The Fundamentals of Submission
Books Reviewed: Toni Bentley, The Surrender, Regan Books, NY, October 2004. Heather Lewis, Notice, Serpent's Tail Books, London, 2004.
 
   The Surrender is a memoir by Toni Bentley, the author of a number of books on dance, herself a former member of the New York City ballet. It has been getting plenty of press, including feature articles in the New York Times, the Village Voice and the New York Observer, and many other places. According to the publicity material accompanying the book, Ms. Bentley has “committed the unforgivable – by forcing us to confront the unspeakable.” The New York Times Book Review described The Surrender as “a brave book ...in its earnest attempt to do justice to the transcendent dimensions of a profane act.”
   So, what is the daring, shocking, “unspeakable” practice this monstrous ballerina has been indulging in? Human sacrifice? Child Murder? Cannibalism? Unfortunately not. The Surrender is a memoir devoted to the subject of ordinary anal sex.
       According to her memoir, Ms. Bentley became devoted to ballet at a very young age, and enjoyed a decade-long career as a ballerina, dancing in the New York City Ballet under the direction of the legendary George Balanchine. A hip injury brought her dancing career to an end, at which point she entered into a frustrating and fruitless ten year marriage. A week after her marriage broke up, she tells us, she embarked upon a purely physical affair with her masseur (whom she paid for his services), which kindled her interest in sexual experimentation, and she began to see the many possibilities open to a single woman with a rich imagination and a ballerina's body. After the gigolo-masseur, she tries regular threesomes with a couple from her gym, a mixed bag of “pussy hounds”, a Christian sex-addict, now reformed, and, finally, a last attempt at a “regular boyfriend” -- none of whom can provide her with the kind of lasting satisfaction she craves. Until, that is, she encounters “A-Man.” The male partner of the couple from the gym with whom she used to have a regular threesome, this anonymous young man returns to Ms. Bentley's boudoir and initiates her into the pleasures of sodomy – after which, her life is changed forever.
        I find it surprising that, during her years devoted to sexual experimentation, the author never tried anal sex, which is surely not so far from most couples' regular sexual repertoires. The idea that anal sex is “shocking” makes The Surrender seem terribly conservative, in a way. The book has been widely publicized for its taboo-breaking frankness, and Ms. Bentley praised for speaking so openly about her taste for “the unspeakable.” But to whom, and in what context, is sodomy “unspeakable”? If popular culture is anything to go by, everybody's doing it. Rap singers write odes to their girlfriend's “booty”, J.Lo's “bootilicious” behind is waved in our faces every day on MTV, and, in most pornographic movies, the “anal” scene is de rigeur. Rather like homosexuality – once the “love that name not speak its name” -- hetero anal sex is a humdrum commonplace. Nor is it especially radical to describe anal sex as a gateway to spiritual transcendence, as Bentley does. This if a motif that goes back to the Karma Sutra, and probably earlier.      
     These infelicities are not problems with the book itself, however, but with the way it has been marketed and reviewed. If you can ignore the garbled overreaching of the book's publicity, The Surrender is an interesting read; Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, has declared it to be “a small masterpiece of erotic writing.” There is a playful eloquence in Bentley's descriptions of how satisfying it feels to relinquish her sense of power and control, and how the passivity of anal sex has allowed her to experience a new kind of erotic fulfillment and spiritual realization. In this light, it seems interesting that most of its reviewers saw The Surrender as part of the existing discourse on female sexuality, without linking it closely to  Bentley's career in the ballet. This is telling, I think; no-one writes about the sexual exploits of male athletes without drawing connections with the way these men are expected to behave on the field, or in the arena. For the ballerina, who from a very young age has grown accustomed to such extremes of endurance that her toes are worn down to bloody stumps, it is not so unusual that subjugation should be the doorway to spiritual enlightenment, as it is for other kinds of ascetics.
      The Surrender is explicit, but in physical, rather than psychological terms. Bentley gives us detailed descriptions of positions, encounters and orgasms. One entire chapter, for example, is devoted to her extensive wardrobe of crotchless panties, and how delicious her “magic crevice” looks in each pair. We learn a lot about her anatomy, but less about her insecurities; she seems enviously at ease with her body for a woman who is no longer young. As I read the book, I began to wonder whether she ever felt unsure of her physical attractiveness. Does she never have anxieties about bad hair days, stretch marks or sagging flesh, like the rest of us, or does she feel no need to discuss them in her memoir? Perhaps her vigorous ballet training has left her with a confidence about her physical appeal – but then, she is the first to admit that insecurity is bred into the ballerina from her earliest days at the barre. Personally, I would have found psychological honesty more engaging than anatomical descriptions, however engaging or acrobatic. 
      Which brings me to my final reservation about this otherwise uninhibited memoir. “I know that when some of you hear anal sex you see nothing but shit,” admits Bentley, openly. “Shit on the bed, shit on his cock, shit on your ass. I am here to tell you it just isn't like that. Hardly a trace, ever.” Later, she boasts that “you could eat out of my ass, on my ass, it's that clean.” There's something about this emphasis on cleanliness and hygiene that seems a little... well... anal. If everything is so fresh and immaculate, where is the degradation and submission that makes the experience so sublime?
   In her bathroom, Toni Bentley has framed verses from William Blake's poem, “Eternity.” As someone who professes to be following the profane path to spiritual enlightenment, she might consider replacing them with lines from another poem by  Blake, “Crazy Jane and the Bishop”:
 
A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.
 
   It might seem be inappropriate to compare The Surrender to Heather Lewis's novel Notice, were it not for the fact that Toni Bentley maintains her memoir of spiritual transcendence through submission is a very serious one. Notice is also a serious book about submission, also written in the first person, and, like The Surrender, recounts the narrator's sexual submission to a collection of anonymous lovers. Notice, however, is not – at least, not overtly – a memoir, and the kind of transcendence it achieves is of a much  darker kind.
     Notice is told in the voice of a nameless young woman – perhaps in her late teens, though it's never quite clear – who, when the story opens, has begun having sex for money, for psychological reasons that never made clear to us. She lives alone in the home of her wealthy parents, who are elsewhere, and seems irresistibly drawn to cruel and abusive men, loveless sex, and self-destructive patterns of behavior. A sadist takes her home to use her as a pawn in violent sexual dramas between himself and his jaded wife, and even though she is free to leave, the narrator stays in this bizarre ménage a trois until she is in danger of her life.
    She escapes, but is unable to keep away from the pain and horror that she is addicted to. Hooking for sex in the parking lot of the local bar, she is raped, beaten up and arrested by a group of cops, then put in solitary confinement at a juvenile detention center. The rest of the book details her release from this facility, thanks to the intervention of a concerned therapist, who continues to care for her. But the narrator, unable to sustain a relationship that is not physical and in some way abusive, manages to become sexually  involved with her therapist, leading to further confusion and despair.
     Heather Lewis is the author of two previous novels, House Rules and Second Suspect. Although Notice was written much earlier than its 2004 publication date, the manuscript was initially considered too dark and disturbing to be commercially viable, and it remained unpublished until it was picked up last year by Serpent's Tail, a largely feminist imprint. Notice is a book about the kind of submission that, although it may manifest itself sexually, is predominantly psychic in origin; it is also a book about the difficulty of escaping from a life where attention (“notice”) comes only when accompanied by physical violence and abuse, so even those who try to heal are drawn into a spiral of psychic masochism, confusion and despair.
       At the end of The Surrender, after her 298th anal encounter with A-Man, Bentley terminates their relationship, and announces her intention to begin a new direction in her life by purchasing a new pair of seven-inch heels. Heather Lewis, the author of Notice, took her own life at the age of 41, after battling a life of abuse and addiction.  Knowing this makes Notice painful and difficult to read, but perhaps it is important to bear in mind that, sadly, more women are familiar with the kind of submission experienced by Heather Lewis than the kind described by Toni Bentley. 
 
Mikita Brottman, Lanaguage, Literature and Culture
Maryland Institute College of Art