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

maybe a nice little spanking for indulging my anger” (137). The author does not require a man to attempt psychological understanding or emotional intimacy, but rather to uphold what she perceives to be his rightful place in the dominant sexual hierarchy. For a man to do any less than sexually dominate her positions him as a biological anomaly who can, in the twenty-first century, hide his genetic deficiency behind the umbrella of feminist enlightenment: “Women’s liberation has fostered what appears to be an entire generation of this particular man: the male masochist who can now masquerade, legitimately, as the feminist man” (49).

Bentley’s resistance to the ideal of the enlightened, modern man ensures that, throughout the memoir, she assumes a subservient position in all her sexual interactions, first through acting as a vessel for learning and self-awareness: “I learned with him that I am most alive, most observant, and most intelligent when sexually engaged” (31). Ultimately, she finds sexual communication with a man who “was not going to compromise himself for pussy, like so many men do” (176). It is Bentley’s affirmation of sexual essentialism and narrowly defined gender roles that culminates in her positioning of male sexual behavior as the preeminent marker of masculinity: “If a man can possess a woman sexually—really possess—he won’t need to control her ideas, her opinions, her clothes, her friends, even her other lovers” (98). The implication here is that male domination in all spheres of life is merely a compensation for a man’s inability to assume a position of sexual dominance. Bentley suggests that male sexual dominance ensures that her lover has “infiltrated the core” (98) of her being, after which female submission in all other aspects of life is inevitable and legitimate. The author identifies the aftershock of feminist thought as a challenge to sexual empowerment and positions her sexual pleasure in the convoluted territory between two polar opposites: “Domination—total and complete domination of my being—that is where I find freedom” (98). Here Bentley displays that she is an heir of the tradition of erotica developed by Reage and Bataille by configuring sex as necessarily destructive and liberating and by identifying feminism as an