Customer Reviews

The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I ordered this book with high expectations. Over the years I've sought out a variety of the classic and not-so-classic examples of the genre, both academic and just for fun. The expression of sexuality Bentley promotes is neither shocking nor abhorrent (millions can attest to this) and her story deserves to be told.

Bentley is a former professional ballet dancer and competent writer and reporter. Her memoir about an intense affair that had as its centerpiece frequent, albeit compulsive (she kept count) anal intercourse seemed like something worth reading.

Instead of "showing," though, Bentley tells - and you understand pretty quickly that Bentley has told her story and explained herself many, many times in many, many therapy sessions. She offers some nuggets of self-analysis that sound very much as if a mental health practitioner came up with them. Her father was cold and difficult to please, pain became a friend, she early on became perfectionist, etc. One is led to believe that it is a given that an old psychic wound is necessary in order for one to enjoy anal sexuality.

The Freudian punning is unnerving.

There is little dialogue in this story and precious little deep feeling. The guy to whom she insists she surrendered is called "A-Man," a cutesy moniker and far cry from the grave dignity of the Stephens and Sirs of the genre.

This is less an "erotic memoir" than a series of descriptions - told by the way in the breathy prose of fashion-magazine reportage - of what she wore and how she looked, the state and the size of genitalia, and where to buy the supplies most cheaply (Costco), of an affair that while undoubtedly wonderfully physically intense and affecting, sounds surprisingly lackluster in the retelling. I was disappointed in this story.

This is Toni Bentley's fifth book about either the world of ballet/dance or her own life. Now in her mid-40's, Ms. Bentley's formative experiences were with her distant father and her years with George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet. "Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal" was her painful account of establishing a new identity apart from the all-consuming world of the NYC Ballet. Now she writes of her quest to create a viable sexual identity for herself.

This focus upon issues of sexuality is nothing new for Ms. Bentley. She wrote a cultural history of a striptease known as the Dance of the Seven Veils in her "Sisters of Salome" (2002). She is an accomplished writer though she occassionally goes over the top.

The reader should be warned that this memoir is emotionally and sexually graphic as Ms. Bentley focuses upon her newly discovered obsession with sodomy. If the reader is uncomfortable with being a voyeur inside Ms. Bentley's bedroom, then this book is not for you.

For Ms. Bentley, she has finally found a form of sexual liberation for her masochistic and self-abasement tendencies. With her personal sexual surrender, she attributes a freeing up of a lifetime of inhibitions, releasing anger toward her father, and discovering a spiritual union with "Paradise."

"The Surrender" is a very intimate and searingly honest account of one woman's search for personal peace. It is difficult to be this honest about one's sexual neediness with a lover or with a best friend -- Ms. Bentley just published her sexual neediness for the world to read.

This is a brazenly revealing first person account of a narcistic ex ballet dancer who, following her retirement and the end of an unfortunate marriage, sets out with huge energy and courage to fully explore all aspects of her libido and sensual proclivities.The graphic details she shares on active and passive oral sex, and ultimately on total submission to extended anal sex to achieve new orgasmic plateaus are wondrous to behold. The story is told with honest motivational insights and more than a little relaxed humor, and whether you approve the action or not, you will find Toni a hugely endearing woman,

I'm a big proponent of the notion that the world would be a much better place if everyone would just get over the idea that there is such a thing as `normal' when it comes to sex.
Which is why, I am so jazzed about this lovely, funny, erotic, whacked and remarkably honest little book about the pleasures of sodomy. I always wondered what it was about women who enjoyed this particular activity (as opposed to those who do not) and now, damned if I don't have a pretty good idea.
From the surprise hidden under the cover onward, this thing never ceased to amuse me and take my breath away. I guess the lovely Ms. Bentley has more in her than just ballet books.

Toni Bentley is a brilliant author and very brave woman. The Surrender is an honest, humorous, enlightened and rich book about one woman's experience of finding spirit through her surrender into the world of sexuality, sodomy and union with a soul mate. Most people never have the chance in their lifetime to know what it means to merge with another through their sexuality, heal masochistic tendencies and childhood wounds through pure love, or find God through ecstatic surrender to another. This book is the vicarious thrill of knowing what all of that would be like. It is a voyeuristic pleasure to watch such an articulate, open, cultured and successful woman find such an unconventional way to reach God and her own transformation from hurt child to powerful Goddess. I would recommend this book to any woman who has been exploited in a man's world and can appreciate the tantric way of sodomy.

Sodomy has never had such a voice since perhaps the Marquis de Sade took quill to ink. Ms. Toni Bentley unabashedly gives a detailed and explicit exposition of her submission to her sexual need to yield to the will of men--plural. For her, rapture in submission was achieved in the ultimate subjugation: From giving up her ass for the pure and unadulterated use by a man.

This is a graphic memoir that is bound to disturb some and undoubtedly delight many others. There is a fair amount of tedious moments in the work, where the author gets a bit too philosophical in her rationalizing of her experiences, but still the work nonetheless is an honest exposition and memoir of a woman's journey into submission and sexual fulfillment thtough sodomy.

I read recently that 74% of women who tried anal sex liked it, but only 14% admitted to it.
Well, Toni Bentley admits to it, in spades.
This is not an erotic novel meant to excite. This is an erotic memoir meant to intrigue, seduce, titillate, and ultimately make you sigh.
The writing is tight, but not terse. The successive chapters follow each other like postcards; intimate pictures of a life, and lifestyle, that seduces and tempts, while remaining aloof.
We should be grateful to Ms. Bentley for sharing this collection of stills from her life, we are enriched for it.

I saw Toni Bentley speak at the West Hollywood Book Fair last month and came away very imptessed with her energy, her wit, her passion, her style and her directness. She told us that she never thought of getting this book published, and described how differently she thought of it as a project than her previous four books, and indeed how she, a former ballerina, thought of herself now as a writer first and a woman second. Then came the man she calls "A-Man" and the rest is erotic history. The moderator asked her if she thought Anais Nin an important influence on her style, and Bentley replied that Nin was one of many who had helped her attain the honesty she sought in writing up her own erotic adventures. She acknowledged that Judith Regan was taking a big chance on a book which, only a few years ago, might never have been published. Some have suggested (she reported) that the success of the French book "Sexual Life of Catherine M' might have been a factor in Regan agreeing to publish her book, and also that the HBO show "Sex in the City" played a part in expanding the boundaries of what women might say and feel in our modern era. The audience hung on her every word.

We were astounded to hear her speak, and her humor and the slight huskiness in her voice made her seem very approachable and a delighful conversationalist. Once I had started reading the book, I could not stop, even though to a certain degree it was a bit repetitive. But there is something Apollonian about Toni Bentley's writing, almost as though the spirit of her former mentor George Balanchine lingered at her elbow, guiding her through the Scylla and Charybidis of porn and erotica. I am looking forward to her next project, something very different she said, a personal memoir of knowing Lincoln Kirstein the balletomane and entrepreneur.

I learned about "The Surrender," former ballerina Toni Bentley's paean to the supposedly sublime pleasures of anal sex, through an article I had read in "n+1." I was both fascinated and repulsed by a quote taken from the latter part of the memoir in which Bentley recounts how she had become so enraptured by her lover that she saved and stored away the condoms left over from their anal encounters -- nearly three hundred in all -- in a black, lacquered box where they remain as mementos of a transformative three-year long affair.

I imagined Bentley, a lithe and lovely ballerina and a bona-fide member of George Balanchine's chorus of swans, plucking stained prophylactics from the floor, each dripping with the oleaginous residue leftover from unabsorbed gobs of K-Y and spermicide, and dropping them into an elegant box as if they were just as precious as grandma's pearls. I was intrigued by the image of this woman and what she could say about an affair that could inspire such an obsession. I was also, with the exception of some brief perusals of Pauline Reage's literature, rather limited in my experience with contemporary erotica. Women are now the primary authors of this material and, after the publication of Catherine Millet's "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." in 2001 (a tome whose success may have helped lead to the publication of Bentley's memoir), it seemed as though Virginia Woolf's wish had come true: women could finally write the truth about the experience of their own bodies. The men (Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, et al.) had done a fine job, but lacked the authority. The women who have already traversed this territory either grossly embellished the experiences (Anais Nin) or had made the matter of female pleasure seem, well, to be more of a political act (Erica Jong).

Bentley is frank in her exploration of pleasure and all the preliminaries (which she explores in far greater detail than Catherine Millet, for instance): the importance of ambiance, selecting the right lingerie, and even the benefits of shaving (if done properly) over bikini waxing. Readers will find these tips useful, though they distract from what the work is supposed to be: a thorough, literary exploration of a sexual experience and its aftermath.

Bentley could not seem to decide on what she wanted the memoir to be. It is rather spare compared to other memoirs. The frank dialogue with which she engages the reader is interspersed with journal entries chronicling each anal encounter. The language in these entries read like passages out of harlequin romances and contrast, rather awkwardly, with the more down-to-earth voice she has adopted for the main narrative. In one unnecessary chapter, entitled "Statistics," she provides us with the legal taboos that prevail against sodomy -- a pity, in Bentley's view, as she acknowledges, ad nauseum, about how she managed to encounter "God" from the rear. The evocation of this imagery is hyperbolic and fails to give a full sense of the experience she attempts to convey. It was not God that she acquired after years of being taught to deny him, but instead a greater sense of knowledge about her own self and her potential to experience intense pain and pleasure -- both physical and emotional. Perhaps "God" was the most convenient term to encompass the depth and breadth of her experience during the three years she spent with her lover.

Halfway through the book, I grew tired of Bentley's incessant evocation of holy imagery and her insistance upon using it to demonstrate how the act of sodomy was -- surprise -- a rebellion against her emotionally withholding, atheist father. She relies too heavily on Freudian analysis to help us understand her attraction to anal sex. For example, there was the desire to be humiliated, as she had once been as a small child when her father mashed the banana she refused to finish eating in her little face. In this regard, we read of the ever-present threat of accidental defecation. Bentley asserts that this has never happened during any of her hundreds of encounters with the conveniently nicknamed "A-Man" but, in another passage in which she invokes memories of her father, insinuates that she would not have been averse to leaving stool on a penis.

She admits that feminists may be averse to her memoir. The title alone indicates submission and, in the book, Bentley blithely recounts how pleased she was to make herself "obedient" for "A-Man." Any individual who is honest and comfortable thinking and reading about sexual experience, however, will not recoil from this. The disappointment for some feminists, I think, will come from the realization that Bentley's work is so mired in the language of psychoanalysis and "daddy-revenge" fantasy that it fails to be the fascinating exploration it wanted to be.

For less neurotic, and better written erotica, it may be best to stick with the French for a while: Pauline Reage's "The Story of O" and Catherine Millet's "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." are great places to start.

Toni Bentley's book The Surrender fascinatingly captures her odyssey into alternative sexuality. Clearly a 'thinking' guide to eroticism. She pulls no punches and considers everything. Based upon her background in the story, the way she was raised, her thoughts on life, relationships and marriage, she builds a tale of erotic obsession and sex. Insane but freeing and spiritual. A must read.