Free Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin

which the water has been turned off, his member began to fill again. ” 19 The sand causes tenderness, introduces physical intimacy, between him and the woman: “he joined the woman in helping to brush the sand from her body. She laughed in a husky voice. His hands became more and more insistent as they passed from her breasts under her arms and from there around her loins. ” 20 Sand is carnal; his memory of it is carnal; he remembers “the sense of shame in scraping away, with a finger he had wet in his mouth, the sand like burnt rubber that had gathered on the dark lips of her vulva ” 21 And then, there is the final triumph, the final superiority, of the sand and the woman, a physical triumph over him, achieved when he tries to rape her in front of the villagers who have promised to let him go if he lets them watch. She physically beats him and carries him inside, and he recognizes that there is an intrinsic rightness in her victory, his failure:
But the man, beaten and covered with sand, vaguely thought that everything, after all, had gone as it was written it should. The idea was in a corner of his consciousness, like a sodden undergarment, where only the beating of his heart was painfully clear. The woman’s arms, hot as fire, were under his armpits, and the odor of her body was a thorn piercing his nose. He abandoned himself to her hands as if he were a smooth, flat stone in a river bed. It seemed that what remained of him had turned into a liquid and melted into her body. 22
    Sand is the element, the woman is the human being surviving in it; to him, they are dangerous, the hole, the trap; he is afraid of what it is to be sunk in them, without a consciousness in reserve to separate him and keep him afloat, above; they are life; and the woman is life’s logic and purpose—otherwise it has no logic, no purpose. In this vision of sex, while the man is by contemporary standards emasculated by the failed rape, in fact rape is supposed to fail. Men are not supposed to accomplish it. They are supposed to give in, to capitulate, to surrender: to the sand—to life moving without regard for their specialness or individuality, their fiefdoms of personality and power; to the necessities of the woman’s life in the dunes—work, sex, a home, the common goal of keeping the community from being destroyed by the sand. The sex is not cynical or contaminated by voyeurism; but it is only realizable in a world of dangerously unsentimental physicality. Touch, then, becomes what is distinctly, irreducibly human; the meaning of being human. This essential human need is met by an equal human capacity to touch, but that capacity is lost in a false physical world of man-made artifacts and a false psychological world of man-made abstractions. The superiority of the woman, like the superiority of the sand, is in her simplicity of means, her quiet and patient endurance, the unselfconsciousness of her touch, its ruthless simplicity. She is not abstract, not a silhouette. She lives in her body, not in his imagination.
    InThe Face of Another,the man is a normal man living in a normal world, except that he has lost the skin on his face; he has lost his physical identity and the sense of well-being and belonging that goes with it. He is stranded as absolutely as the man in the dunes, but he is stranded in the middle of his normal life. He wants touch, he wants love, he wants sex, so desperately; he thinks that he has lost his identity, because he has lost his face; but his wife, who knows him even in his mask, leaves him because he is selfish; no loss of physical identity helps him to transcend his essential obsession with himself; and so she remains unknown to him, someone untouched no matter what he does to or with her when he makes love. Repudiating him, she writes him:
You don’t need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger is for you simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don’t ever again want to return