There are some people whose desire to write, or at least to see themselves in print, exceeds by far the urgency of anything they might have to say. They are, in essence, attention-seekers, rather than seekers after the truth. For this fraternity or sorority—I hesitate to use the modern cant word “community”—the existence of conventions or taboos is essential, for it is by breaking them that they may obtain the notice that they desire; indeed it is the only method available to them. Oddly enough, however, the last taboo that they or their publishers claim to have broken turns out not to be the last taboo after all. Last taboos are thus rather like the last appearances (positively the last) of aging prima donnas; and future attention-seekers need not fear that mankind will ever run out of taboos for them to break.
The author of The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir is a standard modern taboo-breaker, since her book is largely about a subject not much written about, namely the joys of sodomy.[1] She claims to have discovered the meaning of life, or to have achieved a kind of enlightenment, through this activity (if she hadn’t, the book would have been pornography merely); a man’s penis in her rectum is to her what the sacred bo tree was to the Buddha.
Of course, Miss Bentley is the world authority on her sex life, though it does not follow that what she writes is entirely true. Plenty of world authorities on plenty of subjects have written, or even testified in court, dishonestly on their subject of expertise. Nor does the possession of world authority mean that the subject is intrinsically interesting, at least to others. Miss Bentley laments that her sodomizer did not reach his three-hundredth entry into her rectum, only his two-hundred-ninety-eighth: by this stage in the book, however, the reader is unlikely to agree, for there is little doubt that orgasms are better experienced than read about. The waves of transcendent pleasure that rolled through Miss Bentley’s corporeal being, and shook her to her very soul, do not transfer well to the written page. This is not her fault: language isn’t cut out for this kind of thing. The blame is in the exhibitionist effort, not the execution. And when she writes of “the joy that lies on the other side of convention, where risk is real and rapture resides,” one feels that she is like a little girl riding her bicycle with her hands outspread, saying, “Look at me, mummy,” in the knowledge that her mother will be appalled and terrified, and will probably scream.
Perhaps the most intriguing pages of her short book are the acknowledgments. No fewer than fifty-three people are thanked in them. This is indeed strange, and no doubt will guiltily raise many half-formed and hastily suppressed questions in the reader’s mind. Although hers is a work of world authority, it is not, after all, in any sense scholarly: she did not have to consult anyone on an arcane point of cuneiform script, say, or the biochemistry of Australian snake venoms. All she had to do was remember and fashion her memories on the page. What exactly, then, were Mary Bresovitch’s and Ray Sawhill’s contributions (to take two names completely at random) that they should be thus immortalized? Is this an intimate memoir or a collective essay? For exhibitionists, I suppose it is the same thing, and poetry is emotion recollected in front of an audience.
The next literary erotic memoir will have to tackle a sexual activity considerably less tame than mere sodomy. (A taboo? Miss Bentley quotes the latest, deeply uninteresting survey of sexual behavior in America, proving that millions of Americans practice it, especially as they get older, and especially if they are well-educated.) It is in the nature of sensationalist literature that the next sensation must be greater than the last, or it produces no sensation at all. How about necrophilia, then? Our author will coyly admit that sex with the living has not really ever satisfied him (or her). He or she has tried and tried and tried again—of course, the efforts will have to be described in extenso, for the sake of verisimilitude, for in this kind of memoir nothing can be taken as read—but somehow the living sexual partners leave him or her with a feeling of incompleteness.
One day, our hero or heroine meets an old friend to whom he or she confides his or her sexual dissatisfaction. The friend knows just what he or she means: sex with live people is apt to lead to all kinds of complications, such as jealousy, recrimination, demands for more, commitment, and so forth. There is also the increasingly important problem of the power relations between the couple, for power these days is seen as the summum bonum of human relations. It is tiresome to have to achieve power over another and then defend it. Surely there must be a sexual activity in which such complications do not arise?
The friend then asks whether he or she has ever considered sex with the dead? This is the only form of sex in which it is impossible to inflict pain on others: it is therefore ethically not merely permissible but (since the avoidance of the infliction of pain on others is the beginning and perhaps the end of morality) compulsory, at least if there has to be sex at all. And, as it happens, the friend has the key to a local pathology department. The scene is thus set for an orgy in the morgue.
Unlike the erotic memoir of the future, I shall pass over the mechanical details, because—of course—readers of the memoir will be interested only in the philosophy of necrophilia, not in the act itself, which will be described in the book only for the sake of establishing authenticity and the author’s world authority on his or her own life. Our necrophiliac memoirist will dilate on what he or she has learnt from his or her experience, for example that our revulsion at corpses is but a social prejudice and can be overcome with a little exposure to their positive advantages as sexual partners. Moreover, the fact that corpses can be sexually arousing and desirable will act as a consolation to the dying; they will not be forgotten as soon as the breath is out of them after all. Since these are philosophical points that readers will almost certainly not previously have considered, the erotic memoir will be able to lay claim to a purpose deeper than might at first sight appear, and that some critics at least will take seriously.
Goodness knows what will be the sexual experience extolled in the next erotic memoir after the necrophiliac one, but I have great faith in Man’s inventive capacities, especially where the hope of quick sales is concerned.
Of course, Miss Bentley is hardly the first person to seek spiritual transcendence through physical experience. Man is a physical being and his awareness of the transcendent (if a transcendent realm exists) can arrive only through his physical being. Pain and discomfort are sometimes used to achieve this transcendence: not long ago, for example, at the vast Hindu festival on the Ganges known as the Kumbh Mela, when the waters of the river are believed to turn briefly into nectar that washes away sins, I met a saddhu who had held one arm aloft for more than a quarter of a century. Now, of course, it was firmly fibrosed in its vertical position, and his gnarled fingers had grown into the palm of his hand. An angry rationalist approached him and demanded to know, in no very friendly or respectful terms, why he had turned himself into a cripple in this fashion, when the last thing India needed was another useless mouth to feed.
With great good humor and patience, the saddhu said that he had used his pain, which of course had bothered him greatly at the beginning, to transcend the physical realm and reach a higher sphere of being, free of the accidental and filled only with the essential. As to being a useless mouth to feed: having become the object of worshipful charity allowed people to express their goodness and their belief in the transcendent realm that he had, or was trying, to reach. In this case, however, a soft answer most definitely did not turn away wrath.
Miss Bentley presents herself to us as the saddhu of sodomy. “Bliss, I learned from being sodomized, is an experience of eternity in a moment of real time.” And “The direct path to God has become clear, has been cleared.” But somehow one doesn’t quite believe in her spiritual quest, because she’s given the game away in the first two sentences of her book.
She writes: “I once loved a man so much that I no longer existed—all Him, no Me.” She continues: “Now I love myself just enough that no man exists—all Me, no Them.” In other words, she is incapable of a relationship with another human being. Either she is an object herself, or the man becomes an object; and her motto in dealing with others is “Annihilate that ye be not annihilated.”
Any form of mutuality is impossible for her, any warmth of feeling, any sympathy for another. She continues in this chilling opening passage (no pun intended): “They [the men] used to be God, and I used to be a figment of my own imagination; now men are figments of my imagination. Same game, different positions. I don’t know how to play any other way. Someone must be on top, someone on bottom.” In other words, relations between men and women, as conceived by her, are nothing but a zero-sum power game.
Clearly Miss Bentley is a person whom one would not cross the road to meet; rather, she is a person whom one would cross the road not to meet. It is, of course, possible that she is not really as she presents herself, that she is actually very different, what used to be known as a warm and wonderful human being, but then the question would be why she wished to exhibit herself before the public (as large a public as possible) in this icy, self-centered, sociopathic light? The desire to make money is the best, or least damaging, conceivable answer to this particular question, a motive with which most of us can identify.
Is this belief that one either uses other people, or is oneself used by them, and that no other possible relationships exist between people sexually and no doubt in other ways also, more common than it was in former times? (By former times, I mean a few decades ago at most.) I suspect that it is, though I cannot actually prove it beyond reasonable doubt, with knock-down evidence.
Several intellectual tendencies, feminism not least among them, have suggested that power is the supreme, even the only, good, and that inequality of power is the supreme, even the only, evil. Kindness, tenderness, generosity, and a host of other qualities hardly count. Indeed, they are seen as masks for inequality. After all, you can be kind only if it is within your power to be unkind; and that implies an inequality of power between the bestower and the receiver of kindness.
From a realistic point of view, however, power is ineradicable as a feature of human relations. Equality, as Miss Bentley informs us, is not only boring but impossible; so is sharing of power, or any check to power. As Humpty Dumpty, an avatar of her miserable philosophy, put it, “The question is which is to be master—that’s all.” It seems to be the only question that interests her.
For Miss Bentley (at least, as she would like to present herself to us, her public), life is masturbation, and the world, including its population, is an extended dildo for her use and delectation. She flies from emotional involvement with other people as from a plague. I have little doubt that this represents quite accurately a certain spirit of the age, a kind of individualism without individuality, at least for a larger proportion of the population than ever before. But it is a deeply unsatisfying spirit, one incapable of leading to happiness or fulfilment. In the midst of plenty we are in dearth.
The desire for a large audience—that is to say, exhibitionism—is a substitute for intimacy, but a very poor one. The blurb states that this is an intimate memoir, but it is as intimate as Yankee Stadium. Just as one would suspect that anyone who claimed to have five thousand close friends did not know what friendship was, so anyone who writes in this fashion of her experience is incapable of intimacy. That is why explicitness is almost always, in the end, pornography, and why there should always be things that cannot be said in polite company. This is not prudery: it is prudence, for only thus can the most valuable of human experiences be preserved.
Theodore Dalrymple is a doctor, an author, and a contributing editor of City Journal.
Notes
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- The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir, by Toni Bentley; Regan Books, 224 pages, $24.95. Go back to the text.
