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

just men and I allowed it. Resentfully” (94). Feminist research into, and women’s reflections upon, experiences of sexual violence long ago established that rape involves the sexualization of power, the fusing in men’s imaginations of sexual pleasure with domination and control. As Bentley does not take pleasure from all but one of her sexual relationships, her confession strongly implies that in a culture where the dominant definition of sex is the taking of pleasure from women by men, rape is an expression of the sexual norms of the culture, not a violation of those norms.

Over the past forty years, feminists have argued that the possibility of empowerment for young women entails critical consideration of how women can respond to the pressures on them to treat sexual encounters as primarily for fulfilling men’s sexual needs (Holland 1996). They have challenged the lack of a positive model of female sexuality and argued that women must critically reflect on their sexual experiences in order to gain control of their responses to men. In this chapter, I have aimed to illustrate how Bentley’s memoir demonstrates a plethora of (post)feminist sensibilities: the centralisation of women’s desire for sex without emotional intimacy, the rejection of the codes of heterosexual romantic love, and the relegation of men to the sphere of sexual objects. All of this can be read as women’s progress in the drive to invert the inequalities in the male-dominated history of sexual relations. Yet, I have also aimed to illustrate how, despite the ostensibly liberating ethos of The Surrender, the memoir remains trapped within male-dominated sexual discourses that are limiting to women’s sexual empowerment, if not their sexual pleasure. The distinction is an important one to make, for, as Kathrina Glitre declares, “neoliberalism and the postfeminist sensibility encourage self-indulgent pleasure to be mistaken for empowerment” (28). While it is clear that Bentley subjectively experiences sexual pleasure as agentic, her pleasure is predicated on a strict adherence to the sexual paradigm of mainstream pornography—particularly the eroticization of male power—in a manner that denies her material agency. Her memoir suggests that while expressing their sexual desires is very