“Sexual intercourse is not intrinsically banal, though pop-culture magazines like Cosmopolitan suggest that it is. It is intense, often desperate. The internal landscape is violent upheaval, a wild and ultimately cruel disregard of human individuality, a brazen, high-strung wanting that is absolute and imperishable, not attached to personality, no respecter of boundaries. It ends not in sexual climax but in a human tragedy of failed relationships, vengeful bitterness in an aftermath of sexual heat, personality corroded by too much endurance of undesired, habitual intercourse, conflict, a wearing away of vitality in the numbness finally of habit or compulsion or the loneliness of separation. The experience of fucking changes people, so that they are often lost to each other and slowly they are lost to human hope. The pain of having been exposed, so naked, leads to hiding, self-protection, building barricades, emotional and physical alienation or violent retaliation against anyone who gets too close…” From: Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin I have read somewhere that Andrea Dworkin is a feminist, that feminists everywhere are ashamed to be called feminists because of her. Whereas I, when first ran across her book Intercourse, knew I have never read any text which spoke to me to such an extent, moved me so, and I dare say “awakened” me. Perhaps it is ungenial to say so, but no masterpiece had appealed to me as this book did. The book Intercourse made me reconsider private experiences in my past, and to be aware of the more complex aspects of exploitation that are every woman’s share. In the western world, the masculine taming of women is cleverly disguised so much that the exploited woman is certain that she is in control of her emotional-sexual life up to a point of an imaginary role reversal, which is the most perilous.
NANO SHABTAI Intercourse, 2010
C-print 34 x 34 inches (86.36 x 86.36 cm) Edition of 6 42