She had a particular gift for conveying abstract concepts through acute, unusual metaphors. Perhaps the most prominent quality of Dworkin's writing is its ferocity: its relentless intellectual and ideological confidence, its refusal to collapse into what Dworkin called 'the quintessential feminine pose.' Though she bragged she used 'language without its ever becoming decorative or pretty,' there is elegance as well as aggression in Dworkin's sentences. If this is the first book of hers you've encountered, brace yourself-she had a voice like no other. Dworkin’s argument, she points out, is the stickiest question of feminism: Can a woman fight the power when he shares her bed? Read Excerpt (This argument was quickly-and falsely-simplified to “all sex is rape” in the public arena, adding fire to Dworkin’s already radical persona.) In her introduction to this twentieth-anniversary edition of Intercourse, Ariel Levy, the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, discusses the circumstances of Dworkin’s untimely death in the spring of 2005, and the enormous impact of her life and work. In it, Dworkin argues that in a male supremacist society, sex between men and women constitutes a central part of women’s subordination to men. Intercourse enraged as many readers as it inspired when it was first published in 1987. Now the book that she’s best known for-in which she provoked the argument that ultimately split apart the feminist movement-is being reissued for the young women and men of the twenty-first century. The power of her writing, the passion of her ideals, and the ferocity of her intellect have spurred the arguments and activism of two generations of feminists. Andrea Dworkin, once called “Feminism’s Malcolm X,” has been worshipped, reviled, criticized, and analyzed-but never ignored.

Right-Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin