Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

intercourse stops, when one person is no longer naked, it is asif the skin of the other had in fact been torn off.Being naked takes on different values, according to the selfconsciousnessof the one who is naked; or according to theconsciousness of the one who is looking at the nakedness. Themen are tortured in their minds by the meaning of being naked,especially by the literal nakedness of women but also by theirown nakedness: what it means to be seen and to be vulnerable.The nakedness of the women they look at, interpret, desire, associatewith acts of violence they want to commit. The womenare at ease being naked. The woman in the dunes, sleepingwhen the man is first there, has covered her face with a towel,but she is naked, except for the light layer of sand that eventuallycovers her body. He thinks that her nakedness is a sexualprovocation, but then, struck by the physical reality of his environment—thesand—decides that “ [h]is interpretation of thewoman’s nakedness would seem to be too arbitrary. ”33 Shemight not want to seduce him; instead her nakedness might bean ordinary part of her ordinary life, “seeing that she had tosleep during the day and, what was more, in a bowl of burningsand. ”34 He too, he thinks, would choose to be naked if hecould. The woman loved by the box man is naked “but shedoesn’t seem to be at all. Being naked suits her too well. ”35Thewife of the man in the mask is placid, stolid, when naked; heimputes indecency and vileness to her, but being naked doesnot unnerve or expose her. To the men, a woman’s nakednessis “a nakedness beyond mere nudity. ”36Being naked does unnerve the men: it is an ordeal; and beinglooked at is nearly a terror. The men seem to distractthemselves from their own nakedness by looking at women inan abstracting or fetishizing way; the voyeurism, the displaced