Libertarians and liberals focus their ruinous and combined offensives on love. The former champions the rights of the democratic individual to pleasure in all its forms, without seeing that, in a world governed by the dictatorship of the market, they serve as trailblazers for pornography, which is one of the largest planetary industries. The latter see love as a contract between two free and equal individuals, which comes down to wondering whether the advantages that one person obtains equitably balance those obtained by the other. In each case, we remain within the doctrine according to which everything that exists is a matter of arbitration between individual interests. The only difference between libertarians and liberals, who both take the satisfaction of individuals as their only norm, is that the former refer to desire, whereas the latter refer to demand.

Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy

It’s a tall order: the kind of demand an adolescent would make. Dworkin’s stance in Intercourse is somewhat like that of a questioning adolescent interrogating the “adult” world, demanding that it account for itself. She doesn’t have to be fair. She wants the truth. Specifically, she wants the truth about sex, about which the adult world speaks with a forked tongue, alternately or simultaneously warning and exhorting, inciting and forbidding. How can what the world says about sex be reconciled with what the adolescent experiences?

Dworkin had experienced rape, battery, prostitution and medicalised sexual torture. She had heard a lot of women’s stories, all of them unbearable. People recognised her, came up to her and told her the worst. Sadness and rage. The motif of heartbreak is present in Dworkin’s work from very early on. The essential choice for her is between heartbreak and heartlessness. What the world says about sex is an expression of its heartlessness: not its lack of emotion as such - it is as full of emotion as a circus barker’s spiel - but its inability to signify the heartbreak of sexual violence. The frequent morbidity of Dworkin’s writing is not indulgent, and it is not exhibitionism. It is a necessary factor in her counter-erotics, which concentrates itself at times into a ferocious and implacable commination against heartlessness.

Against sexual boosterism; against complicity; against settling for what you can get and letting the devil take the hindmost. Against the accommodations that adults make as adults, in becoming adult, in joining the adult world. Dworkin’s work infuriates grown-ups, provokes angry and impatient dismissal. Love must be reinvented - whoever has time for that? This dreadful imperative obstructs the satisfaction of individuals, which depends on the reliability of self-interest, of whatever turns you on. It is intolerant of individual choice, insofar as the latter is formatted by conventions that it seeks to overthrow. It interrupts the discourse of self-justification - the discourse that seeks to determine when it is “OK” to have sex, to ratify individual entitlement to enjoyment - with the demands of an irreducible heteronomy. Small wonder that Dworkin was reviled as anti-sex, anti-male, anti-female. “I am a radical feminist”, she wrote. “Not the fun kind”.