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Monday, Oct 6, 2008
"You open your ass and you open your mind and you open your heart." Toni Bentley talks about her new anal sex memoir, "The Surrender."
Oct 8, 2004 | As a young woman, Toni Bentley danced with the New York City Ballet, and made a second career writing well-reviewed books about it. She knew George Balanchine and co-wrote Suzanne Farrell's autobiography, and she can delicately describe the agony of toeshoes and the psychological rigors of the barre. Now she has turned her literary attention to another activity that stretches body, mind and psyche: sodomy.
In "The Surrender," her 205-page "erotic memoir," by Page 26 Bentley has dispatched with her first orgasm (after French erotica on the Upper East Side), the loss of her vaginal virginity (to a man who tells her, "You've got a great ass"), an affair with a stagehand who has her sit on his face, and a 10-year marriage. She then sits back and luxuriates in her chronicle of her post-marriage sexual experimentation. There is her cunnilingus-heavy affair with a masseur she continues to pay, her appreciation for "Pussy Hounds" or men "who live to dive," and repeated threesomes with a Pre-Raphaelite redheaded woman and a "Young Man," who later gets a new epithet, "A-Man." A-Man is the lover who introduces Bentley to anal intercourse, the act that gives "The Surrender," and Bentley herself, a soul.
In addition to enjoying the physical act itself -- which she finds "unwinds" the lower bowels -- the atheist Bentley insists that she found a spiritual ecstasy in buggery. She has been to the mountain and seen God; and apparently, He likes it from behind. Despite her mad love for A-Man -- evidenced in no small part by the fact that she keeps the condoms-and-K-Y detritus of their unions and a baggy-full of his pubic hair in a little memory box -- Bentley staunchly resists a traditional commitment to him. The lovers do not meet outside the bedroom: no monogamy, no dating, no shared friends, no movies or meals. In fact, the only food they consume together is the occasional restorative snack between back-door intrusions. By the end of the book, A-Man is history, and leveled Bentley is left to sort out her altered body, desires and devotions.
Even though it won't officially be available until next week, the book has, not surprisingly, garnered a lot of attention. Bentley, speaking to Salon by phone from Los Angeles, spoke quickly and kindly and actually sounded quite shy as she discussed anal hygiene, the costs of monogamy, and her conviction that her book will anger feminists.
Your book is a memoir of anal sex. You describe your first time as surprising and ecstatic, not something you stretched for, worked up to. So ... no searing pain?
You want the technical description? I use explicit language in the book, in a literary context, but using that language out of context can be disheartening to me.
But no, it was absolutely not searing pain. It was astonishing. He was very slow and very gentle and very loving and nothing was against my will and this was a very consensual act between two people. The most important part of the act technically is slowness, and most men don't know how to do it properly. Men usually move too fast with the other kind of sex. And you have to go way slower [with anal penetration]. The muscles are tighter.
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