CRAP CULTURE #01

"You open your ass and you open your mind and you open your heart." Toni Bentley talks about her new anal sex memoir, "The Surrender."

Oct. 8, 2004 As a young woman, Toni Bentley danced with the New York City Ballet, and made a second career writing well-reviewed books about it. She knew George Balanchine and co-wrote Suzanne Farrell's autobiography, can delicately describe the agony of toeshoes and the psychological rigors of the barre. Now she has turned her literary attention to another activity that stretches body, mind and psyche: sodomy.

In "The Surrender," her 205-page "erotic memoir," by Page 26 Bentley has dispatched with her first orgasm (after French erotica on the Upper East Side), the loss of her vaginal virginity (to a man who tells her, "You've got a great ass"), an affair with a stagehand who has her sit on his face, and a 10-year marriage. She then sits back and luxuriates in her chronicle of her post-marriage sexual experimentation. There is her cunnilingus-heavy affair with a masseur she continues to pay, her appreciation for "Pussy Hounds" or men "who live to dive," and repeated threesomes with a Pre-Raphaelite redheaded woman and a "Young Man," who later gets a new epithet, "A-Man." A-Man is the lover who introduces Bentley to anal intercourse, the act that gives "The Surrender," and Bentley herself, a soul. Read More