Men (24 page)

Dworkin was a grandiose writer who liked playing with omniscience: she wanted to speak from within the dark tangled unconsciousness of sex itself, then expose it to the interrogator's rubber hose. Not just expose it, she wanted to hold a war-crimes tribunal—
Intercourse
is her one-woman Nuremberg trial on the injustices of heterosexual sex. Indeed, she was fond of comparing intercourse—along with its propaganda arm, pornography—to the greatest crimes of the twentieth century: Treblinka, Auschwitz, the Gulag all come up as parallels. She was never one for understatement.

Her favored prosecutorial tactic is to pick a revered literary author and ventriloquize him: at one moment she's Tolstoy, at another Kobo Abe, then she takes a spin as Isaac Bashevis Singer. Characters merge into authors who merge into the singular truth of the entire culture; writers of every era and nationality are assembled to testify to the violent timeless truths of male sexual hatred for women. You can read very attentively and still not be entirely sure who's speaking from one sentence to the next—Flaubert? Patriarchy? Dworkin? This is rhetorically powerful, if slippery. This is my life, she wants you to think. (Don't get defensive about it or you'll just prove her right.)

Given the slippery stylistics, Dworkin can be tough to pin down theoretically. It's never exactly clear in her account what's a cause and what's an effect: whether women are an inferior class because intercourse subordinates us or intercourse subordinates us because we're already an inferior class. But if the problem is fucking per se, then won't penetrative sex always be oppressive? Or does she just mean penetrative sex, for women, in a male-dominated society?

On this, as on much else, Dworkin is charmingly inconsistent. What's nature, what's culture—why quibble over details? At certain points we hear that women are anatomically constructed for subordination—after all, we're the ones with a hole that's “synonymous with entry,” put there by the God who doesn't exist (Dworkin is a virtuoso at the droll aside). At other points we hear that male power constructs the
meaning
of intercourse, because men get off on dominance. Regardless of whether it was nature or culture that made things inequitable, it's doubtful it can ever be otherwise, at least not until everyone gives up fucking. (Dworkin is fairly indifferent to the reproductive aspects of the act, but then how much intercourse is really for reproduction anyway?)

You can find her paying very occasional lip service to the possibility of a non-male-dominated society in which a more woman-oriented sexuality would hold sway, though this turns out to be the conventional soft-focus stuff: “diffuse and tender sensuality that involves the whole body and a polymorphous tenderness.” This, Dworkin assures us, is what women really want. As far as bringing about the social conditions under which tender sensuality would achieve primacy in the bedroom, it's hard to see how this is going to happen since men enjoy their dominance too much and women are too complicit in helping them maintain it, especially by getting horizontal with them all the time.

Obviously, Dworkin was not the world's biggest fan of men: not only are they titillated by inequality, they need it in order to perform at all. Men get pleasure from sexual hatred, and intercourse is their way of expressing contempt. It should be noted that Dworkin's own contempt for male sexuality runs just as deep as theirs for women: without rape, pornography, and prostitution, “the number of fucks would so significantly decrease that men might nearly be chaste.” This is just one of her many indictments of the brawny sex. One is tempted to point out that Dworkin either underestimates or just never noticed the vast range of male vulnerability possible in sex. Her men are all into “cold fucking,” and whether they're husbandly or promiscuous types, their “eventual abandonment turns the vagina into the wound Freud claimed it was”—one of her nicer aperçus. Just as all women really want tender sensuality, all men really want to degrade women.

Considering that Dworkin was so devoted to flattening men and women into reassuringly predictable types, it's curious that one of her main anxieties about sex was that it makes people generic. Fucking
is
the great universal event, but for her, the universality means that we lose our individuality in the very act. She seems anxious about the breakdown of boundaries that can happen in sex, even though boundary-blurring is what people frequently seem to like about sex, or so I hear. But for Dworkin, it was abhorrent, a threatening loss of self, because in intercourse “nothing is one's own, nothing, certainly not oneself, because the imagination is atrophied, like some limb, dead and hanging useless, and the dull repetition of programmed sexual fantasy has replaced it.”

Maybe the best way to read Dworkin is as the literary writer she aspired to be rather than as a social theorist. She said her models were Dante and Rimbaud, though the contemporary writer she brings to mind is novelist Michel Houellebecq—her acid eloquence on the subject of empty sex matches his; her hatred of men matches his disdain for everyone, apparent in the way he sets his characters banging into one another in mutual incomprehension and loathing. No one is better than Houellebecq on the general repellence of human physicality, but Dworkin gives him a run for his money. For both, the contemporary mantra that sex is good for us is the emptiest notion of all, the new patriotism. Dworkin: “We talk about it all the time to say how much we like it—nearly as much, one might infer, as jogging.” Ouch. “This is the sexuality of those who risk nothing because they have nothing inside to risk.” Ouch again. Dworkin may have been the great hater of sex, but is she wrong when she charges that the bubbly “sex-positivity” of our time masks a deep and abiding core of disgust?

Dworkin's own writing teems with sexual disgust, but it's disgust that transforms itself into flurries of creative loathing and poetic incantations. Out of the vast woman-hatred of the culture, she created a seductively sordid idiom:

There are dirty names for every female part of her body and for every way of touching her. There are dirty words, dirty laughs, dirty noises, dirty jokes, dirty movies, and dirty things to do to her in the dark. Fucking her is the dirtiest, though it may not be as dirty as she herself is. Her genitals are dirty in the literal meaning: stink and blood and urine and mucous and slime.… Where she is not explicitly maligned she is magnificently condescended to.

It's hard to argue. Any woman who won't admit it just enforces Dworkin's view that we lose any capacity for self-knowledge and honesty in sex, since to the extent we reconcile ourselves to enjoying it, our brains turn to mush. Worse, women transform themselves into pathetic sex scavengers, wanting sensuality and tenderness but settling instead for “being owned and being fucked” as a substitute for the physical affection and approval we actually crave from men. Women need male approval to be able to survive inside our own skins, and solicit it through sex; but obtaining sex means conforming in “body type and behavior” to what men like. Given the vast amount of time, energy, and disposable income many of us invest in achieving and maintaining whatever degree of sexual attractiveness is feasible (sometimes known as “fuckability”), again, it's hard to argue. Self-knowledge might be the means to really
knowing
a lover in sex—the only thing that makes passion personal instead of generic—but self-knowledge is impossible for women because having intercourse in the first place requires eroticizing powerlessness and self-annihilation. If the argument seems tautological, you're getting the point: fucking is a vortex, an abyss, a sinkhole from which you never emerge.

The topic that Dworkin is not entirely persuasive on, no surprise, is pleasure, which is pretty much absent here except as a form of false consciousness. (She's far more animated by violence.) For a woman, trying to eke any portion of pleasure out of sex is collaborationism; initiating sex is taking the initiative in your own degradation. There's no entry for pleasure in the index, though you'll find entries for “Sex act: repugnance toward” and “Sex act: used to express hatred.” You must wait until page 158 to find orgasms even mentioned in the text—or more accurately, lack of orgasms, since here she's citing Shere Hite's data to the effect that seven out of ten women don't experience orgasms from intercourse. Dworkin seems not unpleased. How
could
a woman have orgasms under such conditions, she wants to know, in which we have to turn ourselves into things because men can't fuck equals? Who'd enjoy this kind of thing but colluders and dupes?

Yes, Dworkin reads like a stampeding dinosaur in our era of bouncy pro-sex post-feminism. Feminist anger isn't exactly in fashion at the moment: these days, women just direct their anger inward, or carp at individual men, typically their hapless husbands and boyfriends. Nevertheless, the theme that sex injures women more than men continues to percolate through the culture, though in a well-meaning nibbled-to-death-by-ducks sort of way, in books with titles like
Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose
at Both
or
Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good.
The arm-twisting subtitles tell you everything you need to know. The general worry is that casual hookups have replaced dating, young women are having too much sex, and girls who are slutting around are never going to find husbands. Besides which, it's supposed to be woman's task to train men to act better than they do, and this is no way to go about it. Also, with so many women hooking up with no strings attached, things aren't fair for the girls who won't. Not hooking up these days sounds like trying to unionize in a right-to-work state—if everyone else is selling it cheaper, how's a higher-priced girl going to stay in the market?

It's all very alarming, but the new alarmism is so
tepid
compared with the old alarmism. Dworkin had her female fears, obviously, but for her the problem started with female anatomy, not being a bad girl: “Women are unspeakably vulnerable in intercourse because of the nature of the act—entry, penetration, occupation.” Her successors can't follow her down this path—they're equally invested in female fragility, but indicting intercourse itself would implicate marital sex too, and marital sex is supposed to be the reward for virtue, in their version of the story. Dworkin saw womanhood as a tragic condition, but at least she wasn't peddling the line that everything used to be better in the old days, and the best solution is finding a man to love and marry you.

All in all, if I have to cast my vote for a sexual alarmist, I'm for Dworkin, the radical firebrand, in lieu of the well-meaning aunties. Sex for her was catastrophic and disgusting, but at least she wasn't trying to spawn a generation of nice girls. True, she had no time for sexual experimentation—she disliked men too much to admit that nice girls stifled by conventionality and greedy for freedom have always pursued it by trying to act like men, whether that means careers, adventurism (from Joan of Arc to Amelia Earhart), or sleeping around. Emulating men has its problems, to be sure—they haven't got it all figured out either, other than how not to buy books telling them to have less sex, which is probably why no one writes them. For my money, this in itself would be a condition to aspire to.

There's no doubt that women are often pretty deluded about their reasons for wanting sex with men—it's been true enough in my life, anyway. People want to—and frequently do—have sex with each other for murky and self-deceiving reasons, or for clear-eyed reasons that turn out to be mistaken, or a thousand variations on the theme of erroneous judgment. What Dworkin couldn't concede is that what pushes against your boundaries, what destabilizes—maybe even chafes—can also remind you that you're alive.

 

CODA

 

To bring things full circle, Andrea Dworkin and Larry Flynt may not be anyone's idea of a great match, but they did have one intriguing encounter—not in person but in the courts, naturally. Dworkin had brought a $150 million lawsuit against Flynt and
Hustler
for calling her, among other things, a “shit-squeezing sphincter” and “one of the most foul-mouthed, abrasive manhaters on Earth.” They also said she advocated bestiality, incest, and sex with children.

Dworkin lost. In a surprisingly ringing defense of rhetorical excess, the Supreme Court of Wyoming compared
Hustler
's over-the-top language to the historical confrontation between labor and management—a “widely recognized arena in which bruising and brawling, rough and tumble debate is the daily fare.” The moral and political clashes between pornographers and anti-pornographers are waged in the same heated spirit, said the court. “Abusive epithets, exaggerated rhetoric and hysterical hyperbole are expected.”

What the decision also made clear is that someone over at
Hustler
had read Dworkin very thoroughly, possibly more thoroughly than she'd read herself. It seems she
had
written favorably about bestiality, incest, and sex with children, in a chapter titled “Androgyny, Fucking and Community” in her book
Woman Hating.
Imagining a model society where sexuality as we know it would be overhauled, Dworkin envisions eliminating the incest taboo to foster the free flow of natural androgynous eroticism, human and animal relationships becoming more explicitly erotic, and children being allowed to live out their own erotic impulses. Eventually the distinctions between adults and children would completely disappear. Though Dworkin insisted she was only discussing these possibilities not advocating them, the court ruled that
Hustler
was entitled to critically interpret her work as it saw fit—criticism is “a privileged occasion,” they wrote, and an inherently subjective enterprise.