Intercourse

Intercourse is the fifth non-fiction book by the American radical feminist writer and activist Andrea Dworkin. It was first published in 1987 by Free Press. The book extends the analysis Dworkin had applied to pornography in earlier works such as Woman Hating (1974) and Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) to heterosexual intercourse itself.

Its central thesis holds that the sexual subordination of women, which pornography shows openly, is also the core of how intercourse is experienced in a male-supremacist society. Dworkin examines how literature, science, philosophy and religion have described sex in terms of conquest, possession and invasion, and how that view, combined with the material conditions of women's lives, turns intercourse into a form of domination that women are nonetheless expected to find pleasurable. She illustrates the argument through discussions of works such as The Kreutzer Sonata, Madame Bovary and Dracula, as well as religious texts, legal commentary and pornography.

The book became famous, and remains controversial, for a line critics often attribute to it: that all heterosexual intercourse is rape. That statement does not appear in the text, and Dworkin herself rejected that reading, arguing that sex should be reciprocal and not an act of aggression. Her defenders argue the confusion comes from reading her comparisons out of context; critics have seen in the work a hostility toward ordinary sexuality. Its influence on debates about sexuality and power within feminism of the 1980s and 1990s is considerable.