Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

uality, the basis for corporeal privacy and also the point ofcontact for everything outside the self. It is a conductor of allfeeling. Every time the skin is touched, one feels. All feelingpasses through it, outside to inside. The skin is electric, hot,cold, opaque, translucent, youth, age, sensitive to every whisperof wind, chill, heat. The skin is our human mask; it iswhat one can touch of another person, what one sees, howone is seen. It is the formal limits of a body, a person, and theonly bridge to human contact that is physical and direct. Especially,it is both identity and sex, what one is and what onefeels in the realm of the sensual, being and passion, wherethe self meets the world— intercourse being, ultimately, theself in the act of meeting the world. The other person embodiesnot one’s own privacy, but everything outside it: “ Tolose you would be symbolic of losing the world, ” 2says Abe’sman in love.“ Naked came I from my mother’s womb, ” says Job, “ andnaked shall I return” (Job 1: 21). Naked, stripped down to theelemental human, fragile, exposed and delicate, in birth and insex and in death, the human condition is minimally thisnakedness; being human is also, as Leo Steinberg writes in hisessay on the sexuality of Christ as portrayed in many paintings,“ the condition of being both deathbound and sexed. ”3Sex is the dim echo of that original nakedness, primal, beforeanything else that is also human; later, isolated in an identity,hidden by it, insensate because of it, one is a social human beingruled by conformity and convention, not naked. Intercourserecalls the first nakedness, innocent and basic, but theinnocence itself is not recoverable; the nakedness is neveragain synonymous with being human. One’s skin takes on asocial function— even naked, one is not purely naked; social