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Toni Bentley, Writer Photo: Ishan Tankha
“It turns me on to please a man,” said Toni Bentley wickedly, subverting every gender stereotype there is. The cliché is, to be in control, you have to be the dominant one in any gender equation. Control equals dominance, equals power. “No,” says Toni Bentley, and The Surrender, the book that shot her to fame is an ode to just that. You may miss it if you get lost in the plot and the vivid descriptions of sexual surrender she experiences through anal sex. But there is a larger political point to be made. Own your femininity. And to do that, Bentley has done what many writers haven’t. State boldly and categorically that surrender is female power.
To understand that, you have to go back a little. To her childhood. Like many women, she grew up internalising a notion that she was the second sex. Even though her parents were liberal and let her do exactly as she pleased, it was an overarching message she picked up in her social interactions. As a result, she grew up with the classical feminine stereotype — always wanting to live up to a large male ego, the father figure. When she was 10 and was training in ballet in New York, the famous choreographer George Balanchine became her mythic master. But it was the absolute exploration of beauty in ballet that led Bentley to connect the dots between beauty and surrender.
In 2010, she wrote in the Wall Street Journal of Balanchine’s “ballet that changed everything”, to describe how he stripped the original ballet, Serenade for Strings in C by Tchaikovsky, of its original “boy-girl story” and set the woman free. “The woman is no longer a creature yearning for her man, but an artist for whom men are transitory not primary,” Bentley writes.
And, herein lie the essential keys to The Surrender. Bentley’s release was an artistic flight of fancy, much like the ballet she knew and loved, exploring what lay beyond the shackles. In surrendering to a man called ‘A’ in her memoir, she describes a liberation she says is the honest calling she was looking for as a writer and a woman. It’s why the book begins with the preface — “Virginia Woolf believed that no woman had succeeded in writing the truth of the experience of her own body — that women and language would both have to change considerably before anything like that could happen.”
In essence, Bentley’s sexual ride asks the overwhelming yet unanswered question — what is female sexuality? “We’ve gone to the moon, we’re creating cars that will fly in the sky, but we still don’t understand how female sexuality works.” Embedded in this is another provocative thought — is female sexuality far away from the assertive, dominatrix position feminists have written it as? Can the essential female act be that of surrender by choice, where the person who surrenders is the more powerful, the more essentially femme?
For all these reasons, Bentley’s book did not go down well with many feminists. She did say in an interview with Salon that feminism gave her the freedom to submit but it’s a term she shrugs off, even though she describes it in equally tired clichés. If it is essential to stick to being strident and anti-male to be a feminist then she is not one.
“I love men and I want to be deeply female in every way. From being chatty to loving clothes to wearing high heels to smelling good to fussing about my looks to being narcissistic. I don’t want to give up any of those. It turns me on to please a man.”
And therefore the opening lines of her book — “He was first. In my ass.” A journey Bentley describes in 205 pages as an erotic transcendence.
