust for it all.  In this sense Paglia comes off as a bit
more open-minded, and may even communicate some of the concepts better
by trying to bring the reader closer to them.  Paglia attempts to make
a (creative) erotisation of art objects; in other words a way of
experiencing culture directly, today; and what it could mean to us
right now.  I think that Dworkin was too busy being disgusted by
sexual things in literature that she didn't consider other ways
that literary ideas can realize themselves in other
cultural and religous and historical realities.  

Now for some examples of the serious problems.  In the chapter (posession) where
she reviews Isaac Singer's Satan in Goray in which a woman is possessed
by a dybbuk (with all sorts of messianic religious-sexual implications).
Dworkin is clearly out of her league when it comes to Jewish mysticism.
Although  Singer is a noble nobel prize winning novelist, he is a very
disreputable source on Jewish mysticism.  
I found it impossible to delineate Dworkin's fantasies of Singers
fantasies of Cabbala fantasies of actual source materials (Mishnah,
Gemara, Tenach) and relate any of this to a historical reality.
What a mess!!   Freud was footnoted as the *only*  source to add some
sense to the dissaray; but it's quite likely that his analysis is
quite distorting in this context.
In a similar manner Dworkin also
overstepped herself in a later chapter (dirt/death) where she mentions that the
Hebrew root for vagina is "grave".  She quotes from the Mishnah, but
the footnote reveals a modern 1950's source for the quote.  But how
this association of vagina with death plays out in reality (especially
in another's cultural context) is left to the imagination of the reader.
I assume in fact that Dworkin doesn't care about this issue in a Jewish
context; so long as the idea appears to resonate with her disgust the 
association and influence of the idea in reality is of no concern.
She also includes in another chapter (law), a long diatribe about Jewish
Law but the only source is a single translation of Maimonides' writing
on Sex-Ethics.  I argue below, that it really isn't realistic for an
outsider to read a single novel, and also some 12th century translation
and really appreciate what it means, especially in the context of another
culture.

I think these 2 chapters (possesion, law) by Dworkin are just
another example of the arrogant Western mentality that thinks it can
understand another culture by reading a book (a novel! no less).  This
attitude slightly works for the Western cultures that buy into the same
bookish mentality; but to apply this to a non-Western culture is
incredibly provincial.  I'll bet Dworkin has no direct experience with
mysticism; ah but who cares! We Westerners don't believe in direct
experience; that! wouldn't be objective! Rather, we Westerners can know
*everything* so long as it is filtered through Western style books
(like Isaac Singer novels)!!!  If one were to have direct experience
with another culture (*especially* non-Western) and report it then
one would be immediately accused of non-objectivity, or of
"going native" and wouldn't be believed!  That is why it probably never
even occured to Dworkin to consult some women who actually do have
direct connection with Jewish law (for if they told her that what she wrote
was garbage, and that they in fact do not feel stigmatized by laws of
marital purity, then Dworkin, as the perfect Westerner, would just say:
they are brainwashed, not objective, can't be all-seeing and all-knowing
as we Westerners; I (Dworkin) know better because I have read
two! books about it)  Perhaps, if Dworkin doesn't have access to
this culture, then at least as a stop-gap crutch, testimonial literature
could be used (say "Holy Days" by Lis Harris) while recognizing the limitations
of such methods.  I object strongly to the above-it-all attitude
implicit in Dworkin's writing on another culture.

But even by Western standards, there are errors.  Just consider the
following: 

	In Christianity, attitude is everything; in Judaism,
	simple compliance is.  (pg 163)

[for those interested: this statement is 100% false, but let's
not get into that now]

Dworkin just serves this up as self-evident (ie. a prejudice).
She doesn't bother to appeal to reason, history, logic, personal
experience, or intuition.  The main way to argue the above statement
is to make an appeal to the writings of Paul (that's why I regard the
above statement as a Christian stereotype of Jewish thought)
I suspect that much of the absurdities Dworkin  gets into with respect
to Jewish law issues derive from her viewing all this through 
the filter of Christianity.  She mentioned that it is against Jewish
law to coerce one's wife into sex; but then claims that that law was only
made as an appeal to "moderation"  (sort of like a law against
"overeating", or specifically, against having sex after eating a
meal).  Of course she has to make this cavalier claim because 
otherwise, acknowledgement of such a law would
erode much of her diatribes about "fucking" in the context of marriage.
Here again, her assertions are self-evident; but I think based on ignorance
and disrespect.
She completely ignores a related
law: "a man must let his wife come to her pleasure first in marital
relations"  Oh Dear!!  A 2 or 3 thousand year old law with explicit
recognition of a woman's enjoyment of sex....Oh No!!
Dworkin can't possibly talk about this law....
for it might expose another one of her chapters as a distorted,
unsupportable polemic.
(See "Jewish Woman in Jewish Law" for a Rabbinical
elucidation, by Moshe Meiselman, Ktav, 1978)
  
Soooooo, IN CONCLUSION:

There's really lots of distortion in her writings; and
it isn't simply a problem with Dworkin, or feminism (radical or not);
it's a problem with the Western academic mentality and the difficulty
this mentality has respecting other cultures.  And this lack of
respect is implicit in the idea that Western academics can know
it all by reading enough (Western) books; and therefore there
is nothing outside of the West.

Dworkin has no compunction towards *randomly* grabbing any artifact from
any context so long as it supports her disgust and resonates with
her main thesis:  Everything everywhere is designed to make sure
that men can fuck women.  Is it possible that Dworkin is approaching
this issue prejudicially?

Steve Seidman
seid@ee.cornell.edu



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