Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

The men, civilized, in shells of identity and abstraction, areimprisoned in loneliness, unable to break out of their selfpreoccupation.They look, but what they see can only beknown through undefended touch, the person naked insideand out. The women are the escape route from mental selfabsorptioninto reality: they are the world, connection, contact,touch, feeling, what is real, the physical, what is true outsidethe frenetic self-involvement of the men, the convulsions oftheir passionate self-regard. Wanting a woman to be nakedwith, wanting to be skinless with and through her, inside herwith no boundaries, is “breaking down the barriers of sex andbursting through my own vileness. ”45 Failing means that theman is “left alone with my loneliness ”46The skinless fuckingmay be like “ [t]he appetite of meat-eating animals. . . coarse,voracious, ”47but wanting fucking without barriers and wantingpreservation of self at the same time leaves men “surfeited withloneliness ”48 The man tries in vain to hold love together:“ holding the broken glass together, I barely preserved itsform. ”49He wants love, but on his terms. Unable to transcendego, to be naked inside and out, or being left alone becausepassion is burnt out and “when it is burnt out it is over in aninstant, ” 50 the men use violence— capture, murder, violentrevenge. Alienated because of their self-absorption, theirthoughts of women are saturated with violence; they dream ofviolence when they think of the woman they want— spikesthrough her body, fangs in her neck, cannibalism (“ First I shallwoo the girl [sic] boldly, and if I am refused. . . I shall kill herand over a period of days I shall enjoy eating her corpse.. . .I shall literally put her in my mouth, chew on her, relish herwith my tongue. I have already dreamed time and time again ofeating her. ” ). 51 Their dreams of her, rooted in their alienation