Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

flowed towards Yves. It was this violence w hich made himgentle, for it frightened him . 50The tenderness is the inner violence transformed by love andself-knowledge into complex and compassionate passion; andthe passion is gentle in that it does not destroy.Fucking as communion is larger than an individual personality;it is a radical experience of seeing and knowing, experiencingpossibilities within one that had been hidden.Vivaldo, the white lover of Ida, Rufus’s sister, has sex withEric that brings him, finally, face-to-face with a truth he hasdenied, and this enables him to face his other failures of loveand courage:He felt that he had stepped off a precipice into an air whichheld him inexorably up, as the salt sea holds the swimmer:and seemed to see. . . into the bottom o f his heart, that heartwhich contained all possibilities that he could name and yetothers that he could not name.... He moaned and his thighs,like the thighs o f a woman, loosened, he thrust upward as Ericthrust dow n. 51It is this first real experience of being loved— not doing it butbeing the beloved— that helps to enable him, later, to face Ida,who is being destroyed by his refusal to face hard truths, hisinability to give the gift of himself because he does not dareknow himself. In particular, this act of communion helpedhim to understand in precisely what way, and at what cost, hehad abandoned Rufus: “ ; I loved Rufus, I loved him, I didn’twant him to die. But when he was dead, I thought about