Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

chastity on the part of all— this to achieve a reconciliation betweenmen and women that physical love, with its strong,cruel passion, makes impossible. Repeatedly characterizingintercourse as swinish, Tolstoy’s killer/husband tells howproud he was o f‘“ animal excesses, ” ’ “ ‘these physical excesses,and without in the least considering either her spiritual oreven her physical life. ’” 44 We pretend, he says, that love isideal, exalted, but nature made it shameful and disgusting; weonly pretend that it is not. He feels repulsion for the act andfor the relationship that it creates, these being two parts of awhole, consistently condemned because they are inextricablyintertwined. The sex act and the relationship it constructscannot be separated in his analysis or in his loathing. At firstthere were long periods of lovemaking, followed by periods ofanger, quarrels. The fights were “‘only the consequence of thecessation of sensuality. ’” 45 Their real relationship became“‘cold and hostile, ” ’46but sensuality distorted their perceptionof it, because the hostility would soon be covered up by renewedperiods of physical love. A cynicism begins to characterizetheir relationship. They would make love until‘“ [a]morousness was exhausted by the satisfaction of sensualityand we were left confronting one another in our true relation.. . as two egotists quite alien to each other who wishedto get as much pleasure as possible from each other. ’”47 Theemotions engendered in him by intercourse, during the periodsof it, became extreme: rage, hatred of her caused by thesmallest movement or gesture—pouring the tea in a certainway or smacking her lips. He felt this grandiose rage and hatredin response to trivialities during the periods of physicallovemaking; and when those periods were over, he felt animosity,hostility, and coldness. As the marriage advanced in