Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

e better than the world. ’”4Being “better than the world ” forthe oppressed, is the nearly impossible prerequisite for compassion,the only means of staying whole as human beings;what the powerless must somehow manage to become, to remain,while carrying a knowledge of cruelty and indifferencethat kills with a momentum of its own.Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance isvalued more— also because the status quo depends on it; butlove depends on self-knowledge, and self-knowledge dependson being able to bear the truth. For Baldwin, in his fiction and inhis essays, * being human means that one pays for everythingone knows and for everything that one refuses to know; thatyou have to, in order to live, finally, make so many difficultand dangerous choices that the one thing you’re really tryingto save is what you lose. A nd what you’re trying to save isyour ability to touch another human being or be touched bythat person. 5This ability to touch and be touched is at stake always, in everychoice toward or away from knowing anything at all about theworld or oneself; and this ability to touch or be touched is thesimple ability to love, so hard to save because hope is so hardto save, especially when it must coexist with knowledge:Yet, hope— the hope that we, human beings, can be better thanwe are— dies hard; perhaps one can no longer live if one allows*The values in the fiction and the essays are very much the same—though the subject of the essays is not fucking—and I have quoted fromboth throughout using the essays to illuminate the world-view in the novels.