Intercourse

From the Foreward to the 20th Anniversary Edition by Ariel Levy

Like most writers, Andrea Dworkin thought her work was underappreciated in her lifetime. Like very few of them, she was right. Dworkin the persona—the mythical figure, the inverted sex symbol—eclipsed Dworkin the writer in the public imagination. There are many more people who have strong feelings about her than there are people who have actually read her work.

If this is the first book of hers you've encountered, brace yourself—she had a voice like no other. Perhaps the most prominent quality of Dworkin's writing is its ferocity: its relentless intellectual and ideological confidence, its refusal to collapse into what Dworkin called "the quintessential feminine pose." Though she bragged she used "language without its ever becoming decorative or pretty," there is elegance as well as agression in Dworkin's sentences. She had a particular gift for conveying abstract concepts through acute, unusual metaphors. "It's not as if there's an empty patch one can see and so one can say, 'There's my ignorance; it's about ten by ten and a dozen feet hight and someday someone will fill in the empty patch," she wrote in her memoir, Heartbreak. (She was talking about male writers.) She could be lyrical in her descriptions; Bessie Smith's voice "tramped through your three-dimensional body but gracefully, a spartan, bearlike ballet." And she could be very funny. Of a grade-school teacher who gave her trouble, Dworkin says, "I knew I'd get her someday and this is it: eat shit, bitch. No one said sisterhood was easy."