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dalyandot's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
claratwentyone's review against another edition
I just couldn’t get through it unfortunately
maya69's review against another edition
5.0
genuinely life changing. required so much rumination and recalibration. stunningly written, extensively researched, incisive and revelatory all at once. a masterpiece of feminist literature
lattelibrarian's review against another edition
5.0
Wow, this book opens up with a hell of a statement: all heterosexual intercourse is rape. At first I was like, huh, that seems a little overkill, even I wouldn't go that far. But then Andrea Dworkin deconstructs biology, the concept of consent, porn, politics, power over the course of multiple essays. Can we really consent to something that we've been groomed for our entire lives? Can we ever consent when biologically, it is the man who has consistently had the power, when it is the man who dominates our lives both domestically, socially, and politically?
When sex is based on inequality, it sometimes becomes difficult to question longlasting traditions of intercourse, dating, and marriage. When is sex expected and why? Are women ever truly okay with it? Would we still be okay with it if not for the ways in which we'd been raised?
And men, the perpetrators, even regardless of how violent and manipulative they are, have no worries with their position as powerful in the office, home, street, or bedroom. In fact, they're so powerful that they dominate the notions of what women should look like, how they should act, how they should perform in bed an leading up to it. And when anything can be construed as potentially sexy or attractive, aren't all women just asking for it? Even when they are? And if this is the case, how can anything be consensual, and how can anything not be considered rape?
Overall, this is a powerful book that asks and demands answers to difficult questions even today's leading feminist scholars are unwilling to ask in the light of the sex positivity movement. This, in my opinion, is a necessary read, and one that should be required for all feminists.
Review cross-listed here!
When sex is based on inequality, it sometimes becomes difficult to question longlasting traditions of intercourse, dating, and marriage. When is sex expected and why? Are women ever truly okay with it? Would we still be okay with it if not for the ways in which we'd been raised?
And men, the perpetrators, even regardless of how violent and manipulative they are, have no worries with their position as powerful in the office, home, street, or bedroom. In fact, they're so powerful that they dominate the notions of what women should look like, how they should act, how they should perform in bed an leading up to it. And when anything can be construed as potentially sexy or attractive, aren't all women just asking for it? Even when they are? And if this is the case, how can anything be consensual, and how can anything not be considered rape?
Overall, this is a powerful book that asks and demands answers to difficult questions even today's leading feminist scholars are unwilling to ask in the light of the sex positivity movement. This, in my opinion, is a necessary read, and one that should be required for all feminists.
Review cross-listed here!
samue_l's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
2.75
To read this book, for the male gaze, would be to stare directly into the sun.
And it is a book every man should read, because men ought to be confronted with the reality of their status with regard to intercourse—privileged, possessive, and in power through several very real, yet to many men vague and trivial, dimensions of our culture, legislation, and society. This is not a comfortable reality, for anyone who acknowledges it. Nor is it nebulous, if you take the time to engage thoughtfully with the text. But I can only write this reflection as someone with that status, so certainly my views will be colored differently than those of the author and any reader who does not identify as straight and cis and man. And the thing about this status retained by straight cis men is that, in most cases, they personally have done nothing active to obtain it. We only perpetuate it, oblivious to our position, by acting as agents of the status quo.
Dworkin exhibits to the reader's abhorrence the violence of normal behavior. She isn't talking about acute violence such as an instance of battery, although that too lies under the canopy of abuse. No, Dworkin speaks of hybrid warfare, waged and raged against women and their bodies on civil, cultural, historical, and inter-and-intrapersonal planes, as well as the physical. She deconstructs the interaction we call sex and shows us its qualities. And underneath the fervor is a complicated, abject brutality. Whatever your opinion of the text, her message is clear: fucking's fucked up. Our conceptions of intercourse have been constructed by forces that overlay our thinking, and our thinking directs our behavior. And it doesn't take the sharpest knife in the kitchen to stab a 20th Century history book in a place where humans behave in heinous ways.
The prose is as violent as the picture Dworkin paints with it. Literature, law, art, biography, and more, are all employed in demonstration of her thesis. She tears down whatever monument of thought you may harbor involving intercourse, and instead of erecting a more ideal conception, she leaves you to lie with the ruins. Intercourse really is an immense project, and while I did crave more elucidation throughout the book, I found it difficult not to admire Dworkin for the work she did here, as it forced me to very seriously consider a new perspective that I otherwise wouldn’t, and probably does for every other reader too.
And it is a book every man should read, because men ought to be confronted with the reality of their status with regard to intercourse—privileged, possessive, and in power through several very real, yet to many men vague and trivial, dimensions of our culture, legislation, and society. This is not a comfortable reality, for anyone who acknowledges it. Nor is it nebulous, if you take the time to engage thoughtfully with the text. But I can only write this reflection as someone with that status, so certainly my views will be colored differently than those of the author and any reader who does not identify as straight and cis and man. And the thing about this status retained by straight cis men is that, in most cases, they personally have done nothing active to obtain it. We only perpetuate it, oblivious to our position, by acting as agents of the status quo.
Dworkin exhibits to the reader's abhorrence the violence of normal behavior. She isn't talking about acute violence such as an instance of battery, although that too lies under the canopy of abuse. No, Dworkin speaks of hybrid warfare, waged and raged against women and their bodies on civil, cultural, historical, and inter-and-intrapersonal planes, as well as the physical. She deconstructs the interaction we call sex and shows us its qualities. And underneath the fervor is a complicated, abject brutality. Whatever your opinion of the text, her message is clear: fucking's fucked up. Our conceptions of intercourse have been constructed by forces that overlay our thinking, and our thinking directs our behavior. And it doesn't take the sharpest knife in the kitchen to stab a 20th Century history book in a place where humans behave in heinous ways.
The prose is as violent as the picture Dworkin paints with it. Literature, law, art, biography, and more, are all employed in demonstration of her thesis. She tears down whatever monument of thought you may harbor involving intercourse, and instead of erecting a more ideal conception, she leaves you to lie with the ruins. Intercourse really is an immense project, and while I did crave more elucidation throughout the book, I found it difficult not to admire Dworkin for the work she did here, as it forced me to very seriously consider a new perspective that I otherwise wouldn’t, and probably does for every other reader too.