Free Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin Page B

garbage piles up in the building, but “when you’re touching skin with someone else it seems that your sense of smell undergoes a transformation. ” 31 Nothing matters, except being skinless, naked beyond nakedness, this sex that goes beyond intercourse even as it is a metaphor for intercourse. Nothing matters, except the need for touching each other that unites two people, physically fuses them and simultaneously isolates them together from any society outside themselves, any need or obligation outside their need for each other: “We could not imagine things as far as a half year in the future, when the room would be full of garbage. We continued touching one part or another of each other’s bodies the whole day long. ” 32 Passion, wanting to burn, races against love, which may stop. Not being the same, they create urgency and desperation. For the two people, touching each other naked, absolutely naked, and skinless, absolutely skinless, is life itself; and when the touching stops, when the intercourse stops, when one person is no longer naked, it is as if the skin of the other had in fact been torn off.
    Being naked takes on different values, according to the self-consciousness of the one who is naked; or according to the consciousness of the one who is looking at the nakedness. The men are tortured in their minds by the meaning of being naked, especially by the literal nakedness of women but also by their own nakedness: what it means to be seen and to be vulnerable. The nakedness of the women they look at, interpret, desire, associate with acts of violence they want to commit. The women are at ease being naked. The woman in the dunes, sleeping when the man is first there, has covered her face with a towel, but she is naked, except for the light layer of sand that eventually covers her body. He thinks that her nakedness is a sexual provocation, but then, struck by the physical reality of his environment—the sand—decides that “[h]is interpretation of the woman’s nakedness would seem to be too arbitrary. ” 33 She might not want to seduce him; instead her nakedness might be an ordinary part of her ordinary life, “seeing that she had to sleep during the day and, what was more, in a bowl of burning sand. ” 34 He too, he thinks, would choose to be naked if he could. The woman loved by the box man is naked “but she doesn’t seem to be at all. Being naked suits her too well. ” 35 The wife of the man in the mask is placid, stolid, when naked; he imputes indecency and vileness to her, but being naked does not unnerve or expose her. To the men, a woman’s nakedness is “a nakedness beyond mere nudity. ” 36
    Being naked does unnerve the men: it is an ordeal; and being looked at is nearly a terror. The men seem to distract themselves from their own nakedness by looking at women in an abstracting or fetishizing way; the voyeurism, the displaced excitement (displaced to the mind), puts the physical reality of their own nakedness into a dimension of numbed abstraction. The nakedness of the women experienced in the minds of the men is almost a diversion from the experience of being naked as such; naked and, as the box man says, “aware of my own ugliness. I am not so shameless as to expose my nakedness nonchalantly before others. ” 37 Men’s bodies are ugly (“unsightly, ” “the unsightliness of [generic man’s] naked body, ” “ninety-nine percent of mankind is deformed”); 38 it is this ugliness of men that makes the box man think that
[t]he reason men somehow go on living, enduring the gaze of others, is that they bargain on the hallucinations and the inexactitude of human eyes. 39
    For men, the meaning of a woman’s naked body is life itself. As an old box man says, “Her naked body should have been an absolute bargaining point for extending my life, for as long as I see her I will not commit suicide. ” 40 Men’s nakedness is unbearable to them without the nakedness of a woman; men need