Sexuality and Contemporary Literature By Joel Gwynne and Angeli ...

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Critical discussion of pornography has been further complicated since the ascent of postfeminism as a cultural condition, and Walter decrees that second-wave feminist critiques of pornography shared a common misconception: “[T]hey assumed that women never take any pleasure in pornography” (105). Yet, while a plethora of evidence supports Walter’s claim—not least the popularity and growth of United Kingdom retailers such as Ann Summers (which sells sex toys in addition to lingerie)—the extent to which women take pleasure in pornography and the extent to which women are coerced into performing pornographic pleasure is somewhat difficult to determine in postfeminist culture. Charting the growth of “raunch culture” and “do-me-feminism,” Genz and Brabon highlight that women are now encouraged to express individual agency primarily through a re-articulation of sexually feminine identities. Yet, as Imelda Whelehan argues, images of sexually empowered women in postfeminist culture “only notionally offer a subversion of the pin-up image: she is active rather than passive, and ruthlessly self-seeking in her own pleasures […] yet she looks deceptively like a pin-up” (37). The centralization of sexually active rather than sexually subordinate women in popular culture illustrates the prevalence of a particular vision of women’s empowerment that is deeply complicit in porn culture. Returning to The Surrender, nowhere is this more apparent than in Bentley’s adherence to the aesthetic and ideological conventions of mass-market visual pornography.

Commenting on the rise of depilation and cosmetic surgery as one of the many self-regulating practices performed by contemporary women, Walter argues that the “idea that there is one correct way for female genitals to look is undoubtedly tied into the rise of pornography” (Living Dolls 109). In Bentley’s memoir, the narrator similarly demarcates depilation as a contemporary lifestyle trend that has risen commensurately with the mainstreaming of the sex industry: “I began with the simple