cel@cs.duke.edu (Chris Lane) (10/19/90)
Sometimes, the skin comes off in sex. The people merge, skinless. The body loses its boundaries. We are each in these separate bodies; and then, with someone and not with someone else, the skin dissolves altogether, and what touches is ... not inside language or conceptualization, not inside time; raw, blood and fat and muscle and bone, unmediated by form or formal limits. There is no physical distance, no self consciousness, nothing withdrawn or private or alienated, no existence outside physical tough. The skin collapses as a boundary---it has no meaning; time is gone---it too has no meaning; there is no outside. Instead, there is necessity, nothing else---being driven, physical immersion in each other but with no experience of "each other" as separate entities coming together. There is only touch, no boundaries; there is only the nameless experience of physical contact, which is life....This skinless sex is a fever, but _fever_ is too small. It is obsession, but _obsession_ is too psychological. It becomes life; and as such, it is a state of being, a metaphysical reality for those in it, for whom no one else exists. It ends when the skin comes back into being as a boundary. The answer is.... Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, pp. 24-25. The words removed with the first "..." were: unspeakably, grotesquely visceral, The "...." replaces: ; there is no solace, except in this contact; without it, there is unbearable physical pain, absolute, not lessened by distraction, unreached by normalcy---nearly an amputation, the skin hacked off, slashed open; violent hurt. "My heart was open to you," says a man obsessively in love in _The_Face_of_Another_ by Kobo Abe, "quite as if the front of it had been sliced away." -- "Life's a bitch and then you die." cel@cs.duke.edu Down with Gender! Enjoy today.