Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

showed me the snapshot of the place with the columns. I pulledyou down off them columns and how you loved it. . . Andwasn’t we happy together. . . ” 18They have a habitual life offucking and violence that blends into the common neighborhoodlife around them. They are not marked by sex; they are notoutsiders; despite what is intended to be the staggering sexualappeal of the actor who plays Stanley, they are not different.They conform perfectly to the patterns of the married peoplearound them. The couple upstairs will have the same drama ofbattery and fucking in the course of the play; Stanley and Stellaare a younger version, not different in quality or kind. Blanche isdifferent. Blanche is marked, stigmatized, by her capacity to feelinside; by loneliness, vulnerability, despair; by her need for sexin conflict with her capacity for love; by her need for sex in conflictwith what are the immediate needs of survival—passing as areal lady, not someone shopworn and used up, and marryingMitch, Stanley’s staid companion. Blanche is a displaced person,a refugee in a solitary migration, driven from where she wasby the cacophony of men she had—and their voices follow hernow, reaching Stanley, damning her as a whore; she is displacedby the desire that carried her to u[w]here I’m not wanted andwhere I’m ashamed to be. ” 19Being stigmatized means beingmarked by an inner capacity for feeling; put against Stanley’sanimal sexuality, it emerges as a distinctly human capacity forsuffering the internal human consequences of sex and love,especially loneliness and remorse. There is an indelible sorrow,perhaps a distinctly human incapacity to heal, because somekinds of pain do not lessen in the human heart:Yes, I had many intimacies with strangers. After the death o fAllan— intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill