Part 2 of 4 in a series by WLRN Guest Writer: Dora Landon

Intercourse 

In her 1987 book Intercourse, Dworkin raises the most provocative feminist question of the 20th century, if not of all time. It is the question of women’s, as she puts it, “metaphysical” inferiority,* and whether or not it is intrinsic. “The political meaning of intercourse,” she writes, “is the fundamental question of feminism and freedom: can an occupied people—physically occupied inside, internally invaded, be free…can those without a biologically based physical integrity have self respect?” (156, italics mine). She dares to ask whether, as the act “fundamental to existence,” intercourse “has consequences to [woman’s] being that may be intrinsic, not socially imposed” (155). The “God who does not exist,” as Dworkin puts it, made woman’s invasion, her internal occupation, her lesser physical integrity, the condition of human existence. She asks but does not answer definitively whether or not intercourse could take place without objectification, in what ways it might be different if it could, whether intercourse could ever be compatible with women’s equality (177-8). In intercourse as she defines it, as heterosexual vaginal penetration, there are only two possible roles. That of the penetrator, endowed with the penis that makes entry, and that of the penetrated, used vaginally by the penetrator. Intercourse argues that the question of women’s freedom cannot be solved without understanding the meaning of intercourse. Not until women understand the metaphysical implications of our biology as women can we know what freedom is, what freedom can be, to us. This argument takes for granted sex-realism. It relies for its meaning on a binary model of sex. This argument could not be put forward outside the context of the existence of the “two discrete sexes” denied in Woman Hating. Here her analysis has come closer to Firestone’s materialism. In Intercourse, Dworkin states explicitly that her argument is sex-specific, that it pertains only to the sex categorized female: 

“This hole, her hole, is synonymous with entry. A man has an anus that can be entered, but his anus is not synonymous with entry. A woman has an anus that can be entered, but her anus is not synonymous with entry…[T]hat slit that means entry into her—intercourse—appears to be the key to women’s lower human status…There is no analogue anywhere among subordinated groups of people to this experience of being made for intercourse: for penetration, entry, occupation.” (155, italics mine)

According to Dworkin, the stigma of being the one penetrated in intercourse does not and cannot apply to men or boys because intercourse will never signify sex-based inferiority for the male, not even when he is forced into sex, heterosexual or homosexual† (156). The stigma of being “made for intercourse” is a female-specific stigma, a stigma by which girls and women are marked whether or not they have been penetrated. Being enterable—and having this enterability, this violability, this unique and characteristic vulnerability to rape, not only sanctioned but necessitated by God and/or evolution, means that the political meaning of intercourse will always be different for women than it is for men. Could intercourse ever signify freedom for women? Dworkin is skeptical that it could. Nonetheless, women err in trying to achieve “sexual liberation” through male means. 

In Woman Hating, Dworkin had written that “[i]ntercourse with men as we know them is increasingly impossible” (184). Here she implies that men are the problem with intercourse: if only men stopped using intercourse to assert their dominance, then intercourse would be pleasurable and not harmful to women. She does not recognize intercourse itself as a problem, but writes idealistically that, “[a]ny sexual coming together which is genuinely pansexual and role-free, even if between men and women as we generally think of them…is authentic and androgynous” (184). In Intercourse, however, her emphasis falls away from men as agents and she directs her scrutiny toward the act of intercourse itself, to whether or not this act is inherently degrading to women. The Dworkin of Woman Hating is an optimist, a young activist with light undimmed, compared to the weary and cynical prophetess of Intercourse. Woman Hating loses its conclusion in a muddle of hopeful and contradictory predictions; whereas to the end Intercourse is brutal and methodical as an execution.

Reading Intercourse helps to achieve further insight into why Dworkin maintained a sex-denialist position in Woman Hating. In the latter book, before proceeding to list the flaws in the binary model of sex, none of which actually refute it, Dworkin gives her reason for following this line of argument: “If there are two discrete biological sexes, then it is not hard to argue that there are two discrete modes of human behavior, sex-related, sex-determined. One might argue for a liberalization of sex-based roles, but one cannot justifiably argue for their total redefinition” (175). These are two very logically problematic sentences. Firstly, rather than arguing from premise to conclusion, she is working backward from an already-decided conclusion, seeking a premise that will fit it. She wants to believe that human behavior is not sex-determined, that it does not necessarily and naturally bifurcate along the lines of sex. But since female and male humans have demonstrable physiological differences, and since it is not illogical that behavioral differences might result from differences in physiology, it would be “hard to argue” that sex does not play a determining role in behavior, even if it may be (let us assume for the sake of argument) only a slight role in certain kinds of behavior. Clearly her argument for “multisexuality” is motivated by a desire to argue that sex does not play a role in behavior. Mirrored, the first two clauses of her first sentence read: “If there are not two discrete biological sexes, then it is easy to argue that there are not two discrete (sex-based) modes of behavior.” 

But one might ask why she feels the need to overcome the behavioral-physiological barrier in the first place. As we have seen, Firestone saw no contradiction in suggesting the elimination of sex roles without the elimination of sex itself. Frye, too, manages to disconnect these two propositions, writing, “we do not know whether human behavior patterns would be dimorphic along lines of chromosomal sex if we were not threatened and bullied; nor do we know, if we assume that they would be dimorphous, what they would be” (36). Why, then, in Woman Hating, did Dworkin see it necessary to reject the notion of discrete sex category in order to argue that women’s liberation was not impossible? 

The answer is apparent on reading Intercourse. Rewritten in the language of Intercourse, Dworkin’s earlier statement about sex might read: “If there are two discrete biological sexes, the male being the penetrator and the female being the penetrated, and these roles must always signify and manifest civic inequality, then the sex-based oppression of women is insurmountable.” Insurmountable, that is, if men cannot be convinced to give up intercourse as well as their hatred of women; insurmountable if intercourse requires the woman’s objectification, if it requires that she be one step lower than human. The Dworkin of Woman Hating, not having articulated intercourse as such as a political problem, but still vaguely sensing a danger about it, an as-yet unvoiced danger, so that she was unable to predict happily, with Firestone, a utopia where men and women prefer each other out of sheer fit, this Dworkin had to demolish the categories of sex so that “men” and “women” could meet and fuck on the terrain of androgyny and equality. To deny that sex is binary is to eliminate the problem of intercourse before it even arises. It invalidates the highly disturbing question of women having any innate biological disadvantage, any physical or metaphysical barrier to full human citizenship. Moreover it all but guarantees equality, if we all would simply wake up to our true androgynous, multisexed nature. 

Dworkin’s letter to Raymond 

In 1978, four years after Woman Hating and one year prior to Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire, Dworkin sent a letter to Raymond in which she shared some of her thoughts on transsexuals. In his biography, Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary, Martin Duberman quotes a passage from this letter. He does so with the aim of demonstrating Dworkin’s belief in what he calls “the integrity of a ‘transsexual’ identity” (160). Duberman asserts that Dworkin never wavered from her position on transsexualism in Woman Hating (161). He rhetorically distances her from Raymond, with whose “transphobic book” Dworkin is evidently not fit to be associated, even though Dworkin is credited in its acknowledgments. Raymond’s view of transsexualism as sexist was, according to Duberman, “a view that Andrea deplored, and she let Raymond know at some length,” whence he proceeds to quote Dworkin’s letter. The substantial part of the quote reads: 

“I knew of transsexuals in Europe as a small, vigorously persecuted minority […] They lived in absolute exile, […] conjuring up for me the deepest reaches of Jewish experience. They were driven by their ostracization to prostitution, drugs, and suicide, conjuring up for me the deepest reaches of female experience. Their sense of gender dislocateness [sic] was congruent with mine, in that my rage at the cultural and so-called biological definitions of womanhood and femininity was absolute. I perceived their suffering as authentic….Looking back, I can see other […] sources of my own particular empathy. Male-to-female transsexuals were in rebellion against the phallus and so was I. Female-to-male transsexuals were seeking a freedom only possible to males in patriarchy, and so was I. The means were different, but the impulses were related” (Dworkin, quoted in Duberman 161).‡

Reading this passage, two questions arise: does it critique Raymond’s analysis, and if so in what way; and is it an endorsement of transsexualism? To the first question, it seems that if Dworkin intended to critique Raymond, it is Raymond’s conclusion that transsexualism contributes to sex-role oppression that she is disputing. Dworkin does not suggest that Raymond is wrong about the basic nature of transsexualism, i.e., that it is a surgically-created fiction.

Nevertheless, Dworkin clearly views transsexuals as oppressed, and as being oppressed because of their disavowal of their sex-role category. In this she feels a commonality with them, with male-to-female transsexuals in their repudiation of the phallus, and with female-to-male transsexuals in seeking a specially male freedom. A natural bleeding-heart, she was not inclined to doubt the authenticity of their suffering. In saying that her and their “impulses were related,” Dworkin recognizes the transsexuals as fellow rebels against patriarchy, which indicates she may have been uncomfortable with Raymond’s portrayal of transsexuals as in collusion with the oppressors. 

Duberman notes rightfully that “Empathy in the face of human suffering was a hallmark of Andrea’s character” (160-1). Yet it would be a mistake to assume ideological agreement on the basis of empathy. Trans activists, in searching the above passage for evidence of Dworkin’s belief in their cause, will likely point to two phrases in particular. First, there is Dworkin’s reference to her rage at the “so-called biological definitions of womanhood,” and second, there is her statement that the transsexuals’ conditions “conjur[ed] up for me the deepest reaches of female experience.” On its face, the first phrase seems to be a point for trans activists, who will use it to conclude that Dworkin rejected womanhood as defined by sex category. But that is not the only interpretation, nor is it the most obvious. When Dworkin condemns so-called biologically-based definitions of womanhood, it is probable, based on cumulative textual evidence, that she is rejecting sweeping statements about women’s nature allegedly grounded in biology, not the definition of women as biologically female. In Right-wing Women she lists and refutes several ostensibly biologically-based claims about woman’s inherent nature: woman as narrow-minded and conservative (13); woman as illiterate and unintellectual (46-48); and woman as whore (212). The proponents of these claims argue that they follow from women’s reproductive role of bearing children. Not all women have children, replies Dworkin, and what is to stop them from being free-thinking, intelligent, and dignified even if they do? The three claims listed are examples of biological essentialism, which is what Dworkin rejects. The recognition that women are biologically female, which says nothing about women’s intellectual or moral capacities, is not biological essentialism. 

The second phrase is still more easily dismissed. The transsexuals’ recourse to “prostitution, drugs, and suicide” conjured up for Dworkin “the deepest reaches of female experience.” That they are female only by analogy is clear from the previous sentence. She uses identical words to say that the transsexuals’ “exile…conjur[ed] up for me the deepest reaches of Jewish experience.” It would be eccentric to argue that Dworkin believed the transsexuals to be literally Jewish in addition to being female, but based on her wording an argument for the second claim would make the first inescapable. Besides, it is clear from her inclusion of “female-to-males” that she is speaking of transsexuals of both sexes, which further points to her use of analogy. 

This excerpted letter is Duberman’s entire argument, aside from the passages of Woman Hating which I have already discussed, for Dworkin’s supposed pro-trans stance. All the letter shows is that she had empathy for transsexuals in extreme poverty and that having observed this poverty she may have disputed Raymond’s picture of transsexuals as privileged patriarchal colluders. It is indeed interesting to read this letter from the perspective of the modern transgender debate. In Dworkin’s words, “[m]ale-to-female transsexuals [are] in rebellion against the phallus.” What would she say about all the transgender-identifying men today touting the virtues of the feminized penis, trying to foist it on women of all orientations? Conversely, Dworkin says, “[f]emale-to-male transsexuals [are] seeking a freedom only possible to males in patriarchy.” What would she say about those transgender-identifying females today, many of them girls under eighteen, undergoing radical mastectomies, a procedure she condemned in “The Root Cause” as a “savage form of mutilation”? On the subject of radical mastectomy she says: “These forms of physical mutilation are brands which designate us as female by negating our very bodies, by destroying them” (100). It would seem that bilateral mastectomy does not qualify as a method of obtaining male freedom. 

Notes

*For a discussion of the way Dworkin’s use of the term “metaphysical” differs from its typical use in analytical philosophy, see Vadas, Melinda. “Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin.” Hypatia, vol. 3, no. 2, 1988, pp. 174–77.

†Dworkin discusses a separate stigma suffered by homosexual men, that of being perceived as sexually unnatural, in “Chapter 8: Law” and especially on page 195.

‡For a response to this quotation by a woman who knew Dworkin and does not believe she was pro-trans, see Chesler.

Works Cited: 

Chesler, Phyllis. “Woke Andrea Dworkin.” Tablet, 8 April, 2021. <https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/woke-andrea-dworkin>.

Duberman, Martin. Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary. The New Press, 2020. 

Dworkin, Andrea. Intercourse. Basic Books, 2007. 

—. Right-wing Women. Perigee Books, 1983. 

—. “The Root Cause.” Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics. Perigee Books, 1981, pp. 96-111. 

—. Woman Hating. Plume, 1974. 

Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Verso, 2015 

Frye, Marilyn. “Sexism.” The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Crossing Press, 1983, pp. 17-40. 

Raymond, Janice. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Teachers College Press, 1994. 

Vadas, Melinda. “Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin.” Hypatia, vol. 3, no. 2, 1988, pp. 174–77. JSTOR, <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3809966>.