Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin Page A

experienced as a stigma, as if it marks the person, as if it can be seen; a great aura emanating from inside; an interior play of light and shadow, vitality and death, wanting and being used up; an identifying mark that is indelible; a badge of desire or experience; a sign that differentiates the individual carrying it, both attracting and repelling others, in the end isolating the marked one, who is destroyed by the intensity and ultimate hopelessness of a sexual calling. The person, made for sex or needing it, devoted to it, marked by it, is a person incarnated restless and wild in the world and defined by fucking: fucking as vocation or compulsion or as an unfulfilled desire not gratified by anything social or conventional or conforming. The stigma is not imposed from outside. Instead, it is part of the charge of the sexuality: an arrogant and aggressive pride (in the sense of hubris) that has a downfall built into it; a pride that leads by its nature—by virtue of its isolating extremity—to self-punishment and self-destruction, to a wearing down of mind and heart, both numb from the indignity of compulsion. In the electricity of the stigma there is a mixture of sexual shamelessness, personal guilt, and a defiance that is unprincipled, not socially meaningful in consequence or intention, determined only by need or desire. Isolation and intensity, panic, restlessness, despair, unbreachable loneliness even, propel the person; the price paid for the obsessed passion is an erosion of innocence: innocence being, in the end, only hope. The pleasure too is part of being marked; having a capacity for what Serafina delle Rose calls “the love which is glory. ” 2 InThe Rose Tattooby Tennessee Williams, Serafina sees her husband’s rose tattoo, which is on his chest, on her own breast after fucking, and she knows that she is pregnant, “that in my body another rose was growing. ” 3 The rose, in Christian symbolism a sign of carnality, is the brand the husband’s lovemaking leaves on the women he fucks, who are obsessed with him, who live for the sex they have with him. His mistress gets a rose tattooed on her breast, in fevered commemoration of his touch. His wife has a vision of a rose tattoo on her breast, his rose tattoo, but the vision is not ethereal:
That night I woke up with a burning pain on me, here, on my left breast! A pain like a needle, quick, quick, hot little stitches. I turned on the light, I uncovered my breast! —On it I saw the rose tattoo of my husband. 4
    The meaning of the tattoo here is not that she is passively possessed; the brand is not intended only as a sign of sexual ownership. Instead, the stigma is mystically transferred to her by a magic that is both carnal and spiritual so that it signifies her essence, an active obsession, a passion that is both relentless and righteous, the whole meaning and praxis of her fierce character. In her memory she owns him through the sex they had, the sensuality and tenderness between them. As she says, deluded, to some women:
“Go on, you do it, you go on the streets and let them drop their sacks of dirty water on you! —I’m satisfied to remember the love of a man that was mine—only mine!Never touched by the hand ofnobody!Nobodybutme!—Just me! ” 5
    Her memory is dense with sexual feeling, a corrugated passion of fulfillment and longing:
I count up the nights I held him all night in my arms, and I can tell you how many. Each night for twelve years. Four thousand—three hundred—and eighty. The number of nights I held him all night in my arms. Sometimes I didn’t sleep, just held him all night in my arms. And I am satisfied with it.... Iknowwhat love-making was... 6
    The mark is on her, not just superficially, but put into her skin with burning needles, and it is also a vision with its mystical component, a sign that she is pregnant, a holy woman who knows a holy fuck; she is the carnal embodiment of a Holy Mother, her devotion to fucking being