[In the following review, Harrold summarizes Dworkin's view of sexual inequality in Intercourse.]

All right, strap on those crampons, and into the Abyss! How does intercourse relate to the status of women?

Intercourse is examined through a series of concepts—repulsion, skinlessness, stigma, communion and possession, and the opposing/complementary roles of virginity and occupation/collaboration. Dworkin uses a multiple approach to her subject and her subjection. She analyzes social practice and individual lives, and the use of language; she employs psychoanalytical concepts, legal interpretation, and literary criticism. The interpretation of literary texts is excellent—marked by generosity and effective, never strained, exegesis. The examination of legal definition and construction of gender and sexual practices (both legal and illegal) is especially fine.

Dworkin notes the constant challenge to the liberal notion of the individual that women present. Her property in herself is intrinsically compromised by that opening for men to penetrate. Woman is open, marked as penetrable and possessible in biology, personal relations, and law. Dworkin's positioning of intercourse in the foreground of the inquiry into woman's lesser worth has been burlesqued as an acceptance of biological determinism; as buying into a vulgar ideology of male supremacy. Yet the constructions of a hegemonic culture, whether true or false, define women's roles and lives. These constructions are no less powerful for being constructions.

Woman is defined in difference and in degradation as the opposite of man. Woman is socially constructed as a human being to be taken, entered, penetrated, to bear up, to bear children willingly or unwillingly. Rebels who choose to have none of this are not going their own way, they are going the other way, a form of rebellion defined in opposition to the dominant, dominating mode of being. Chastity, lesbianism, and alternate reproductive methods are commentaries, not challenges, to intercourse in a man-made world.

Is this penetrability of woman's body the principle reason, the first cause of her inferiority? Dworkin argues that there is more to penetration than social construction. But how much more? The strictly physical aspects of the female body, its openings and its fertility, indicate a natural sexual congress. But a proper use is charged with the abuse; the mock conquest of the first time with surprise, pain, and blood; or the risk and wearing away of health and mind by too many or too dangerous pregnancies; and woman's statistical infrequency of orgasm as reported anonymously to researchers. Dworkin suspects that our construction of intercourse is at the heart of the inferiority of women if physical construction is not enough. She notes that penetration could be interpreted differently. But a happy, self-willed, undominated sexuality that includes for women a positive and inclusive construction of mother, wife, lover is not the dominant set of meanings by which intercourse is interpreted. In fact, sometimes we cannot differentiate sexual activity from bloody murder: note the assumption that a glimpse of the primal scene by those of tender understanding will be devastating, and the confusion between violent murder and sexual congress in Ruthless People. It does not do to shrink from the unpalatable, and those who find the notion of the book preposterous should reflect on what it means to be fucked, fucked over, fucked up, or to do the fucking.