Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin

women to survive their own nakedness, which is repellent to them, “terribly piteous. ” 41 The box man cuts off the electricity when the woman dresses because then “the effect of her clothes too will end. If she cannot be seen, that will be the same as her being naked. ” 42 Any means to have her naked is justified because having her naked is life. In the dark, “[s]he will again become gentle. ” 43 He did not want to kill her—“to gouge out her eyes or anything like that” 44 —so he made a prison rather than let her go, locked her in a barricaded building in the dark; and now he waits for her to find him. In the dark she will seem naked, if he looks but does not touch.
    The men, civilized, in shells of identity and abstraction, are imprisoned in loneliness, unable to break out of their selfpreoccupation. They look, but what they see can only be known through undefended touch, the person naked inside and out. The women are the escape route from mental selfabsorption into reality: they are the world, connection, contact, touch, feeling, what is real, the physical, what is true outside the frenetic self-involvement of the men, the convulsions of their passionate self-regard. Wanting a woman to be naked with, wanting to be skinless with and through her, inside her with no boundaries, is “breaking down the barriers of sex and bursting through my own vileness. ” 45 Failing means that the man is “left alone with my loneliness ” 46 The skinless fucking may be like “[t]he appetite of meat-eating animals... coarse, voracious, ” 47 but wanting fucking without barriers and wanting preservation of self at the same time leaves men“surfeited with loneliness” 48 The man tries in vain to hold love together: “holding the broken glass together, I barely preserved its form. ” 49 He wants love, but on his terms. Unable to transcend ego, to be naked inside and out, or being left alone because passion is burnt out and “when it is burnt out it is over in an instant, ” 50 the men use violence—capture, murder, violent revenge. Alienated because of their self-absorption, their thoughts of women are saturated with violence; they dream of violence when they think of the woman they want—spikes through her body, fangs in her neck, cannibalism (“First I shall woo the girl [sic] boldly, and if I am refused... I shall kill her and over a period of days I shall enjoy eating her corpse.... I shall literally put her in my mouth, chew on her, relish her with my tongue. I have already dreamed time and time again of eating her. ”). 51 Their dreams of her, rooted in their alienation from her, are extravagantly sadistic, this mental violence characterizing their abstracted, self-involved sexual desire. They are also psychologically cruel, users of others, inflicting deep emotional pain, the cruelty being an inevitable part of their intense self-obsession. The wife of the man in the mask writes him that, as a result of his manipulations of her, she feels “as if I had been forced onto an operating table... and hacked up indiscriminately with a hundred different knives and scissors, even the uses of which were incomprehensible. ” 52 The violence that the men dream and the violence that they do ensures that they are lonely forever. Only the man in the dunes is finally in a state resembling happiness, having been beaten up by the woman when he tried to rape her: having a chance now because he failed.
     

chapter three
    STIGMA
     
     
    S T IGMA COMES FROM THE LATIN FOR “MARK,” THE GREEK for “tattoo”; its archaic meaning is “a scar left by a hot iron ” a brand; its modern meaning is a “mark of shame or discredit” or “an identifying mark or characteristic. ” 1 The plural, stigmata, commonly refers to marks or wounds like the ones on the crucified Christ, suggesting great punishment, great suffering, perhaps even great guilt.
    Inside a person, sexual desire—or need or compulsion—is sometimes