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The Surrender by Toni Bentley, 2006This is a elib.tech Exclusive. Leaking it will result in a permanent ban.GB ThreadContributors: nowElite/VIP: 2 weeksPower Users (PU): 1 monthUsers: never”In recent years, a small but pungent subgenre of extreme female confession has emerged from the general glut of published memoirs. The outre personal experiences retailed in such works have ranged from nymphomaniac picaresques (Catherine M.) and incest (Kathryn Harrison) to spanking fetishes (Daphne Merkin) and the obsessive cyber-stalking of ex-lovers (Katha Pollitt).For a reading public long since inured to the shock value of mere drug addiction or child abuse, these stories have provided a timely upping of the sensationalist ante. That dubious achievement aside, they are also to be credited with subverting some of the more pious 20th-century truisms concerning female sexuality. If the official rhetoric of second-wave feminism has tended to depict women as gentle, peaceable creatures who seek meaningful sexual encounters with respectful, supportive partners, the extreme confessors propose an altogether less sunshiny portrait both of women and of their desires. In doing so, they embarrass some of the simple-minded notions that have become associated, over the years, with the lapidary slogan ”The personal is political.” Women do not, they remind us, always behave nobly in matters of the heart. Nor do women always need — or want — to be treated as valiant, serious-minded people in bed.To this interesting tributary of corrective incorrectness is now added ”The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir.” Toni Bentley, a former ballet dancer who has written a number of books about dance (most notably ”Winter Season,” an account of her life at the New York City Ballet during Balanchine’s tenure), has taken the radical decision to compose a manifesto for anal sex. ”This is no feminist treatise about equality,” she warns us — perhaps a little superfluously — in her introduction. ”This is the truth about the beauty of submission.”Predictably enough, the press material that arrived with my galley heralded this volume as a daring and courageous inquiry into ”what many consider to be the last remaining taboo.” Anal sex is very far from being the last remaining taboo, of course. (The last time I checked, cannibalism and necrophilia were still struggling for acceptance.) Indeed, there are some signs that the status of anal sex as any kind of taboo is under attack. State laws against sodomy were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003. And no less mainstream a fictional character than Bridget Jones cheerfully engaged in the practice, in the film adaptation of Helen Fielding’s best-selling novel ”Bridget Jones’s Diary.”Still, fair is fair: no woman before Bentley has felt quite zealous enough about what she calls ”emancipation through the back door” to write an entire book in its praise. Bentley credits sodomy with having resolved the lifelong psychosexual problems that resulted from not being loved enough by her father. (In one luridly Freudian episode of this book, Bentley pere is described punishing his 4-year-old daughter for some minor infraction by angrily smearing a banana on her face and in her hair.) By giving herself up to ”this forbidden pathway,” Bentley writes, she has not only found her self, she has discovered ”Paradise,” she has experienced ”eternity in a moment of real time,” and she has gotten to know God ”experientially.” That’s not all. She is also pretty sure that anal sex is responsible for piercing her yang, forcing her yin to the surface and releasing decades of anger stored in her lower intestine.Bentley’s inclination to various kinds of self-abasement found early expression in her childhood fascination with the lives of the saints, and later on in her career as a ballet dancer. (All that pain and discipline, all that bowing and scraping before the God-like Balanchine.) But neither these interests nor a busy history of sexual experimentation ever fully satisfied her masochistic yearnings. Only, she claims, when she met a man prepared to focus his attention on her neglected orifice did she enter the realm of bliss. For the just under three years that she and her sodomizer — a man referred to throughout the book by the regrettable moniker ”A-Man” — enjoyed regular bouts of earth-moving sex, Bentley maintained a detailed journal of her experiences. She also kept a tally of how many times she was anally penetrated and made mathematical calculations about the average number of anal episodes she was having per year, week and day. She fetishized the accouterments of her sexual obsession — dedicating herself to finding the best and most economical lubricants, the most sex-friendly boudoir-wear. In a manner befitting a woman who was experiencing a spiritual as well as sexual awakening, she also preserved her lover’s used condoms, much as an acolyte might hoard religious relics. ”THE SURRENDER” is a brave book — although not because it tackles a ”taboo” or because it is frank. (Candor is surely too epidemic in the popular culture, these days, to qualify any longer as courageous.) Its bravery lies rather in its earnest attempt to do justice to the transcendent dimension of a profane act. Sex, it is always claimed, is immensely difficult to write about. But that’s not quite true. To recount the embarrassments and alienation of lackluster coitus is a relative doddle. It is good sex — or great sex — that presents the real challenges for a writer. While Bentley certainly has the requisite pluck for the job, her prose, alas, proves incommensurate with her ambition.For much of her narrative, she resorts to the demotic language of contemporary pornography. While unbeautiful, this has the virtue of appropriateness. It is when she strives for a high, poetic style that she runs into problems.”I was now being given a second chance,” she writes of her anal deflowering, ”not on the well-trodden vaginal trail, but in a place entirely new to my consciousness — and it quickly became the site of my consciousness.”The results of her laboriously facetious punning jags are hardly more pleasing:”This is the back story of a love story. A back story that is the whole story. A second hole story, to be entirely accurate. Love from inside my backside. . . . No hindsight for me in this great love but rather behind-sight — cited from the eye of my behind.”And the jaunty ”how-to” voice into which she occasionally lapses (when weighing up the relative merits of shaving versus waxing, say, or deliberating on which kind of ”scanty panties” provide the better value) yields perhaps the most gruesome sentences of all.Bentley is a great believer in the virtues of what the sociologists call ”transactional sex.” Which is to say, she is against diluting her erotic pleasures with the banal stuff of relationships. ”Desire is sexy, a show of free will,” she writes; ”attachment is the enemy of free will.” Dinner dates are anathema. ”I preferred sex on an empty stomach, and to eat alone with a good book.” She presents the affair with A-Man as the perfect enactment of her sexual philosophy. She never goes out with him. They have no mutual friends. Their relationship is restricted to her bedroom. When, at last, she is confronted with the fact that he is sleeping with another woman, and suffers pangs of terrible jealousy, she chooses to dump him rather than beg for the death-in-life that is fidelity.This — much more than Bentley’s preferred sexual position — is the truly provocative matter dealt with in ”The Surrender.” Most married adults — male and female — know something about the business of trading intensity for security and passion for comfort. But as wistful as they may sometimes grow for the excitements of yesteryear, very few of them have the mettle to live out Bentley’s austere choice. Her desire and ability to do so may, she acknowledges, be evidence of deep psychic wounds. But if so, she is happy to be wounded. ”I once loved a man so much that I no longer existed — all Him, no Me,” she writes. ”Now I love myself just enough that no man exists — all Me, no Them. They all used to be God, and I used to be a figment of my own imagination; now men are figments of my imagination.”If this is a victory, it’s surely the Pyrrhic kind. There is something grimly narcissistic about the world of zipless, fantasy sex that Bentley has created for herself; something sad and alienated about its unforgiving aesthetic standards and intolerance of human frailty. (Apart from the bedroom, the only other location that features in this book with any frequency is the gym.) Moreover, the contempt that Bentley expresses for women who have not taken her path — her characterization of them as pitiable bourgeois types, mired in laundry and consumer goods, who have forsaken sexual joy for mortgages — is suspiciously vehement. She protests too much. Surely, if you’re certain of having found Paradise, you can afford to be a little more magnanimous toward your less privileged sisters?” Zoe Heller, NY Times