[In the following excerpt, Mullarkey offers unfavorable assessment of Intercourse, which she describes as "a hate-mongering tantrum."]

Is pornography a sex aid, like a dildo, hence undeserving of protection as speech? Is it a potent political message that should be denied protection before it leads to a Haymarket riot of rapists and pedophiles? By what criteria is an image determined "degrading"? Is the pet of the month a nastier purveyor of "bad attitudes" than Calvin Klein advertisements, rock videos, Harlequin romances or the New York Post? Is Screw an unusually dangerous product, like gunpowder, which places special liabilities on its maker? What effect will more laws have on the reasons isolated men masturbate in stalls at Mr. Peepers? Will they try it with chickens after they see Leda and the Swan? If Nazis can speak in Skokie and man-haters can speak anywhere, why can misogynists not speak in Indianapolis?

Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon are not interested in clarifying issues. Co-authors of the 1984 Indianapolis civic ordinance that declared pornography a form of legally actionable sex discrimination, they prefer obfuscation and shock tactics. Intercourse and Feminism Unmodified should be read solely for clues to the crudity of the authors' assault on the First Amendment. This is lockstep, völkisch theorizing spun from the tribal myth of male depravity. With the dictatorial arrogance of traditional censors, the High Command disdains information and truthful discussion. (At an April 4 conference at New York University, titled Sexual Liberals and the Assault on Feminism, Dworkin trashed "the free market of ideas" because it does not guarantee that "good" ideas will win.) They rely on demagogic pronouncements and sensationalism, calculated to induce reflexive responses and hysterical acquiescence. Both books are ritual performances, hokey rallying points for the real agenda: the polarization of women along lines of sexual preference. Pure feminists (lesbians and nice asexuals) on one side of the sex code, collaborators on the other. The pornography issue is a stalking horse for power—within the feminist bureaucracy and its twin in academia.

Both books travesty debate with a pornography of their own: the reduction of men to their erections and the depiction of heterosexuality as vicious and degrading. Their styles are different—Dworkin's is Dzerzhinsky to MacKinnon's Lenin—but their substance is identical. Dworkin's lunatic pensées offer a glimpse at the hindside of MacKinnon's scholarly facade. These are the minds paving the way for censorship. The two take turns playing Hitler. The New "Jewish illness" is male sexuality. The world Jewish conspiracy is heterosexual intercourse (MacKinnon: "The institution of intercourse is a strategy for subordination"). The despised Jew-lover is any woman who prefers sex with a man. Implicit in their rhetoric is a condemnation of maleness itself, sub species aeternitatis.

Dworkin's strong-arm specialty is cuntspeak. Intercourse is a hate-mongering tantrum dolled up as a prolegomenon to the work of Tolstoy, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Kobo Abe and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Nose-dive under the skunk spray, and forget the thirty-four-page bibliography. Dworkin's monomania has nothing to do with literature. Art and life are a ghastly jumble, the artist mistaken for the art and vice versa. Fantasy is equated with reality, metaphor taken for fact, in a global attempt to discredit all of Western culture as pornographic. The muddle fulfills MacKinnon's belief that "existing standards of literature, art, science and politics, examined in a feminist light, are remarkably consonant with pornography's mode, meaning and message." Tolstoy's "goose-stepping hatred of cunt" is a synecdoche for men's universal "genocidal loathing" of women. In the Dworkin-MacKinnon pornotopia, there are only the fuckers and the fuckees. The sooner the fuckers' books are burned the better. Dworkin's readings are shackled like an S/M bondage slave to a primitive abhorrence of men, so blatant and compulsive that it obviates her pretense to critical analysis:

But in the world of real life—and in the subtextual worlds of Brown [Norman O.] and Freud and nearly everyone else—men use the penis to deliver death to women who are, literally, in their genitals, dirt to men. The women are raped as adults or as children; prostituted; fucked, then murdered; murdered, then fucked.

Beware the party hacks who chirp encomiums to her "elegant" and "lyrical" prose. Dworkin lives in "Amerika," where "violation is a synonym for intercourse," and "incestuous rape is becoming a central paradigm for intercourse in our time." Her own description of intermission is as brutal and lewd as anything on Forty-second Street:

The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is persistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center. She is occupied … This hole, her hole, is synonymous with entry.

Heterosexuality is on trial in a kangaroo court, and the judge talks dirty. Sex is a "humiliation ritual," and "penetration was never meant to be kind." (MacKinnon: "There is much violence in intercourse as a usual matter.") The "norms of disparagement and cruelty that constitute fucking male-to-female" are so horrific that even Nazi death camps do not compare:

There is no analogue anywhere among subordinated groups of people to this experience of being made for intercourse; for penetration, entry, occupation. There is no analogue in occupied countries or in dominated races or in imprisoned dissidents or in colonized cultures or in the submission of children to adults or in the atrocities that have marked the twentieth century ranging from Auschwitz to the Gulag.

How did the submission of children slip in? What kind of submission? The rant is as slovenly as its innuendoes: "In the United States, incest is increasingly the sadism of choice." Dworkin suggests that incest is a male policy, not an aberrancy that occurs—initiated by both sexes against children of both sexes—in troubled emotional situations for a tangle of tragic reasons. She ignores the shared involvement, conscious or unconscious, of other family members. She does not distinguish between increased incidence of incest and increased reporting of it. (Patricia Foscato, a psychotherapist and coordinator of a sexualabuse prevention program, testified before the Meese commission that she did not believe there was more incest now than thirty years ago, only "more exposure.")

Dworkin's regard for accuracy, like MacKinnon's, is matched only by her estimate of the reasoning abilities of her audience. Both women swing between biological determinism (the male is destined to exploit by his demonic arousal mechanism) and the wholesale denial of biology. Both grant canonìcal authority to the fashionable theory that gender is exclusively "a social construct," like the bourgeois-democratic state machine and credit buying. According to the new Ladies' Anthropology, sexual differences are not the sum of biologically determined morphological and physiological characteristics. "Opposites were created," says Dworkin, by such cunning conventions as "vagina-specific fucking," sodomy laws and the "martial aims of gender":

The creation of gender (so-called nature) by law was systematic, sophisticated, supremely intelligent…. Fuck the woman in the vagina, not in the ass, because only she can be fucked in the vagina.

MacKinnon states the insight this way:

Gender is … a social status based on who is permitted to do what to whom … gender is an ideology…. Gender has no basis in anything other than the social reality its hegemony constructs. Gender is what gender means.

Neither scholar is concerned with the implications of this hash of sex and sex roles. With its tacit insistence on the absolute rule of social conditioning, for instance, it provides the heterosexual majority with a new rationale for imposing the tyranny of behavior modification on the homosexual minority. If all behavior is stored in culture, including our institutions of what it means to be human, the problem of incest, for example, can be solved merely by lifting the taboo. If everything is learned, any social system will do, because we can be trained to live in any kind of society. The word "inhuman" loses all meaning without a guide-pin to human needs by which to judge the world….

The eye for smut is sharper than the eye for our own subterranean biases and fears. Behind the catch phrases of the porn squad ("subordination of women," "trafficking in women's bodies") crouches the tattered old horror of masturbation. Lurking, too, is the ancient repugnance of the Better Sort for the desolate and down-and-out who inhabit porn districts. The sexuality of "that element" is a menacing nether world, condemned as obscene because it reminds us of the fragility of our well-being. Antiporn crusades are a symbolic barrier between us and them, illusory buffers against all wayward, darkling encroachments on our slender margins of safety. Such movements are cruel in that they fail to address the conditions that help create and sustain "offensive" populations of the economically or emotionally disenfranchised. They divert scarce resources from the enforcement of existing sanctions against actual harmful behavior. In addition, they contribute nothing to the material ability of women to leave abusive relationships or exploitative jobs.

MacKinnon and Dworkin are mountebanks strutting on a feminist stage. Women have much to lose by submitting to the regressive "protection" of these neobarbaric thought police and self-appointed arbiters of "correct" sexuality. Despite the reservations we might have about pornography, the only proven danger to date is the censorship mentality itself. There is no constitutional protection for women or men against uncertainty, ambivalence, dread or distaste. These are the hazards of living. By seeking legislation against speculative perils and whatever offends us, we invite suppression of any controversial speech. Such censorship is the cherished technique of every Führer who claims to know what is good for us.