Toni Bentley danced with New York City Ballet for 10 years under George Balanchine and is the author of five books that include The Surrender, An Erotic Memoir, about an obsessive love affair that introduced her to sodomy, rendering the physics, paradoxes and transcendence of the act a revelation. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and writes for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair among others.

How did you come to write about your four-year love affair that took you to the moon, shall we say, with your discovery of anal sex?

As a 15-year-old girl I began writing what became an extensive diary so I have always been in the habit of using the blank page —what Tennessee Williams called the “Pale Judgment”—as the only place on earth I know of where one can tell the absolute truth, my absolute truth, in total freedom. Here I tell of my most powerful or mysterious or painful experiences in order to understand them, give them shape, excavate their meaning. During this particular life-changing affair I kept notes after each and every rendezvous (all 298 of them—yes, I counted!) as I quickly realized I was in the midst of an utterly unique and profound erotic experience. After the affair ended and I had scraped the molecules of myself back into a new form, I connected these notes to tell the story that is the book. All very raw, immediate. Like live sex on the page.

Toni Bentley, photo by Clayton Cubitt.

How is erotic literature different from pornographic writing, other than the obvious—the prose being just better when it comes to literature?

Complex question. I am very pro-pornographic writing: it’s a form of writing that still has a long, long way to go—and if it’s bad, as it usually is, then just don’t read it! After all, even one’s most exquisite sexual experiences if filmed would be “pornographic”—at least they damn well better be. I learned, viscerally, as a ballet dancer, the mind/body connection. In The Surrender I was very clear about my intent to attempt to depict my experience accurately, which meant being entirely literal and physical—what is termed “graphic” sex—while also attempting to convey the internal, metaphysical, even spiritual, experience that can, if one is so fortunate, accompany the “pornographic.” The challenge to do this—a virtual impossibility given that one is transposing a multi-leveled three-dimensional, perhaps four-dimensional experience into flat, two-dimensional, dry symbols, words on a page—was very appealing to me. Guaranteed failure at the outset of a project provides an elating freedom to proceed. I have always thought that if this book managed to convey 15% of what the experience was truly like in the moment, in the flesh, I would have succeeded.

Original cover (censored by Barnes & Noble so publisher slapped the black keyhole cover over it!) of The Surrender.

How much influence does pornography have on today’s sexuality—especially with the instant availability of it now?

Pornography is here to stay—thank God. Just as there will always be attempts, especially in our Puritan country, to control it. But it will never, never, never be stopped. Hurray for the relentless march of human desire! I, however do not watch any current-day porn myself, but prefer the great classic films of Radley Metzger aka Henry Paris from the Golden Age of porn in the 1970s that contain actual plot, wit, European locations and Brigitte Bardot beauties. Needless to say—though I will as it can’t be said enough—porn featuring pedophilia, snuff films or any violence against women and the like is beyond reprehensible.

I do think the reliance on pornography as the main source for sexual learning by young men and women certainly sets up all kinds of unrealistic problems that can indeed be not only damaging but presage terrible disappointment. I don’t think, in general, for example, women love blowjobs as ubiquitously as porn indicates—as one of my girlfriends says, “they don’t call it a ‘job’ for nothing.” Young women who laser off all their pubic hair, blow up their breasts, and fake noisy orgasms are setting themselves up for all kinds of failure—not least really wanting a few strands of that pubic hair back later in life!

My biggest beef—as I am solely concerned with women and their power and pleasure (men’s power and pleasure has run our patriarchal world since Adam blamed Eve so they don’t get any more time, or outrage, from me)—is that pornography contributes yet another barrier to real female orgasms in its totally unrealistic portrayal of them, including the ease and frequency of achievement. Female orgasm is the best, and simplest, literal barometer of female sexual happiness. I simply don’t buy the often heard notion—I heard it just three days ago—that “I don’t really care if I come, it’s the whole experience that I care about.”

To my mind (and from much personal experience) this is yet one more female accommodation to male dominance. And accommodation is complicity, plain and simple. Women still have a long, long way to go to sexual freedom and satisfaction, and the endlessly faked orgasms in porn only encourage the Great Fake in real life. Until women find the courage to put their own pleasure first, and give up “trying to be loved,” they won’t come and won’t be loved. A risky, even terrifying prospect indeed. But to my mind, the only choice.