Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

everything, including his skin; it is a pervasive physical reality,coarse, intensifying every physical feeling and movement,every moment of survival; he has sex with the woman that isdifferent from the sex in civilization; he tries to escape, fightsthe sand, is brought back; the hole is the woman, being in it islike being in her; the sand is the burying, enveloping, suffocating,killing quality of sex with a woman, being surrounded byher; the sand on the skin, in the mouth, on her labia, brings theskin to life, to feeling, to intensity, to sex that is not alienated orabstract; in the end, the man chooses to stay in the hole in thedune with the woman.In The Face of Another, a man has lost the skin on his face;the socially tame sex he has with his wife stops because she isrepelled; he makes a mask, the face of another, and sleeps withher; he wants to know her, he wants sex beyond the constraintsof his identity, but first his real face, then his mask, keep it fromhappening; his wife has sex with the mask, but it is not breakthroughor abandonment; in the end, she has known him allalong— it is his selfishness, she says, that keeps him from gettingoutside his skin and near her; he insists it is the mask. Toovercome the humiliation of having been known by her, fuckedyet kept at a distance, he shoots her.In Abe’s The Box Man, a man gives up society and lives in abox; the box is his skin; he gives up the box finally to have sexwith a woman; they are skinless together—he is skinless withouthis box, she is skinless naked; when she dresses, their loveis over, which is unbearable, so he locks her in the buildingwhere they have been living and cuts off the electricity so thatin the dark it will be as if she were naked. In the end, he hascut off all routes of escape and he sits in the dark waiting forher to find him.