SOURCE: "Staying Outside the Skin," in Times Literary Supplement, October 16, 1987, p. 1129.

In the following review, Sage provides tempered criticism of Intercourse.

By the time Swift's Gulliver paddles away from Houyhnhnm-land in his Yahoo-skin canoe, he is so consumed with self-disgust and self-hatred (Yahoo-hatred) that it seems he has only two alternatives—to skin himself, to jump out of his skin, or (the one he chooses) to loathe everyone else, and particularly (when he gets home) his nearest and dearest, from whose foul closeness he escapes to the stable to inhale the horses. Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse is a book that belongs in a similar landscape of extremity. It's about skinlessness, about coming home to revulsion:

In Amerika, there is the nearly universal conviction—or so it appears—that sex (fucking) is good and that liking it is right: morally right; a sign of human health; nearly a standard of...