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

side trims, the tutu trim, from my ballet-dancing days—a nice isosceles triangle. But then I went to a few strip clubs and got jealous of those very exposed, hairless pussies” (122). While it is always problematic and potentially disempowering to position any aspect of women’s bodily decision making as socially induced rather than self-individuating, it cannot be denied that Bentley’s motivation to remove her pubic hair is not self-determined: the author depilates so her lover can “get a view” and “get access” (121). This confession, and the idolization of the bodies of strippers, implicitly centralizes the growing inclination to render sexual encounters as principally visual rather than tactile experiences, in accordance with the values of the sex industry and the centralization of performance aesthetics. Her desire to conform to porn practices can perhaps be understood as a desire to establish herself as an empowered woman in a postfeminist climate, where agency is often contingent upon “self-objectification and dependence upon the approving gaze of others” (Budgeon 66). Yet, in order to achieve this “empowerment,” Bentley engages in a process of de-individuation in accordance with pornography’s dominant values. In analyzing feature and gonzo forms of pornography, Robert Jensen identified two basic themes common to all mass-marketed heterosexual pornography: the first, that “all women at all times want sex from all men,” and the second, that “women like all the sexual acts that men perform or demand” (62). In Jensen’s appraisal of pornography, women who do not subscribe to such models of female desire “can be easily turned with a little force” even though “such force is rarely necessary, however, for most of the women in pornography are constructed as the nymphomaniacs men fantasize about” (56).

In a similar manner, Bentley admires that her lover has “the balls to want and try and dare to fuck [her] in [her] tiny, tight ass” (78) and audaciously positions second-wave feminism as culpable in the disintegration of traditional masculinity: “Defusing the bomb is a challenge to the feminist man, and arrogance makes him think he can succeed. He can’t. It’s my hurt, my pain, and who are you to take it from me? I don’t need rescuing, I don’t need pity, I don’t need opinions, I need fucking—and