by Laura Kipnis
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As speculation about the 2016 lineup builds, commentators on both sides continue to focus below the belt for portents. One of the narratives currently being floated is that disappointment in Obama’s performance as president helps reposition Hillary on the gender spectrum, or as Democratic strategist James Carville recently remarked, “If Hillary Clinton gave Obama one of her balls, he’d have two.” This was pretty provocative—and intended to be, obviously, on all sorts of levels.
The relation between the sexual organs we’ve been assigned and what happens to us in the world as a consequence is fruit for a constantly evolving orchard of metaphors. Though of course what happens to us in the world isn’t metaphorical: it’s simply the case that fewer positions of power go to the humans with the vaginas than the humans with the penises.
At the end of the day, whether you have one or the other thing going on down there hasn’t yet stopped mattering. There may be a small number of people who’ve traded in the sex organ they were born with, and a small number who are otherwise ambiguously situated (and have their own battles to contend with because of it), but generally it’s been a binary universe we’re born into and mostly still is. Even as gender has supposedly become more mobile, even as there are all sorts of exciting new roles available on either side of the divide—women senators, male nurses and strippers—what’s evident from reading Hillary’s biographers is that we’re nowhere close to giving up the idea that what’s down there is the key to everything.
But if Carville’s metaphorical reassignment of genital equipment means that, going forward, whenever someone says that someone else has “balls” we have to rethink the relation between power and manhood, because metaphorically speaking, women have balls too, then maybe the categories do start looking more arbitrary, or “fungible” as the lawyers say. And maybe the cause–effect relationship between genitals and power isn’t an arrow moving one way or another anymore, but starting to look more like a Venn diagram, with lots of weird angles and unexpected possibilities.
Women Who Hate Men
Sex with men is bad for women, and I mean bad in every sense of the word: from the dismal quality of the experience itself, to the lasting harms it inflicts—psychological, social, and existential. At least this is a premise with a certain traction in the cultural imagination, and seems in no danger of losing its hold, even in an era that simultaneously pays frequent lip service to the polar opposite premise, that sexual parity between men and women is now an established fact, and sex is finally good for women, so let’s all party. In short, there are lots of conflicting stories making the rounds about what women are getting up to in bed, and how much they’re really enjoying it, and whether proclaiming enjoyment is even a reliable indicator of anything when it’s a woman doing the proclaiming; we are the gender, after all, notorious for faking enjoyment. In fact, if you’re a woman, even good sex may be bad for you in ways you can’t begin to calculate.
The literature of bad sex is alarmingly extensive (as is bad writing about sex, though these aren’t necessarily the same thing), and a mainstay of the genre is the cautionary tale aimed at dissuading women from having sex, or sex of the wrong kind, or with the wrong people. The arguments vary, the politics varies, but the message keeps coming around again, like a hit single on the Top 40 station. By far the most interesting variation on this theme is Andrea Dworkin’s 1987 radical feminist classic, Intercourse, now repackaged in a twentieth-anniversary edition. In case you’ve forgotten, Dworkin was the notorious anti-pornography activist and theorist most famous for having said that all intercourse is rape, though she claimed she never actually said that.
The reprint arrives with a new introduction by Ariel Levy, the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs. Levy was less a fan of Dworkin’s in Pigs, labeling her an extremist, which is undoubtedly true yet also a little backhanded, given that Levy was reprising so many of Dworkin’s arguments, albeit in more measured tones. But I too must admit that I never had much use for Dworkin and have ranted against her in print on a few occasions, though rereading her this time around was strangely enjoyable. She’s the great female refusenik, and just because sex disgusted her it doesn’t mean she isn’t often funny and even profound on the subject.
Previously I was under the impression that it was only heterosexual sex that disgusted Dworkin, but that’s not the case. As Levy’s introduction helpfully informs, Dworkin, who died in 2005 at the age of fifty-eight, may have proclaimed herself a lesbian but she wasn’t known to have clocked any hours in the actual enterprise, either romantically or sexually. Additionally, she was an unorthodox enough lesbian to have loved and secretly married a man, her soul mate, with whom she cohabited for over three decades—he, too, was gay, and happened to have health insurance. A soul mate with health insurance and no sexual demands! Happily, Dworkin found the kind of love she either believed in or could tolerate: one that didn’t involve bodies or the messy meeting up of alien genitals. She had far less confidence in the ability of other women to hew to similarly nonconformist paths, I suspect not without reason.
Dworkin was an extremist because she kept harping on the nasty undercurrent of inequality in sexual relations between men and women, and she wouldn’t let it drop. In fact, she seemed to revel in it. Of course, more mild-mannered and even anti-feminist writers keep strumming this same banjo too: namely, the idea that men get more out of sex than women do, even when women think they’re operating in some liberated fashion, turning the tables and having recreational sex just like the guys. Nope, they’re dupes and doing irreparable harm to themselves in the process. The difference is that for Dworkin, intercourse isn’t a personal thing or a private folly; it’s a form of political occupation equal to what all colonized peoples have endured over the centuries. At least this meant she refrained from dispensing chirpy advice on how to get more foreplay, or land a man by playing hard to get, or other quick fixes to female dilemmas. Dworkin didn’t believe in individual solutions, and she didn’t think a little freedom was enough: she wanted to overthrow the whole fucking system.
This seems unlikely to happen anytime soon, but Dworkin is still an excellent philosopher of the bedroom, if a fumingly vitriolic one. Even if you disagree with everything she says, she’s great exactly because her work resists all practicality. Intercourse is a furiously unreasonable book, and usefully dangerous for just that reason: it forces us to look at sex without trying to solve it.
Dworkin’s premise is startling and will always be radical: in short, that sexual intercourse itself is what keeps women mired in a state of social inequality, because a “normal fuck” is an act of incursion. Perhaps a few of you female readers previously thought of sexual intercourse as a “natural” act; maybe even thought you liked it. Dworkin will have none of this. Sex, along with the desire for it, is forced on women to subordinate us. During intercourse
a man inhabits a woman, physically covering her and overwhelming her and at the same time penetrating her; and this physical relation to her—over her and inside her—is his possession of her. He has her—or, when he’s done, he has had her.… His thrusting into her is taken to be her capitulation to him as a conqueror; it is a physical surrender of herself to him; he occupies and rules her, expresses his elemental dominance over her, by his possession of her in the fuck.
Note the passive construction—“is taken to be”—a hallmark of the Dworkin style. Elsewhere: “The normal fuck by a normal man is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation.” Taken … by whom? The passive voice combined with the punch-you-in-the-face argument, the vacillation between victimization and militancy: this is Dworkin distilled to her essence.
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 inj
ustices 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, Dwor
kin 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.