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

surrender, stating, “I loved him too much. I was too vulnerable to give myself entirely to him” (176). Instead, she rationalizes that, in the absence of “a commitment that might be broken,” there is no danger of the “self-righteous pain and anger of betrayal” (176) that infidelity would precipitate. As such, she begins a relationship with “A-Man” that never extends beyond the boundaries of nonmonogamous anal sex, choosing a sexual practice that the author situates as a feminist strategy: “a pussy, genetically, wants impregnation, the juice; an asshole wants the ride of its life” (126). For the author, she and her lover “exist in the land beyond the intercourse that breeds babies” (83).

Bentley’s rejection of the institution of marriage, monogamy, emotional intimacy, and decentering of vaginal intercourse can be cited as evidence of a textual feminist consciousness. Yet, the reductionism of her comment that “vaginas are for babies, asses for art” (126) subtly implicates her ideology as one grounded in the rhetoric of biological essentialism, and one observes this further in her adulation of heroic masculinity and adherence to the aesthetic conventions of mainstream pornography. Bentley’s reactionary sensibilities will be explored in detail; however, it is first important to outline how postfeminist culture has reconceptualised pornography as empowering.

Postfeminist Agency and the Mainstreaming of Pornography

Debates that attempt to position pornography as not necessarily damaging to women, and perhaps even liberating, have emerged in force in the late twentieth-century, arguably because the consumption of pornography by women has become a marked feature of culture in the twenty-first. Pornography has become mainstream, in accordance with a neo-liberal embracement of the potentially empowering possibilities offered to women by the sex industry, marking a new trajectory of sexual representation in popular culture. In Pornland: How Porn Has