The first part of Intercourse is organised as a series of “readings”: of Tolstoy, Kobo Abe, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin and Isaac Bashevis Singer. The technique of these readings is one of doubling commentary. Dworkin circles her texts, homing in; repeating, restating, setting markers. This technique enables a disconcerting equivocation between “use” and “mention”: the commentary presents a series of unassignable statements, which are neither strictly what “Tolstoy says” nor simply what “Dworkin says”, but are a kind of remonstration between them. Of these authors, Dworkin says “I use them; I cut and slice into them in order to exhibit them”, in order to create “an intellectual and imaginative environment in which you can see them”.

The tendency of hostile readers has been to assume that “Dworkin says” all that her text says, and that her use of these authors simply affords her a kind of deniability for claims so outrageous and malicious that even she cannot sincerely stand behind them. This is one of a number of ways in which people have refused to read Dworkin as a writer, being satisfied with their apprehension of a small set of “Dworkin’s claims” - absurd, offensive, ridiculous, every one - for which they take Intercourse to be merely a rather intellectually show-offy sort of manifesto. Really, why bother with all this literary criticism? Get to the bit where you say all sex is rape already. Well, not say: imply. Slippery bitch, why can’t you just come out and say what we say you mean?

(I was very struck by the similarity with the way people refused to read Derrida, confidently dismissing “Derrida’s claims”, and declaring his texts “almost unreadable” because they failed to state such “claims” with unequivocal authorial directness. Not only does he say these ridiculous things, he doesn’t even say them! Derrida’s practice of doubling commentary, his ghosting of an unassignable “middle voice” between his own and that of the text under discussion, parallels Dworkin’s in some respects. Both have something in common, although Derrida disowned any direct connection, with Talmudic scholarship, in particular midrash).

So, those outrageous claims? Well, here’s a promising specimen: “intercourse distorts and ultimately destroys any potential human equality between men and women by turning women into objects and men into exploiters”. Who says that? It is, in point of fact, Dworkin’s summary of the argument of one of Tolstoy’s characters - the husband / murderer in The Kreutzer Sonata - who believes that only chastity can bring to an end the sexual tragedy of human existence. Tolstoy is not being summoned here as an authority, whose insight would validate Dworkin’s own, but exhibited. A man whose marital relations were, by his own and his wife’s separate accounts, marked by sexual greed, compulsion and violence, observes that intercourse as understood and practiced by him is destructive of their mutual humanity. He does so by means of a fiction in which a character is only able to recognise his wife’s humanity after he has murdered her, after she has ceased to be the object of his sexual requirements, so that the murder is only retroactively understood as a tragedy, as the taking of a valuable human life.

Taken as an excerpt from the Annals of Male Sexual Solipsism, volume 27, this statement says nothing that a regular reader of that publication would find especially surprising. Male hatred of sex, of sexual dependency, of the dependency of exploiters on those whom they exploit, is copiously and variously documented. There is a vast anti-feminist literature, the original “rape culture” of the Western intellectual tradition, in which compulsion and loathing go hand-in-hand. Dworkin’s first offense is simply to point this out; to say that this view - the exploiter’s view - of what sex is, of what the sexual destinies of men and women are, is incompatible with any vision of human equality for women. It has to be destroyed, and in order for it to be destroyed it is necessary not only that the attitudes of the exploiters be changed but also that exploitation itself should end.