The Radical Restoration: Dworkin’s ‘Intercourse’ & Female Sexuality in the Seventeenth-Century

Abstract

Oscar Wilde famously argued that “[e]verything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power” (Michaels, qtd. in Glick, 118). In discussions of sexuality, the symbolic power of the phallus cannot be overstated. Man covets his penis as the nucleus of his being: it represents all he is, and all he may become. It is the tool with which he maintains power. The Restoration period, the age of the “impotency” poem and emergent sexual pseudoscience, offers a wealth of literature neurotically concerned with the symbiotic relationship between intercourse and power. With reference to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), The Earl of Rochester’s The Imperfect Enjoyment (1680), and the anonymously written The London Jilt (1683), this paper will resubstantiate Restoration literature within a modern, radical feminist framework. Using the seminal text of feminist theorist Andrea Dworkin, ‘Intercourse’(1987), it is the ambition of this paper to elucidate the patriarchal ideology which underpins the erotic Restoration text, concluding that works on such topics as intercourse are never just about intercourse, or even pleasure, but, rather, about power.