Warning: this
review discusses anal sex and uses bad language.  It also gives away details in
the plot of the memoir.

Toni Bentley (author of Winter Season: A Dancer’s Journal) has won some high
praise from critics for her new memoir The Surrender that documents the
former ballet dancer’s affair with a man ("the A-man") who takes her
anal virginity and meets her only to have sex with her for over two years. 
They have anal sex every time they meet during their affair, nearly always in
her New York City apartment.  This man, the A-Man, is a stallion who can keep
on going for hours, and he does.  The A-Man fucks her in the ass.  He only lets
himself climax when she has completely surrendered to him. 

The first chapters of the book
chronicle Bentley’s sexual history, including a decade of mostly sexless
marriage, before this affair.  After her marriage is over, she starts being
bolder sexually and she has numerous encounters and short-lived relationships. 
Some of the man gave her good sex, while others were hopeless.  Bentley’s idea
of good sex sometimes seems to sound like standard pornographic fare —
"big cocks," "erections like steel."  It isn’t always
better to be big, since one man’s penis is so wide that is the size of a corncob,
and condoms would not stay rolled down.  She concluded from this part of her
experience that she didn’t like intercourse, since it didn’t make her come, and
it was often painful.  But Bentley continued to have sex anyway.  Her most
satisfying relationship is with a two people who she met at the gym, and they
have a threesome one New Year’s Eve.  She calls him the Young Man, and his cock
is "hard, big, and beautiful."  She continues to meet him, in the
threesome and out of it.  The two of them meet only for sex, and have no
relationship outside of the bedroom.  Their meetings are sporadic   Eventually
after a string of other men, and one longer relationship, the Young Man phones
her himself returning from an extended stay in Europe and he becomes the A-Man,
now keen to enter her rectum.  They have long sex sessions often twice a week
when he is in town.  By the end of the relationship, they have had anal sex 298
times.  She keeps a record.  Their relationship is non-monogamous, and it is
because of another woman that they eventually break up.  She is devastated by
the end of the relationship. 

Bentley writes with plenty of
style, often in quite metaphysical ways.  The first chapter is especially
notable. 

"Bliss, I learned from being sodomized, is an
experience of eternity in a moment of real time.  Sodomy is the ultimate sexual
act of trust.  I mean you could really get hurt — if you resist.  But pushing
past that fear, by passing through it, literally, ah the joy that lies on the
other side of convention.  The peace that is past the pain.  Going past the
pain is key.  Once absorbed, it is neutralized and allows for transformation. 
Pleasure alone is mere temporary indulgence, a subtle distraction, an aesthetization
while on the path to something higher, deeper, lower.  Eternity lies far, far
beyond pleasure.  And beyond pain."

Indeed, Bentley goes on to describe anal sex as bringing her
to a mystical state, or as she playfully explains: "Butt-fucking offers
spiritual resolution.  Who knew?"

There are at least a couple of ways
to try to take this memoir seriously.  First, one might look at it as a
treatise and consider what evidence it provides for the grand claims it makes
about anal sex.  Of course, this is to mistake the purpose of the book, and
thinking about it this way, it doesn’t measure up.  Bentley says very little
about the higher knowledge she gained from her experience of being fucked up
the ass (in contrast to the considerable detail she gives to KY jelly and crotchless
panties).  While she is certainly aware of all sorts of useful distinctions
(such as sex with another person as opposed to using a man as a human dildo for
personal sexual gratification, and between sex and love) she does not give her
reader any sense of knowing the A-Man in any other way apart from in sex.  She
may have come to want anal sex and trust her partner, and even to go through
intense emotional experiences in sex with him, but her remains a mysterious and
unknown figure throughout the memoir.  We know that he likes anal sex and that
he is no good in monogamous relationships, and that’s about it.  She has a
passionate desire for him, and sometimes when they are together they are so
close they join as one, but, tellingly, she describes them as becoming
"one thing," not "one person."  Much of her anal experience
sounds like someone taking mind-expanding drugs, where a person has incredible
feelings that she never knew possible, but afterwards when she looks at what
she wrote, it turns out to be gibberish. 

Second, one might look to the
psychological roots of the emotional power of Bentley’s experience.  She brings
in some discussion of Freudian ideas, and her relationship with her father who
was often cruel and even physically abusive to her when she was very young, and
this might be a factor.  It is slightly strange that she never discusses
bondage or sadomasochism, since the feelings of being in someone else’s power
and coping with helplessness and vulnerability seem central to her experience
during anal sex.  It is tempting to speculate that the sex helped her relive
some issues related to her father.  But she never really gains any new insight
about her relationship with her father, and this whole aspect of the discussion
is more of a collection of allusions than a thought-out theory. 

Third, one might look at this as a
case history of psychopathology.  Bentley herself sought treatment from sex
addiction groups but she found them unhelpful.  It is not at all clear from
what she writes that she really had a mental disorder, and many people would
simply be envious of all the powerful sex she had in her relationship with the
A-Man.  Nevertheless, the way that their relationship partitioned sex off from
every other form of interaction is unusual and even bizarre.  She seemed to be
something of a sex radical in embracing this lifestyle and rejecting monogamous
relationships.  It is intriguing to consider whether we have reason to judge
her behavior as pathological, but it is hard to arrive at any certain
conclusions.

Bentley’s memoir is provocative and
erotic, and it is unusual enough to be highly memorable.  Ultimately it is more
style than substance, not just in what it has to say about anal sex, but also
in its depiction of relationships.  Bentley herself, despite revealing such
intimate details about her life, seems an alien personality.  We don’t learn
anything about her friendships or family from the book, or anything about her
work, and we learn very little about her, except for her sex life.  Even more
troubling, she doesn’t leave her readers wanting to know more about her.  It is
as if she has anticipated that, having told her readers so much about her anal predilections,
they won’t want to know learn more about the rest of her life, and she is
shutting herself off. 

 

Link: Author website: http://www.tonibentley.com

 

© 2005 Christian
Perring. All rights reserved. 

 

Christian
Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities
Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also
editor of Metapsychology Online Review.  His main research is on
philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Memoirs, Sexuality