Intercourse & Andrea Dworkin
Andrea Dworkin, I am convinced, is quite crazy and brilliant at the same time. I love the fact that she problematizes and complicates the relations of men and women during intercourse, but I don't really like the way that she does it. I appreciate that she articulates the inequality of the process, however she doesn't include any other sex act or other gender/sex relations. Homosexual intercourse or sexual activity is not mentioned or addressed.
However, I do really like this statement she made on page 139 of her book Intercourse,
We refuse to recognize our possibilities because we refuse to honor the potential humans have, including human women, to make choices. Men too make choices. When will they choose not to despise us?What I find interesting (and very cool) that she addresses the fact that patriarchal society, which she calls 'men', have been silencing women through intercourse and everyday activity for quite some time. But it is more that just silence according to Dworkin, it is the actual unrecognition of women's potential to make decisions, choices. I agree with her here. This statement is still very true today. I offer the example of the Supreme Court upholding the partial-birth abortion ban. Even the Supreme Court seems to believe that women cannot make this decision for themselves and that we are driven solely by convenience.
Dworkin asserts that:
Objectification may well be the most singly destructive aspect of gender heirarchy, especially as it exists in relation to intercourse.She states that there is no form of intercourse that doesn't objectify women. The act of man entering/inserting/fucking a woman is the objectification. He has complete power over her and she has no say. It is the act which makes obvious the woman's inferiority. Because the man takes power over the woman and enters her, she no longer has the power or force. He can force himself into her, she cannot do the same to him, unless she has a strap-on dildo, but I digress. She discusses Woodull's argument that women can be free in intercourse if they have complete control over their sexual organs, however, there is no way for a woman to have complete control. Dworkin retorts that:
His dominance over her expressed in the physical reality of intercourse had no real analogue in desire she might express for him in intercourse: she simply could not do to him what he could do to her.Because the man still enters the woman, she does not have full control.
Dworkin also addresses the idea of freedom in intercourse.
For women, [Woodhull] thought and proclaimed (at great cost to herself), freedom must bel iteral, physical, concrete self-determination beginning with absolute control of the sexual organs; this was a natural right that had been perverted by male dominance-and because of its perversion, sex was for women morbid and degrading.Much like the argument that I have already addressed, women cannot be free when they do not have complete control over their sexual organs. Dworkin, as I have stated above, believes that there can be no true control over the sexual organs when man enters woman. But she moves past this argument by asserting that there can be no effective reform of the male-dominant gender heirarchy. She suggests that reform seems impossible because intercourse is impossible to reform - women will always be objectified and on the bottom. Intercourse always demonstrates women's inferiority.
For those of you who have read Freud and understand that through intercourse, women are alienated from each other, will understand the question, "Who can love someone who is less that human unless love itself is domination per se?" Men love women and in fact subordinate women, but women cannot love one another because each is un-human. Although I do not agree with this statement, it makes a point about why it is that women are painted as catty bitches rather than persons like men. She suggests that the collaboration by women to call intercourse freedom has kept women within their objectified position and they will remain there until a certain realization is achieved: that intercourse is not freedom. Even then, women must understand that intercourse is not needed. She believes that technology has allowed for intercourse to become optional.
All exerpts from Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin. 1987.
Thoughts?