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

literary quality for precisely these reasons. Despite this expectation, Toni Bentley’s memoir appears to be, like visual pornography, produced for mass consumption and therefore complicates not only gendered definitions of erotica and pornography, but also their corresponding notions of aesthetic quality. The memoir convenes elements of both erotica and pornography and, in feminist terms, the ramifications of this problematic integration are especially important: erotica has been historically embraced by feminist scholars, whereas pornography has been primarily contested. This raises a critical question; namely, how should one position female-authored memoirs that appear to embrace the aesthetic notions and sexual values of male-produced visual pornography? This question becomes particularly complex when one acknowledges that the form of the memoir has been historically positioned as inherently feminist and has been especially important in the ascent of third-wave feminism.

In Promiscuities: A Secret History of Female Desire, Naomi Wolf attests to the role of life writing in feminist consciousness-raising. She comments, “[T]here is something missing from our psychological understanding of how girls become women today that only first-person accounts can fill” (3). Similarly, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards observe that, in historical terms, “women’s personal stories have been the evidence of where the movement needs to go politically” (20). Given the regulation of female sexuality and the taboo of female promiscuity, the act of writing a sexual history embodies potential implications that are especially damaging to women, constituting a “record that can be used to embarrass, belittle or even destroy” (5). Considering these possible implications, the decision to publicize a private sexual history can be positioned as a subversive political act in itself, and this political intent has been evident in the form of feminist memoirs such as Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation and Leora Tanenbaum’s Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation. Yet, despite the feminist imperatives that the mere act of producing a public sexual history may signify, Bentley’s memoir presents no obvious validation of conspicuous feminist