Free Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin Page A

to such a desert of mirrors. 23
    Pushed by a deep, obsessive desire for sex with his wife, for her love—but also an increasing desire to watch her being unfaithful with the man he is pretending to be—he is unable to transcend the constraints of self-absorption. He gets closest to her when touch becomes a part of his imagination, a means of cognition when he is near her but not literally touching her:
Isn’t it generally rare to imagine by a sense of touch? I did not conceive of you as a glass doll or as abstract word symbols, but had a tactile sense of your presence as I got within touching distance of you. The side of my body next to you was as sensitive as if it had been overexposed to the sun, and each one of my pores panted for breath like dogs sweltering in the heat. 24
    She is far from being an object or an abstraction; she is nearly real. His reaction is physical, hot, on his skin; close to touch, closer than when he is actually touching her. When he makes love to her in the dark, touch is a form of greed: “I concentrated on capturing you in every way other than sight: legs, arms, palms, fingers, tongue, nose, ears... your breathing, sighing, the working of your joints, the flexing of your muscles, the secretions of your skin, the vibrations of your vocal cords, the groaning of your viscera. ” 25 Like a man making notches on his bedpost, he uses touch to get as much as he can; his sense of sex is quantitative—each touch of her being capture, while he keeps count. Unable to get out of the bind of his identity, his self-involvement, his use of another as a mirror for himself, he is unable to touch her, even when he touches her, no matter how much he touches her: he can count the times he touches and list the parts he touches, but even inside her, on top of her, listening to “the groaning of your viscera, ” he is not really touching her at all. He does not know who she is, and to know who she is, he would have to be able to forget who he is—both of him. Being naked is interior too, being stripped of ego and greed, to touch and be touched.
    In Abe’s world, the ability to know through touch is not peripheral to human experience; it is essential to it. Touch is a central form of cognition, taking the place of intellect and logic. Nothing substitutes for it or equals it in importance. The box man says:
No curiosity can ultimately be satisfied unless one can check by touching with one’s hands. If one wants really to know another person, if one does not know him with one’s fingers, push him, punch him, bend him, tear at him, one can scarcely claim to know him completely. One wants to touch, to pass one’s hands all over him. 26
    Touch is the meaning of being human. It is also, says Abe, the way of knowing what being human is, the way of knowing others, the world, anything outside the self, anyone else who is also human; touch is the basis of human knowledge, also of human community. The box man, who sees mostly legs because he lives in a box, is drawn by the legs of a woman. Legs, he speculates, are “covers for the sexual organs, ” attractive because “you’ve got to open the covers with your hands, ” the charm of legs being “tactile rather than visual. ” 27 Leaving his box to touch the woman, he puts one hand on her shoulder from behind; then, because she does not resist, he comes closer. He tells himself “emphatically as I do so that I must forever maintain this closeness. ” 28 Distance is unbearable, the pain is unbearable, he loves in the deepest human way: “Compared to the you in my heart, the I in yours is insignificant. ” 29 When he escapes the pain by touching her, he escapes from time: “time stops just by touching your skin lightly with my fingers, and eternity draws near. ” 30 They touch all the time, even after they have physically separated from intercourse: for instance, he sits at her feet and touches her leg, passing his hand over it, as she peels potatoes. The