"Blithely, as if it were as natural a romantic yarn as would appear in a popular magazine, the synopsis of Andy Warhol's latest opus reads: 'The story of a young married couple and the efforts of the husband, Joe, to sell himself to earn money for his wife's girlfriend's abortion'" (Variety). Unwittingly placing Flesh in its natural context (the anti-romance), Variety's bemused reaction might have amused and pleased Warhol, who was recuperating from a serious gunshot injury when the film was made; and Paul Morrissey, who wrote, directed and shot Flesh. Joe Dallesandro is the hapless husband-hustler in what Stephen Koch characterizes as "a film about flesh, about the dilemmas of the male body...It carries to near-cartoon explicitness the obsessions that underwrite My Hustler...The misandry-man-hating-at the core of Flesh is the rage of alienation, an alienation from the flesh itself...The hustler's relation to his body is...the imagined resolution of a central dilemma of alienated masculine consciousness in our time...(T)hough this dilemma may have many sources, its principle dynamic seems to me a terrorized unconscious denial of the permission to feel need..."