[In the following review, Sage provides tempered criticism of Intercourse.]

By the time Swift's Gulliver paddles away from Houyhnhnm-land in his Yahoo-skin canoe, he is so consumed with self-disgust and self-hatred (Yahoo-hatred) that it seems he has only two alternatives—to skin himself, to jump out of his skin, or (the one he chooses) to loathe everyone else, and particularly (when he gets home) his nearest and dearest, from whose foul closeness he escapes to the stable to inhale the horses. Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse is a book that belongs in a similar landscape of extremity. It's about skinlessness, about coming home to revulsion:

In Amerika, there is the nearly universal conviction—or so it appears—that sex (fucking) is good and that liking it is right: morally right; a sign of human health; nearly a standard of citizenship. Even those who believed in original sin and have a theology of hellfire and damnation express the Amerikan creed, an optimism that glows in the dark: sex is good, healthy, wholesome, pleasant, fun; we like it, we enjoy it, we want it, we are cheerful about it; it is as simple as we are, the citizens of this strange country with no memory and no mind.

This Amerika, though (think of Donne, "O my America! my new-found-land, / My kingdome, safeliest when with one man mann'd"), is somewhere we all live, or rather, that lives in us. You discover it—ironically enough—as a result of consciousness-raising, rather as Gulliver did.

Dworkin's position assumes an impasse in feminist thinking. The reformist strain is wearing itself out (this is almost a definition, in any case: it's about wearing itself out) in conflict with both consumerism (which makes use of "liberation" for its own purpose) and the various forms of fundamentalist backlash. At the same time, there is a retreat, a green retreat, into separatism, with the stress on feminine, nurturing qualities. All of these things keep women busy, patching and mending. Dworkin, however, is interested in picking off the cultural patina that persuades people of the naturalness of their "nature," and disputing over again the category of the human.

The literary examples from which she starts (Tolstoy on chastity, or Tennessee Williams on intimacy with strangers, or James Baldwin on "communion") aren't the kind that would make up a "women's studies" reading-list. Those work usually by cumulative comfort, the building of traditions, the argument of quantity, but this argument is opposite, and works (or wants to work) by way of quality, and stripping down, through the persuasiveness of images and metaphors. Here she is, improvising on the central metaphor of The Face of Another by Kobo Abe:

The skin is a line of demarcation, a periphery, the fence, the form, the shape…. The skin is separation, individuality, the basis for corporeal privacy…. Especially, it is both identity and sex, what one is and what one feels in the realm of the sensual, being and passion, where the self meets the world—intercourse being, ultimately, the self in the act of meeting the world.

Woman's privacy (and hence her individuality, her integrity, her significance) is never real or complete—Dworkin cannot, any more than Milton, praise a cloistered virtue, virgin ignorance—because her meeting with the world is an invasion. She is not the owner or sole inhabitant (her privates we) of her own skin, "her insides are worn away over time, and she, possessed, becomes weak, depleted, usurped…."

Dworkin has been accused of misunderstanding and/or being led astray by metaphors of penetration and possession. Certainly, the book develops and sustains its momentum on metaphor, and metaphor's powers of provoking recognition, of outwitting the rational desire to take things apart only in such a way that they can be put together again. Metaphors redraw the map, and put the boundaries in different places; these metaphors, in particular, make women into territory that has had a boundary drawn not round its edge, but on the inside, in the name of nature. It is an argument ad feminam, with all the unfairness that implies: if you can't recognize what I'm saying you're in thrall; if you can, you're in thrall too, but you've been rescued from banality, and can say, with all bitterness and bleakness, "we": "this elegant blood-letting of sex is a so-called freedom exercised in alienation, cruelty and despair. Trivial and decadent; proud; foolish; liars; we are free." This climax to Chapter Six ("Virginity," and Bram Stoker's Dracula) perhaps conveys something of the sublimity of the preacher's style that sells so bleak a sermon, and avoids (like the plague) any suggestion of patching and mending reasonableness. It's worth looking at what the book has to say about the production of meaning:

It is human to experience these differences whether or not one cares to bring them into consciousness. Humans, including women, construct meaning. Humans find meaning in poverty and tyranny and the atrocities of history; those who have suffered most still construct meaning … we can understand some things if we try hard to learn empathy; we can seek freedom and honour and dignity; that we care about meaning gives us a human pride that has the fragility of a butterfly and the strength of tempered steel. The measure of women's oppression is that we do not take intercourse—entry, penetration, occupation—and ask or say what it means …

"Ask or say" are synonyms here: asking the questions, you supply the answers. The argument is weakened by this tactic, though not as much as might appear. It is cheap to ask, on page 128, "Is intercourse itself then a basis of or a key to women's continuing social and sexual inequality?" It is less so to ask. "To what extent does intercourse depend on the inferiority of women?" On this, the book suggests, for once, fewer answers than questions. The notion of the "real privacy of the body" ("There is never a real privacy of the body that can co-exist with intercourse") is for Dworkin inseparable from full selfhood, from freedom, from integrity, from the "discrete" individual. "Liberal" is for her a term of abuse ("A false sympathy of abstract self-indulgence"), but it's from that background that her sense of the human is derived. Or at least, it's on that sense of the self—as choosing, willing, meaning—that her map of women's possession is based. She is in this sense as much an "enlightenment" figure as Mary Wollstonecraft, who argued that she didn't want women to have power over men, but over themselves.

There remains the question, then, of human closeness under any circumstances—the Yahoo problem. And here the book is eloquent by its silence on lesbianism. By the logic of its own metaphors it should be saying that women's sense of their own sex is invaded by the "natural" and cultural climate, that they are no less "objectified" in relations with each other. But by the message of its silence it produces an unthought, unarticulated alternative, which does more than any of its rhetorical excesses to undermine it. Do women stay outside each other's skins? To ask the question is to flounder on a technicality. It's clear from the whole tenor of the argument that Dworkin will have no truck with tender, sentimental same-sex notions about peace and merging, but at the same time it's impossible not to suspect that this is also a question to which she feels she knows the answer. Either that, or there's the prospect of a kind of "existential" pathos, a celebration of the alienation caused by boundaries that's not so different from what Simone de Beauvoir grappled with in (with?) Sartre.

The voice, in fact, is very much that of the heroic polemics of the late 1960s. Dworkin describes (surely) herself when she bitterly praises those who refuse to submit to "the indignity of inferiority"—"the lone, crazy resisters, the organized resistance." Intercourse embarrasses not only by its visceral imagery, but by its refusal to speak any of the conciliatory public languages of feminism. The contrast with the tone of (say) Germaine Greer's preface to her collected essays and occasional pieces (The Madwoman's Underclothes, 1986) is instructive. Greer writes:

The quality of daily life is what matters, the taste of the food on the table, the light in the room, the peace and wholeness of the moment. Perfect love casteth out fear. The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love.

Dworkin's preoccupation is precisely the obscenity of the ordinary, a gross metaphysical joke played on women. None the less, there is a marked continuity with the tone of Greer's earliest pieces—"Morality is essentially connected with choice, with the exercise of will itself." And this same piece (1972, on abortion) provides a name for Dworkin's special quality: "spiritual muscle."

The days have (probably) gone when this metaphor could be put down to penis envy. Now it is merely unfashionably harsh and individualistic.