Signor Cock

Letters

Vol. 9 No. 14 · 23 July 1987

From Michael Moorcock

SIR: I have just read Roy Porter’s oafish piece inspired by Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse (LRB, 25 June). I have read nothing as shameful’, as pompous or as crudely misleading in a literary journal. Its language and form are reminiscent of the kind of hectoring, bullyboy stuff one used to read in Action and which one still finds in National Front periodicals. In their case the insults were directed at Jews and Blacks. Roy Porter seems to feel equally confident in directing his insults at a woman.

I have read Intercourse. I am the only person quoted on the jacket who is not a woman. Apart from Robin Morgan I am the only person not quoted by Porter. The chief part of the book examines the work of five writers (Tolstoy, Abe, Tennessee Williams, Baldwin, Singer) whom Dworkin admires. She discusses with a fair amount of sympathetic understanding the dichotomy these writers felt between, for instance, the morality expressed in their work and the injustice they realised existed in their personal relations with women. At no point does Dworkin suggest there is anything wrong with sexual intercourse. At no point does she express any belief in biological determinism. Her polemics are constantly prefaced with such words as ‘In a male-dominated society …’ She is neither man-hating nor does she in any sense blame women for being subject to ‘male imperialism’. She does quote male writers who equate conventional sexual intercourse with domination of women, who admit that they use sex to control women, who refer to their relations with women in terms of ‘conquest’, ‘occupation’ and ‘invasion’. She discusses male hatred of women (see Male Fantasies by Klaus Theweleit for further discussin and evidence of this). The tone of her book, though angry, is reasoned and it is humane. Dworkin suggests there might be fresh ways of approaching the act of sexual intercourse. Since Porter fails to quote me I shall repeat what I have already said about the book. Dworkin is one of the great radical thinkers of our time. Any man who ignores what she has to say is refusing the possibility of a dramatically better world where women and men may at last find genuine equality – and enjoy an immense and lasting pleasure in their mutual sensuality. Why didn’t it suit Porter to quote that? He quoted virtually nothing from the book and what he did quote was completely out of context.

I believe Intercourse to be a very important book and I think many people will eventually regard it as such. Meanwhile for you to allow space to someone’s panicky and misogynistic ravings is demeaning to the LRB and to its readers. I’m saddened and outraged that you’ve seen fit to publish such a low level of argument. I seriously doubt you would have published so contemptible a piece had it been directed at a male writer and must therefore suppose that you not only condone but applaud the expression of Porter’s mindless bigotry.

Michael Moorcock
London WC1

Roy Porter writes: Mindless bigotry is indeed the issue. But who is the mindless bigot? The author whose book is full of statements like ‘In the world of real life … men use the penis to deliver death to women … The women are raped as adults or as children; prostituted; fucked, then murdered; murdered then fucked,’ and whose concluding sentence states that men ‘are supposed to slice us up the middle, leaving us in parts on the bed’; or the reviewer who protests against this?

From Bruno Nightingale

SIR. In his jocund review of Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse, Roy Porter discusses her view of the sexual act as an invasion of bodily integrity, and muses parenthetically: ‘Taken to its logical extreme, it would make dentistry the natural target of her next diatribe.’ In Philip Roth’s The Counterlife Henry Zuckerman the dentist, while beginning to seduce his assistant, says:

Most people, unlike you, will never tell you what their mouth means. If they’re frightened of dental work it’s sometimes because of some frightening experience early on, but primarily it’s because of what the mouth means. Anyone touching it is either an invader or a helper. To get them from thinking that someone working on them is invading them, to the idea that you are helping them on to something good, is almost like having a sexual experience. For most people, the mouth is secret, it’s their hiding place. Just like the genitals. You have to remember that embryologically the mouth is related to the genitals.

Perhaps the dentists among your readership would care to probe further?

Bruno Nightingale
London SE22

Vol. 9 No. 17 · 1 October 1987

From Parina Stiakaki

SIR: I find myself compelled as a woman and as a feminist (at least I used to think of myself as one) to put in a good word for Roy Porter’s review of Andrea Dworkin’s book (LRB, 25 June). I find it utterly disheartening that after the brilliant writing and thinking of the Seventies (hallmarks of which were Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Germaine Greer’s Female Eunuch) prominent feminist writing (the thinking presumably has left us) should have degenerated into the narrow-minded, bigoted sterility represented by this kind of work: work permeated by hate, enmity and vengefulness – an attitude, to my mind, worse even than the one it is purportedly condemning. When the act of the rapist is so facilely equated with the lover’s or husband’s embrace, what is happening other than a thorough exoneration of the violent maniac? And what is all this rubbish about insertion of the penis being an invasion? To equate rape with the act of making love is to distort utterly the very essence of life, which culminates in the coming together of man and woman. To think of this merely as the penis violating the body is to disregard the supreme pleasure and ecstasy, the rushing of blood, the warm embrace, the rippling of skin and so on, fully enjoyed by the female of the species (and often to a greater height than the male) during the act of love.

The propagation of these warped notions, expressing violent hate and hostility for our natural counterparts and partners in life, is not only sterile and perverted, but also makes painfully clear the degeneration of the philosophical movement that could have led to repairing the damage already caused between the sexes, instead of making it all so much worse by producing an ugly and distorted mirror image of what it was you were initially against.

Parina Stiakaki
Crete

Vol. 9 No. 20 · 12 November 1987

From Sarah Lefanu

SIR: Like your correspondent Parina Stiakaki (Letters, 1 October), I find myself compelled to write on the subject of Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse, but my aim is to counter the gross distortions that appeared in Roy Porter’s review of the book (LRB, 25 June) and your correspondent’s accusations of its ‘narrow-minded, bigoted sterility’ and its ‘warped notions’ that express ‘violent hate and hostility’ towards men. I am amazed that Andrea Dworkin’s careful arguments can produce such reactions of apparent detestation. Your readers may perhaps be surprised to learn that Intercourse offers a detailed analysis of the history of and meanings given to sexual intercourse in the works and lives of writers such as Tolstoy, Flaubert, James Baldwin and Isaac Bashevis Singer; it explores male fears of women’s autonomy through such historical figures as Joan of Arc; it charts the history of the control of women’s sexuality and the denial of their freedom through centuries of religious and secular law. All this Dworkin achieves with scholarly precision and, dare I say it, with compassion and wit. Examples of this last can be found in the aptness of her many quotations: two marvellously funny, and fearful, examples, being George Bernard Shaw on Joan of Arc’s physical unattractiveness and Somerset Maugham on his Professor of Gynaecology’s definition of woman (‘an animal that micturates once a day, defecates once a week, menstruates once a month, parturates once a year and copulates whenever she has the opportunity’). ‘Were she loved sufficiently,’ comments Dworkin, ‘she could not be despised so much.’ I do not think that Dworkin’s comment expresses ‘hate, enmity and vengefulness’.

Roy Porter suggested that this book is an insult to women, and this is echoed by Parina Stiakaki, who, it seems, was so horrified by it that she was forced to recant her feminism (one can assume this was not an issue for Porter). Dworkin’s crime is to politicise sexual intercourse, and to demand that we look at the relationship between intercourse and the low status of women. As she says, intercourse ‘occurs in a context of a power relation that is pervasive and incontrovertible’. Such an analysis poses an enormous threat to the security offered by the belief that sexual relationships are magically separate from the outside world. I am forced to interpret the hatred and contempt heaped upon Andrea Dworkin in the pages of your magazine as a defensive mechanism against such a threat. As a woman, a heterosexual and a feminist, I find no insult in Andrea Dworkin’s book. It may be uncomfortable, some of it disturbing, but I can only admire her passionate concern for women’s freedom and self-respect and feel challenged by her questioning of the most intimate aspects of our lives. I would urge your readers to give Intercourse a fair hearing, and not be put off by the heightened emotionalism with which it has been greeted.

Sarah Lefanu
Bristol

From Mark Hussey

SIR: Intercourse seems to me a brave but too didactic work, written in a tone that in no sense justifies such an egregious ad feminam assault (LRB, 25 June). It seems that in England no more than here can Dworkin’s writing and ideas be responded to. This is a sad loss as she is a challenging and innovative thinker. Having subscribed to LRB since its first appearance during the Times strike, I always look forward to it: I just hope Porter either grows up or isn’t asked to review again.

Mark Hussey
New York