“… one can offer to Venus in many a temple; I will be content with the most mediocre; you know, my dear, near the Cyprean altar, there is situate an obscure grot into whose solitude Love retires, the more energetically to seduce us: such will be the altar where I will burn my incense… Nothing can betray a girl from this quarter, however rude or multiple the attacks may be; as soon as the bee has left off sucking the pollen, the rose’s calix closes shut again; one would never imagine it had been opened… in one word, ‘tis the mystery’s asylum, ‘tis there where it connects itself with love by ties of prudence… Need I tell you further that although this is the most secret temple it is howbeit the most voluptuous; what is necessary to happiness is found nowhere else, and that easy vastness native to the adjacent aperture falls far short of having the piquant charms of a locale into which one does not enter without effort, where one takes up one’s abode only at the price of some trouble… and those whom reason compels to know this variety of pleasure, never pine after the others…”

So believes the Marquis de Sade, writing in Justine, and so too does Toni Bentley in The Surrender. Bentley is a former dancer with the New York City Ballet, author of Winter Season: A Dancer’s Journal and several other well-recieved, if minority interest, books about ballet and ballet dancers. Suffice to say that noone was expecting her to pen a 200-page hymn to anal sex, but that’s what she’s done.

Bentley gives us a potted history of her life and her sexual history – boyfriends, breakdowns, and the occasional breakthrough. She details threesomes and her collection of crotchless panties (“It is perhaps no surprise, given my theatrical background, that props, costumes, and ceremony became increasingly essential components of my newly expanded private life”). But nothing compares to the arrival of A-Man, and the transcendence that follows: “Bliss, I learned from being sodomized, is an experience of eternity in a moment of real time.”

Bentley does not shrink from addressing the thornier issues of her predilection: the book is awash with tips for following in her footsteps, which, while interrupting her rapturous tone, are a worthy inclusion: “I know that when some of you hear anal sex you see nothing but shit – shit, shit everywhere. Shit on the bed, shit on his cock, shit on your ass. I am here to tell you it just isn’t like that.” This is necessary stuff: when homophobes and other sexual reactionaries respond to increasing sexual freedoms with words like ‘buggery’ and ‘sodomite’ they are reacting specifically to the idea of filth, dirt and sin we connect with the anus. Bentley explicitly refutes this, finding, not shit, but God in her ass.

Proselytising aside, Bentley includes such gems as Kenneth Tynan’s observation that it’s “Odd how nineteenth-century literature is sealed off at both ends by an anal scandal: Wilde up Bosie’s bum, Byron up Annabella’s”, and plenty of her own blasphemies: “Like Sir Richard Burton entering Mecca, he is the first Westerner to have infiltrated the tangled jungle of my bowels, my uncharted territory, the heart of my darkness.”

For Bentley, anal fucking is about submission; her total emotional enslavement to A-Man and, more specifically, “his cock, his balls, his asshole”. Unlike Catherine Millet’s Sexual Life…, whose similarity lies in its explicit intimacy and lack of titillation as well as its emphasis on freedom in all its forms, Bentley adores A-Man above all others, despite the loud protestations of non-monogamy and the sharply circumscribed bounds of their relationship. In fact, the book far more closely resembles Anita Phillips’ A Defence of Masochism in its attempt to ‘top from the bottom’; to restore to submission its exalted, religious meaning.

Ultimately, The Surrender is as much about obsessive love manifested in obsessive sex as it is about ass-fucking. But Bentley fervently believes that this is necessary: “I feel every one could be the last, and so every one contains all I have. Fuck on the edge. Suck on the edge. All ways.”