Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

and there he is—Stanley Kowalski! —survivor of the stone age!Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle! Andyou—you here— waiting for him! Maybe he’ll strike you ormaybe grunt and kiss you! That is, if kisses have been discoveredyet! Night falls and the other apes gather! There in frontof the cave, all grunting like him, and swilling and gnawingand hulking! His poker night!. . . Maybe we are a long wayfrom being made in God’s image, but Stella! —my sister—there has been some progress since then! Such things as art—as poetry and music—such kinds of new light have come intothe world since then! In some kinds of people some tendererfeelings have had some little beginning! That we have got tomake growl And cling to, and hold as our flag! In this darkmarch toward whatever it is we’re approaching.. . . Don’t—don’t hang back with the brutes! 17[first two ellipses mine; thirdellipsis Williams’s]While Williams persistently parodies the refinements of ladies,their yearnings for the ineffable, their pretensions of civilizationand culture against the voraciousness of their sexual appetites,he is also on their side— on the side of art, a sensibility; and thequestion is, how does a person with a sensibility survive beingdriven by the excesses and demands of that very sensibility intosex? Stanley’s animal sexuality leaves him virtually untouchedby the meaning of any experience because he has no interior life,he is invulnerable to consequences, he has no memory past sensation.He is ordinary. Despite the radiant intensity of his sexuality,despite his wife’s genteel refinement, despite the intensity ofthe sex between them, they are like everyone else. “When wefirst met, ” Stanley says to Stella, “me and you, you thought I wascommon. How right you was, baby. I was common as dirt. You