Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

— A sultry wind is blowing between you and me now. A sensual,burning wind is blowing around us.. . . In the force o fthe wind and in the heat I seem to have lost my sense o f time.But in any case I realize too that the direction o f the windwill probably change. Suddenly it will turn into a cool westerlywind. And then this hot wind will be stripped away from myskin like a mirage, and I shall not even be able to recollect it.Yes, the hot wind is too violent. Within itself is concealed thepremonition o f its end. 12The heat envelops them, outside time; and when love is gone,there will be no memory of it, no way of bringing it backthrough memory either, it will have the quality of a hallucinationthat has disappeared; a cool wind will come, the skin willbe stripped of the heat—as if the heat would be forcibly tornfrom the skin—and once stripped of the heat, it will be strippedof memory; and this end, this cool wind and no memory andthe heat being stripped from the skin, is implicit in the intensityand the violence of the experience; the end of passionatelove is built into its very intensity.Being enveloped, weighted down by something outside onethat is overwhelmingly encompassing, is the experience of thissexual passion outside identity, the passion outside the controlof the ego, which is the servant of routinized civilization. InThe Woman in the Dunes, the captive is outraged by the indifferenceof the dunes and its people to his established identity:“Was it permissible to snare, exactly like a mouse or insect, aman who had his certificate of medical insurance, someonewho had paid his taxes, who was employed, and whose familyrecords were in order? ” 13The animal quality of life, with humansliving in the unmediated brutality of the real physical