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 In the ancient philosophies of Kundalini Tantra and Taoist Alchemy, it was believed that the anus was the collection point of life energy. Through the ages, practitioners have applied esoteric techniques to hone in and harness this primordial energy. Several millennia later, this knowledge is back again to bite us on our root chakras and make even the most sexually enlightened among us feel inadequate. Being a great lay just isn't good enough anymore. If you don't reach nirvana when you do it, then you must not be doing it right.
If you really want to know how inadequate you are, read Toni Bentley's The Surrender, an autobiographical tale of a woman who finds salvation through anal sex.
The book is nasty, funny, hot, and on top of it all, one of the literary events of the year, due to the back story that Ms. Bentley was a renowned ballerina who danced for ten years in George Balanchine's New York City Ballet. She's also written a few highbrow books on ballet and one on the history of modern striptease.
The Surrender is a break from that reputable stuff. It details 200+ pages of Ms. Bentley's extensive curriculum vitae of sex -- from first lay to 299th ass fuck. In between, she arrives at revelations about the men she uses and is used by, love, monogamy, marriage and the likes. She also gets spiritual. She finds God. God is in her ass.
Ms. Bentley's ass ("tiny, a teenage boy's tight, and tightly wound") seems supremely suited for this sort of revelation. Twenty-five years of her life spent poising and tightening it, in practice and performance. She estimates 18,000 hours of pirouetting in front of studio mirrors, attempting to achieve an unattainable level of physical perfection.
Add to these classic ballerina pathologies some residual issues with daddy (he spanked little Toni on the bum and never said he loved her) and a chorus line of hapless guys who fail to satisfy (oh, they give her orgasms, but do they fill that void, that deep chasm of her womanhood?). It's plain to see that Bentley was a primed specimen for backdoor catharsis, a woman in desperate need to let go. When she finally does, it's like 20-megaton bomb of anal atomic energy.
 Named one of the "100 Notable Books of 2004" by The New York Times and one of the "Best Books of the Year" by Publishers Weekly, The Surrender has had no lack of mainstream reviewers taking a crack at the work. And it's Bentley's mystical bent that takes the brunt of the criticism. Even The New York Times, which championed the book as a seminal taboo breaker and erotic lit masterpiece, summarily dismisses Bentley's spiritual awakening.
Writes reviewer Charles McGrath:
"Ms. Bentley belongs to the old tradition of hyperbole and overwriting, the tradition of Lawrence, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and Anas Nin, which sees sex as an avenue to spirituality, to the mystical and sublime."
This is an elegant way of saying Bentley is on par with the best, but nonetheless full of shit.
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In The Surrender Bentley writes: "This story is about my coming to experience -- and sometimes understand -- terms that allude to spiritual endeavor. I have learned more of their meaning and power through being sodomized than through any other teaching."
Here's another way she describes it, in response to the question: Is it possible for the average person to have this kind of spiritual awakening through sex? In an interview with Sarah Harrison on Nerve.com:
"Well, they do in Tantra. I'm only saying it because I've been there. Otherwise I would say, 'That's a New Age thing'. It had to be proven to me. So I make this joke: 'This is how God got my attention.' If you're sort of a regular person and then you have a burning bush experience or Jesus appears, chances are it's going to be a pretty remarkable thing in your life. At first you'll think, 'I'm nuts, it didn't happen.' It's kind of how I felt about this affair I was having, but I counted how many times I had sex to prove to myself that it was actually happening. And then it was, like, 'Wow. This isn't just one burning bush, it's many burning bushes!' No pun intended."
The knee-jerk assumption by the literary establishment is that Bentley is exaggerating. Maybe this is because she's a woman and women tend to get carried away when they write about love, so it's wise not to indulge this kind of behavior with proper literary criticism. Best to just dismiss and move on to more tangible elements of the story.
Personally, I can't ignore that The Surrender is perhaps a singular account, at least that I know about. I have never read a mainstream American woman writing a graphic, first person account of sexual mysticism. She's not a porn star. She's not a new ager or a nut. Fear of Flying (and other similar books) is cerebral and psychological. Bentley, the respectable dancer/intellectual, dares to not only be obscene, but transcendent.
 That being said, it's not like anal sex is really all that taboo here in the US of A. Obviously, if everyone who took it up the ass found god, or whatever spiritual thing you want to call it, then most porn stars would be veritable Bodhisattvas (or Bootysattvas as it were) and all of the regular old ass-fucking people would be too.
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Let's eschew the Eastern mysticism for a second (because no one believes in that stuff unless they're actually practicing it) and look at Ms. Bentley through a different lens... from the perspective of some hot, dripping, torrid, cutting-edge academic sexuality research!
Understanding human ambivalence about sex: the effects of stripping sex of meaning, by Jamie L. Goldenberg, Cathy R. Cox, Tom Pyszczynski, Jeff Greenberg and Sheldon Solomon, published in the Journal of Sex Research, Nov 2002 (v39 i4 p310(11)), is an obscure paper that never reached the light of mainstream. But it might shed light on Ms. Bentley's book.
The basic angle of this research paper is that people seem to get all worked up when you remind them about the similarities between humans and animals. Somehow, this elicits increased thoughts of death and mortality.
Their research suggests that there's a threatening side to creatureliness. When reminded of it, there's some unconscious parallel mechanism that makes people think of death.
When people are primed by these thoughts of creatureliness, then thinking about the physical aspects of sex causes increased thoughts of death. But when people think about the romantic side of sex, after reminders of creatureliness, they don't have these same thoughts of death. Love somehow guards against the scary part of sex.
The researchers postulate that sex itself is threatening because it makes us acutely aware of our fundamental animal nature, which in turn reminds of us our mortality. Humans must live in denial of creatureliness to deny mortality. This idea has been around for a long time (Kierkegaard, for instance), but Understanding human ambivalence goes beyond mere speculation to deliver experimental data showing an unconscious reaction against mortality when it comes to sex.
While there are many similarities between humans and every other animal, we are different because we have this higher cerebral function that allows us to attach symbolic meaning to things. Whether it's a defense against the crushing existential gloom of being conscious about our eminent death or something else entirely, I don't know. But either way, people create cultural things. Beliefs. Religion. Poetics. Love. Lots of things. Not always positive things. But they nevertheless convey a connection to something bigger and grander than the mere sum of our flesh and blood.
 Sex is perhaps the most creaturely act of all, so it would follow that it is amongst the most universally regulated and symbolized of human behavior. The tendency is to feel good about sex when there is something "meaningful" attached to it. And oftentimes shitty and unfulfilled when it is meaningless.
In The Surrender, Toni Bentley repeatedly makes references to mortality:
"I am, you see, a woman who has been in search of surrender my whole life -- to find something/someone to whom I could subsume my ego, my will, my miserable mortality."
"Great love always brings thoughts of death and separation."
And, my personal favorite:
"How do you know it's love, real love? When you meet the one with whom you are not afraid to die. The one who takes away that constant gnawing fear of death and gives one air to breathe. Not afraid to die, this is the feeling he generates when he fucks my ass. Pussy penetration does not delve this far into my psyche; does not break the barrier; does not stop the fear."
Another thing Bentley says in her Salon interview:
"I have been very aware and obsessed to some extent with my own mortality since I was about fifteen years old. And great sex is like a near-death experience -- I feel more alive and more grateful."
The closer Bentley comes to facing these death feelings, the greater symbolic meaning she attaches to the event and the higher she elevates the sex, creating this transcendental spiritual experience out of it. Only when she descends, via sodomy, to the depths of creatureliness does she ultimately feel the inspiration, the power, the spiritual energy, as well as the urge to start writing everything down.
I think to dismiss such an account is underestimating the infinite power of the mind to focus and do amazing things beyond the capacity of what seems reasonably plausible.
How far can the human body and mind be pushed? Are there limits? Last week I read about a guy who ran 262 miles straight. (www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=7996275) What would be the equivalent of channeling that same amount of sexual energy?
Anal sex is one of the most intense things a person can do, so many more nerve endings, so much more musculature than vaginal sex. If that profane act is deeply focused, passionately stimulated by emotion, ignited by the all-consuming power of love, and above all, transformed by the unconditional will of the mind, could that translate into a connection to the profound? Do we doubt that the profound can exist within the confines of one's mind?
Bentley faces down death by writing a book. She has in effect achieved an immortality as real as anyone else's through anal sex. Indeed, she has found her religious experience, her god, in her ass.
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