Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

identity becomes a new, tough, impermeable skin; one’snakedness is covered over by layers of social self and emotionalpain, rituals and rules, habits of being that are antithetical toany pure experience of being. Questions of what is human,what is being, suggest questions of what is naked, what issexed. Questions of metaphysics are questions of sex: especiallybecause in intercourse two separate people physicallyfuse; break out of the prison of separateness and into theprison of physical need for another; experience the pain of beingseparate and then the pain of not being separate enough.Intercourse creates a need for society, for humans outside oneself;it pushes one toward others, who are in the world, separate,different. But that society interposes itself—by creatingthe necessity for identity, by making rules—between two humans,keeping them separate, even during intercourse. Thistension is painful, lonely—apart or in sex, the sex beingdoomed by the necessity, the inevitability, of becoming separate,absolutely separate, again. The skin mediates betweenseparation and fusion. “Assuming that man has a soul, ” writesAbe in The Woman in the Dunes, “it must, in all likelihood, behoused in the skin” ; the skin is “a soft, downlike bandage forthe soul. ”4Abe asks what it means to be human in human skin,and what it means to love, past the boundaries of identity. Inhis work, sexual intercourse is a metaphor for the human condition,and it is also, as a literal, physical experience, at theheart of human life and meaning.In The Woman in the Dunes, a man gets lost in sand dunesand is trapped with a woman in a deep hole in the dunes whereshe lives; he is kept prisoner there, to keep clearing away thesand (“4The village keeps going because we never let up clearingaway the sand. . . ”’), 5to have sex with her; the sand rots