Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

logic, no purpose. In this vision of sex, while the man is bycontemporary standards emasculated by the failed rape, in factrape is supposed to fail. Men are not supposed to accomplishit. They are supposed to give in, to capitulate, to surrender: tothe sand—to life moving without regard for their specialness orindividuality, their fiefdoms of personality and power; to thenecessities of the woman’s life in the dunes—work, sex, ahome, the common goal of keeping the community from beingdestroyed by the sand. The sex is not cynical or contaminatedby voyeurism; but it is only realizable in a world of dangerouslyunsentimental physicality. Touch, then, becomes what is distinctly,irreducibly human; the meaning of being human. Thisessential human need is met by an equal human capacity totouch, but that capacity is lost in a false physical world of manmadeartifacts and a false psychological world of man-made abstractions.The superiority of the woman, like the superiorityof the sand, is in her simplicity of means, her quiet and patientendurance, the unselfconsciousness of her touch, its ruthlesssimplicity. She is not abstract, not a silhouette. She lives in herbody, not in his imagination.In The Face of Another, the man is a normal man living in anormal world, except that he has lost the skin on his face; hehas lost his physical identity and the sense of well-being andbelonging that goes with it. He is stranded as absolutely as theman in the dunes, but he is stranded in the middle of his normallife. He wants touch, he wants love, he wants sex, so desperately;he thinks that he has lost his identity, because he haslost his face; but his wife, who knows him even in his mask,leaves him because he is selfish; no loss of physical identityhelps him to transcend his essential obsession with himself;and so she remains unknown to him, someone untouched no