Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin
Published 1987 · 315 pages · 85,662 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Intercourse to read?
Intercourse scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 60 out of 100
- Precise and uncompromising prose; not jargon-heavy but rhetorically forceful.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- Abstract political and philosophical claims grounded in specific literary readings.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- Dense with literary quotation, argument, and interpretive claim.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Direct polemic, though literary examples create argumentative texture.
- Symbolic density: 16 out of 100
- Intercourse functions as both literal subject and structural metaphor throughout.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Deliberately unironic; Dworkin avoids rhetorical hedging.
- Resolution withholding: 14 out of 100
- The argument drives toward its conclusions without false ambiguity.
- Structural complexity: 32 out of 100
- Organized by author and text, building a cumulative thematic case.
How Intercourse is regarded
Intercourse holds a literary regard score of 66 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.