‘Surrender, surrender, but don’t give yourself away’: Toni Bentley’s The Surrender and its post-feminist message

This article interrogates female submission as articulated in Toni Bentley’s (2004) erotic memoir The Surrender. Leaning on research in the fields of gender/sexuality, sociology, and literary theory, I grapple with the social, cultural, and personal realities of female submission as they are articulated within this text. As Bentley extols the transformative power of submission through the anus, actively demonizing her vagina and subordinating herself to the more powerful and agentive male penis, her memoir succeeds in recycling entrenched narratives of female submission that support heteronormative hierarchical ordering of erotic scenarios, removing the ability for female readers to imagine eroticism differently.