“The public censure of women as if we are rabid because we speak without apology about the world in which we live is a strategy of threat that usually works,” wrote Andrea Dworkin in the preface to Intercourse, her incendiary 1987 volume on the politics and power inequities of sex. “Men often react to women’s words—speaking and writing—as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back.”
