{Read} {PDF EPUB} ~download The Surrender An Erotic Memoir by Toni Bentley The Surrender. Your browser doesn't support HTML5 audio. Here is a link to download the audio instead. : Volume Number. : Volume Number. The Surrender. Spend $49 on print products and get FREE shipping at HC.com. Few women do it and even fewer will admit to it. But in Toni Bentley's daring and intimate memoir, The Surrender , she pulls the sheets back on an erotic experience that's been forbidden since the Bible and celebrates "the joy that lies on the other side of convention, where risk is real and rapture resides." From Story of O to The Kiss to The Sexual Life of Catherine M ., readers have been enthralled with sexually subversive memoirs by women. But even those erotic classics didn't navigate the psychosexual terrain that Bentley does when she meets a lover who introduces her to a radical and unexpected pleasure, to the "holy" act that she came to see as her awakening. The Surrender is a witty, intelligent, and eloquent exploration of one woman's obsession that will be sure to leave readers questioning their own desires. Once Forbidden, Now Championed. Every now and then there's a dirty book so literary, or a literary book so dirty, that it becomes a must read or at least a must-discuss among the sorts of people who would never let themselves be seen hanging around the porn shelf. "The Sexual Life of Catherine M.," a French art critic's memoir of her numberless sexual encounters, was such a book; though indifferently reviewed here, it spent months on the best-seller list in 2002. "100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed," a fictionalized erotic memoir by Melissa Panarello, a 17-year-old Sicilian girl, will almost surely be such a book when it's published here next month; it has already sold more than half a million copies in Italy. And in the meantime there is a homegrown version, "The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir," by Toni Bentley, a book whose demure black dust jacket folds back to reveal the same painting of a wispily clad posterior that was the opening shot in the movie "Lost in Translation." No less a highbrow than Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, has declared "The Surrender" a "small masterpiece of erotic writing." "The Surrender" is an extremely graphic memoir and also a paean to a sexual practice once thought so forbidden that Constance and Mellors, for example, didn't get around to it until Chapter 16 of "Lady Chatterley's Lover," and even then Lawrence veiled his description in a way he thought might confound the censors. (They weren't fooled.) The passage -- the one in which Constance, "a little startled and almost unwilling," is "pierced again with piercing thrills of sensuality, different, sharper, more terrible than the thrills of tenderness" -- depicts what Section 12 of the British Sexual Offences Act used to call "buggery." We have the more clinical term "anal intercourse," and according to several recent books, it is now just one more item on the vast, taboo-less sexual menu available to consenting adults. The subject is still not so embarrassment-free, however, or so un-nervous-making that a single conversation about Ms. Bentley's book can take place without eliciting a frantic spate of jokes and bad puns. Even the author can't help writing about her "back story" and her "behind-sight." But Ms. Bentley also has this to say: "Bliss, I learned from being sodomized, is an experience of eternity in a moment of real time" and "The penetration is deeper, more profound; it rides the edge of sanity. The direct path . . . to God, has become clear, has been cleared." The author is a throwback, in other words. At a time when so much sexual writing aims, like Catherine M.'s book, to demystify and de- emotionalize sex -- to reduce it to a physical and hormonal process not much different from, say, scratching an itch -- Ms. Bentley belongs to the old tradition of hyperbole and overwriting, the tradition of Lawrence, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, which sees sex as an avenue to spirituality, to the mystical and sublime. A lot of this writing, with its billowing waves, its dark abysses and searing flames burning the soul to tinder, is nonsense, of course, but it's sometimes splendid nonsense, and every now and then, when she's not talking about crotchless panties or how she collected her lover's used condoms, Ms. Bentley hits the grand rhapsodic note, as when she writes, "I became an archetype, a myth, a Joseph Campbell goddess spreading my legs for the benefit of all mankind for all time." Tall, graceful and still ballerina-thin, Ms. Bentley, who lives in California, was in New York City this week for a book party (sponsored by Playboy, which has excerpted "The Surrender") and for what must surely be a first in the history of book publicity: consecutive interviews with the Howard Stern show and "Topic A With Tina Brown." Ms. Bentley is not your typical dirty-book writer. For 10 years she danced with the New York City Ballet, under Balanchine, and in 1982, when she was just 21, she published "Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal," one of the better dancer's books ever written. She was co-author of the autobiography of her idol, Suzanne Farrell, and also wrote a book about the costume designer Barbara Karinska and "Sisters of Salome," a scholarly book about striptease, which she herself researched by stripping at the old Blue Angel in TriBeCa. (One night she made $89 in tips, more, she says, than she ever earned dancing "Concerto Barocco" or "Symphony in C.") Much of the fuss about her book, she acknowledged in an interview, has to do with its subject matter. "Anal sex -- it's not a taboo, but it is," she said, and she added that she originally thought of publishing under the pseudonym Madeleine Leclerc (in partial homage to the character Madeleine, the Marquis de Sade's lover in the movie "Quills"). After some amicable discussion, her parents and brother decided not to read the book. About the reaction of others, she said, "I'm wary, but I know I can't stop people from seeing it the way they want to see it." She has already heard from the predictable weirdos who are eager to date her; from dozens of feminists, who think she has set back the cause by a hundred years; and from a number of married men who wish their wives were more sexually adventurous. "For a lot of these men, I think I'm like Florence Nightingale," she said. But Ms. Bentley, who talks in very rapid, perfectly formed sentences, like a dancer performing fouettés, is not in the least coy or embarrassed about "The Surrender," nor does she see it as a break with her ballet past. "For a dancer, dancing is an art form that offers the possibility of physical transcendence," she said, "and that's what great sex does. It's about using your body to get to a higher spiritual plane." She went on: "I'm obviously an exhibitionist, but I wrote this book for myself -- to understand what was happening to me. I want to live in that land -- fairyland, the place of transcendent beauty -- and I found that that can happen in reality. But no one was more surprised than me to discover that it could happen by this particular route." When she was working on "Winter Season," Ms. Bentley recalled, she worried about how Balanchine, who was a father figure to her, and whose presence -- charming, formidable, elusive -- dominates the book, would react. It turned out he admired "Winter Season," which he read not long before he died. Inevitably, she has wondered what Mr. B. would have made of "The Surrender." "I think it would have amused him, " she said. "My greatest flaw as a dancer was timidity. I was less than I might have been because I was too shy and modest. And I like to think that Mr. B. would say; 'Now look at what she's done. She didn't dance that way for me.' " The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir by Toni Bentley. Toni Bentley was born in Perth, Australia of an Australian father, a biologist, and British mother, a lawyer. Leaving Perth at age two, she lived in Bristol, England for four years prior to emigrating to the United States. She took her first ballet class at age four in England and then entered the School of American Ballet, the official school of New York City Ballet, at age ten and studied there for seven years. At seventeen she was invited to join George Balanchine's New York City Ballet and danced there for ten years. She is the author of five books -- all named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times. Her first, Winter Season, A Dancer's Journal , was published when she was twenty-two and is a diary of her life as a young dancer in the New York City Ballet under Balanchine's tenure. Several years later a hip injury ended her career on the stage. She went on the write Holding On to the Air: the Autobiography of Suzanne Farrell (co-authored with Farrell), Costumes by Karinska , about Balanchine's great Russian costume designer, Sisters of Salome , a cultural history of the femme fatale and origins of modern striptease, and The Surrender, An Erotic Memoir , the story of an obsessive love affair. The Surrender was named one of the 100 Notable Books of the year by the New York Times, and one of the Best Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly. It has been translated into eighteen languages and was a bestseller in Brazil, Spain, Italy, and France. She has written essays and reviews for The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, Playboy, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, BookForum, Vogue, Allure, Arts & Antiques, Smithsonian, Ballet Review, Dance Magazine, CR Fashionbook, and the Daily Beast among others. She has given talks at Harvard University, Cambridge University, the Oscar Wilde Society in London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, the University of North Florida, the Philoctetes Society in New York, and at THiNK 2013, in Goa, India. In 2010 her story "The Bad Lion," originally published in the The New York Review of Books, was selected for "Best American Essays 2010" by editor Christopher Hitchens. A one-woman play adaptation of "The Surrender" -- in Spanish (La rendición) -- starring the Swiss-German actress Isabelle Stoffel, had its world premiere in Madrid at the Microteatro Por Dinero in January 2012 and was then produced by the Spanish National Theatre (Centro Dramático Nacional) in January 2013 at the historic Teatro María Guerrero in Madrid playing alongside a production of Federico Garcia Lorca's "Yerma." The play had its English-language world premiere at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2013 and was invited to New York City for a one-month season at the Clurman Theatre in January 2014. The play has since toured Spain and South America and had its German-language premiere in Switzerland and Germany in 2014. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. 'The Surrender': The Beauty of Submission. THE SURRENDER An Erotic Memoir. By Toni Bentley. 208 pp. ReganBooks/ HarperCollins Publishers. $24.95. IN recent years, a small but pungent subgenre of extreme female confession has emerged from the general glut of published memoirs. The outré personal experiences retailed in such works have ranged from nymphomaniac picaresques (Catherine M.) and incest (Kathryn Harrison) to spanking fetishes (Daphne Merkin) and the obsessive cyber-stalking of ex-lovers (Katha Pollitt). For a reading public long since inured to the shock value of mere drug addiction or child abuse, these stories have provided a timely upping of the sensationalist ante. That dubious achievement aside, they are also to be credited with subverting some of the more pious 20th-century truisms concerning female sexuality. If the official rhetoric of second-wave feminism has tended to depict women as gentle, peaceable creatures who seek meaningful sexual encounters with respectful, supportive partners, the extreme confessors propose an altogether less sunshiny portrait both of women and of their desires. In doing so, they embarrass some of the simple-minded notions that have become associated, over the years, with the lapidary slogan "The personal is political." Women do not, they remind us, always behave nobly in matters of the heart. Nor do women always need -- or want -- to be treated as valiant, serious-minded people in bed. To this interesting tributary of corrective incorrectness is now added "The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir." Toni Bentley, a former ballet dancer who has written a number of books about dance (most notably "Winter Season," an account of her life at the New York City Ballet during Balanchine's tenure), has taken the radical decision to compose a manifesto for anal sex. "This is no feminist treatise about equality," she warns us -- perhaps a little superfluously -- in her introduction. "This is the truth about the beauty of submission." Predictably enough, the press material that arrived with my galley heralded this volume as a daring and courageous inquiry into "what many consider to be the last remaining taboo." Anal sex is very far from being the last remaining taboo, of course. (The last time I checked, cannibalism and necrophilia were still struggling for acceptance.) Indeed, there are some signs that the status of anal sex as any kind of taboo is under attack. State laws against sodomy were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003. And no less mainstream a fictional character than Bridget Jones cheerfully engaged in the practice, in the film adaptation of Helen Fielding's best-selling novel "Bridget Jones's Diary." Still, fair is fair: no woman before Bentley has felt quite zealous enough about what she calls "emancipation through the back door" to write an entire book in its praise. Bentley credits sodomy with having resolved the lifelong psychosexual problems that resulted from not being loved enough by her father. (In one luridly Freudian episode of this book, Bentley père is described punishing his 4-year-old daughter for some minor infraction by angrily smearing a banana on her face and in her hair.) By giving herself up to "this forbidden pathway," Bentley writes, she has not only found her self, she has discovered "Paradise," she has experienced "eternity in a moment of real time," and she has gotten to know God "experientially." That's not all. She is also pretty sure that anal sex is responsible for piercing her yang, forcing her yin to the surface and releasing decades of anger stored in her lower intestine. Bentley's inclination to various kinds of self-abasement found early expression in her childhood fascination with the lives of the saints, and later on in her career as a ballet dancer. (All that pain and discipline, all that bowing and scraping before the God-like Balanchine.) But neither these interests nor a busy history of sexual experimentation ever fully satisfied her masochistic yearnings. Only, she claims, when she met a man prepared to focus his attention on her neglected orifice did she enter the realm of bliss. For the just under three years that she and her sodomizer -- a man referred to throughout the book by the regrettable moniker "A-Man" -- enjoyed regular bouts of earth-moving sex, Bentley maintained a detailed journal of her experiences. She also kept a tally of how many times she was anally penetrated and made mathematical calculations about the average number of anal episodes she was having per year, week and day. She fetishized the accouterments of her sexual obsession -- dedicating herself to finding the best and most economical lubricants, the most sex-friendly boudoir-wear. In a manner befitting a woman who was experiencing a spiritual as well as sexual awakening, she also preserved her lover's used condoms, much as an acolyte might hoard religious relics. "THE SURRENDER" is a brave book -- although not because it tackles a "taboo" or because it is frank. (Candor is surely too epidemic in the popular culture, these days, to qualify any longer as courageous.) Its bravery lies rather in its earnest attempt to do justice to the transcendent dimension of a profane act. Sex, it is always claimed, is immensely difficult to write about. But that's not quite true. To recount the embarrassments and alienation of lackluster coitus is a relative doddle. It is good sex -- or great sex -- that presents the real challenges for a writer. While Bentley certainly has the requisite pluck for the job, her prose, alas, proves incommensurate with her ambition. For much of her narrative, she resorts to the demotic language of contemporary pornography. While unbeautiful, this has the virtue of appropriateness. It is when she strives for a high, poetic style that she runs into problems. "I was now being given a second chance," she writes of her anal deflowering, "not on the well-trodden vaginal trail, but in a place entirely new to my consciousness -- and it quickly became the site of my consciousness." The results of her laboriously facetious punning jags are hardly more pleasing: "This is the back story of a love story. A back story that is the whole story. A second hole story, to be entirely accurate. Love from inside my backside. . . . No hindsight for me in this great love but rather behind-sight -- cited from the eye of my behind." And the jaunty "how-to" voice into which she occasionally lapses (when weighing up the relative merits of shaving versus waxing, say, or deliberating on which kind of "scanty panties" provide the better value) yields perhaps the most gruesome sentences of all. Bentley is a great believer in the virtues of what the sociologists call "transactional sex." Which is to say, she is against diluting her erotic pleasures with the banal stuff of relationships. "Desire is sexy, a show of free will," she writes; "attachment is the enemy of free will." Dinner dates are anathema. "I preferred sex on an empty stomach, and to eat alone with a good book." She presents the affair with A-Man as the perfect enactment of her sexual philosophy. She never goes out with him. They have no mutual friends. Their relationship is restricted to her bedroom. When, at last, she is confronted with the fact that he is sleeping with another woman, and suffers pangs of terrible jealousy, she chooses to dump him rather than beg for the death-in-life that is fidelity. This -- much more than Bentley's preferred sexual position -- is the truly provocative matter dealt with in "The Surrender." Most married adults -- male and female -- know something about the business of trading intensity for security and passion for comfort. But as wistful as they may sometimes grow for the excitements of yesteryear, very few of them have the mettle to live out Bentley's austere choice. Her desire and ability to do so may, she acknowledges, be evidence of deep psychic wounds. But if so, she is happy to be wounded. "I once loved a man so much that I no longer existed -- all Him, no Me," she writes. "Now I love myself just enough that no man exists -- all Me, no Them. They all used to be God, and I used to be a figment of my own imagination; now men are figments of my imagination." IF this is a victory, it's surely the Pyrrhic kind. There is something grimly narcissistic about the world of zipless, fantasy sex that Bentley has created for herself; something sad and alienated about its unforgiving aesthetic standards and intolerance of human frailty. (Apart from the bedroom, the only other location that features in this book with any frequency is the gym.) Moreover, the contempt that Bentley expresses for women who have not taken her path -- her characterization of them as pitiable bourgeois types, mired in laundry and consumer goods, who have forsaken sexual joy for mortgages -- is suspiciously vehement. She protests too much. Surely, if you're certain of having found Paradise, you can afford to be a little more magnanimous toward your less privileged sisters? The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir. Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. …If you don’t fuck with death chasing you, you are mistaken… Though I did enjoy reading it, The Surrender turned out to be a disappointment. Not sure what I was looking for in reading this title. I feel a great need to always learn something, and this book generally afforded me an opportunity to understand more about why some people are perhaps obsessed with the asshole. I never have been, other than to take a good peek at my pile from time to time after a healthy bowel movement. I am aware of how sensitive the anal area is, of course, but have no compulsion to have a finger, tongue, or prick inside it. Neither does my wife, though there was a time several years ago when we experimented a bit over what all the fuss was about. Not long after a few penetrations to her sacred hole, she announced to me that her ass would be forever-on just exit-only. But I do get the surrender and submission dogma Toni Bentley details in her well-written memoir of ass fucking. I suppose the void of intimacy regarding her personal relationships is where I found the book lacking. She certainly loves to prepare for sex, however. And that is a very good thing by my way of thinking. Bentley is definitely promiscuous, and I thought I might learn more about a behavior that so far has eluded the bulk of my relationships, and more specifically, my marriage. But Bentley is certainly intelligent, and a well-read writer. All of us get our needs met in different ways, and she is no exception. Bentley just seems to have a hunger impossible to assuage. ( ) The Surrender, Toni Bentley's fifth book, has feminists gnawing off their own limbs and male book reviewers salivating like Cujo and carrying around their blue balls in bowling bags. Make you want to read it yet? It's incredibly daring and provocative, and while it is definitely graphic, this isn't hardcore porn by a long shot. It's witty, informational, and at times, moving. So what is the damned book about, already? It's a memoir about anal sex. Not just anal sex, but the connection between that particular act of penetration and the opening up to the realm of the divine, or spirit, or God (or whatever term you'd like to use to fill in that blank, feel free!) It explores the idea of submission to something greater than yourself, whether that's a ten inch cock, or the God of your understanding. After reading this memoir, I'm pretty sure that Bentley is convinced they're one and the same, and after experiencing anal sex myself in much the same way as she often describes, I'm not so sure she's wrong! I don't necessarily like this woman all of the time, but do I understand her. She is an intelligent and insightful author, and in spite of the rantings of her feminist critics, she has a deep understanding of the feminine. Bentley was a New York City ballet dancer for ten years, and in the book, she describes how she began a rather adventurous polyamorous lifestyle after her divorce. She meets her lover, "A-Man," through a threesome that eventually turns twosome. He introduces her to the world of anal sex, and the rest of the book is her cataloguing of their anal adventures mixed with a humorous look at the history, laws and taboos against anal sex. Most of those in the mainstream who encountered her book when it was released in 2004 were shocked by its content, although I imagine if you're reading this review on Literotica, you've already encountered enough information about anal sex on this site alone to fill an encyclopedia. Anal sex isn't the "last" taboo, or even the "latest" taboo, but Bentley does do something shocking that we don't read much about here at Literotica or anywhere else. She connects sex with God. Yes, I said the G-word. She connects to something greater than herself during what she describes as transcendent sexual anal experiences (two-hundred and ninety-eight of them in fact.) Now we're talking taboo! Bentley writes: "I am sitting on the threshold. Perhaps this is the final paradox of God's paradoxical machinations: my ass is my very own back door to heaven. The Pearly Gates are closer than you think. Sacred and profane united in one hole." This is the crux of her message, and she explores this idea, in many ways, throughout the book. Sex is just another way to experience the divine, and anal sex in particular, because it requires a great measure of trust on the part of the receiver, and a great amount of control on the part of the giver, makes the perfect metaphor and learning experience for the art of surrendering. In this way, I believe Bentley truly moves into new territory, and through her memoir, shows us how it can be done. God, or spirit, can be found anywhere. She finds it through her asshole, which, of course, is no accident. It is particularly sensitive for her. She speaks of her childhood, experiences of being spanked and humiliated by her father, and how anal sex begins her process of psychologically working through those wounds. Bentley describes an encounter with A-Man: "His cock is my laser healer. Every point in it probes inside and pierces my armor, the armor of self- protection, and the two fears—love and death—momentarily close their grip and I experience a moment of immorality." It is without a doubt a transcendent experience for her, one that takes her into places that only surrender to something greater than yourself possibly can. If you want a turn-on, and you already enjoy anal sex, this is a beautifully written, interesting, funny, and provocative book. If you're looking for a how-to, you might want to look elsewhere. If your proclivities lie in the realm of Tanta, transcendent sex, and the connection of the profane and the sacred, this book is like striking gold. Bentley gives us a deep and profound look into the tender rosebud that is the asshole. It holds our shadow, personally and collectively, and yet like any shadow, it can be our pathway to the light. I am particularly moved by her revealing her newly acquired openness and vulnerability by sharing this memoir with the world. Her act of surrender points the way for others. Every door is a doorway that leads to God, even the backdoor. Toni Bentley is also the author of Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal, Holding On to the Air: The Autobiography of Suzanne Farrell (by Suzanne Farrell with Toni Bentley), Costumes by Karinska, and Sisters of Salome. ( )