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

obstacle to relinquishing control and celebrating the “natural” order of sexual power structures: “He fucks me into my femininity. As a liberated woman, it is the only way I can go there and retain my dignity. Turned over, ass in the air, I have little choice but to succumb and lose my head. This is how I can have an experience my intellect would never allow, a betrayal to Olive Schreiner, Margaret Sanger and Betty Friedan” (7).

This betrayal of a history of feminist struggle, both first wave and second wave, and valorization of sexual essentialism is distinctly postfeminist. Yvonne Tasker highlights postfeminism’s “suppressed paradox of a simultaneous celebration of female empowerment and more traditional norms of femininity” (70), with reactionary gender regimes masked by a surface subversion of traditional femininity. This is embodied in Bentley’s declaration that “[a]ss-fucking a woman is clearly about authority. The man’s authority; the woman’s complete acceptance of it” (91). By using the term “ass-fucking”—more commonly aligned with masculine expression—Bentley subverts feminine scripts while affirming an essentialist discourse that remains as rigid as Freud’s contention that male activity and female passivity are unavoidable characteristics of sexual life.³ In a further allusion to Freud, Bentley concedes to penis envy: “I reckon every woman wants a cock between her legs, ultimately. The question is: Does she want one of her own, or can she tolerate one belonging to a man?” (42). Her phallocentrism is so strong that she even declares that she “cannot love a cock that cannot dominate [her]”; otherwise she retains “too much power” and becomes “totally tyrannical” (128). She resolutely positions women as desiring subordination, while simultaneously positioning herself as a liberated woman. Along with Patrick Califia, the author can be identified as among a minority of contemporary feminists who affirm sexual subordination.⁴ Califia locates this in the parameters of the wider feminist community by stating that “a woman who deliberately seeks out a sexual situation in which she can be helpless is a traitor in their eyes” largely because the women’s movement has “been trying to persuade people for years that women are not naturally masochistic” (234). Califia makes