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

the astute point that subordination and masochism in the sexual realm cannot necessarily be transferred to the nonsexual sphere, either private or political: “A sexual masochist probably doesn’t want to be raped, battered, discriminated against in her job, or kept down by the system. Her desire to act out a specific sexual fantasy is very different from the pseudopsychiatric dictum that a woman’s world is bound by housework, intercourse, and childbirth” (235). By positing submission in the locale of sexual relations, whilst maintaining control in other aspects of public and private life, Bentley complicates the divisive issue of whether or not sexual submission is indeed counterproductive to female agency or indeed detrimental to women’s experience in the wider social world.

The rhetoric of postfeminism is a rhetoric of liberal humanism; it embraces a “flexible ideology which can be adapted to suit individual needs and desires” (Gamble 44) and as such refuses to be critical of women’s choices, even in the context of sexual choices that ostensibly rebuke more traditional forms of feminism. Yet, as women’s liberation in the twenty-first century has become so inextricably linked to sexual liberation, many young women feel that “any questioning of this hypersexual culture will only be seen as prudishness” (82). Just as in the nineteenth century, when the promiscuous woman was presented in the dominant culture as marginal and to be condemned, so now a girl who has decided to delay sexual activity until she finds a true emotional commitment can be relegated to the margins and silenced. Bentley’s text bears witness to the complexity of sexual decision making within this climate, as even though she appears to be in supreme command of her sexual choices, she reveals that, in the early part of her life, this freedom of choice was not always apparent: “It never occurred to me that you didn’t have to become monogamous the moment a guy put his tongue in your mouth. That’s just the way it was—sealed with saliva—and I didn’t have enough experience to think that I might have a choice in the matter” (24). The catastrophic effect of this compromising of choice is later evident in the author’s post intercourse confession: “He was the thirty-third man, and the only one I really liked to fuck. The others were