/Objets d'art

I had only dabbled in anal sex briefly before reading Toni Bentley’s The Surrender. I gauge my potential interest in a book by flipping through it and seeing if any or how many passages catch my eye. I also look at the first line. In The Surrender:

"He was first. In my ass."

Ahh. Now that’s a strong start.

Bentley is one of the few people who write about the similarities between very good sex, transcendent sex, and God, how edge-riding sex and the right partner can facilitate an opening that is akin to spiritual transformation and surrender.

Her great ode to assfucking reads like an epic poem, like the ancient mariner’s attempt to capture a powerful moment before the intensity of it slips from memory.

In Bentley’s view, the ass, in all its sensitivity and with its fortresses to be transversed, is the orifice with the most to offer.

“The directions are clear: if you want to procreate enter the front door, but if you really want to become a part of a woman’s internal workings, to penetrate her being most deeply, the back door is your portal.”

The book resonates strongly with me since I share Bentley’s philosophy about pain and discomfort. The only way out is through; meaning not to resist, but to open to it. Whether physically, or emotionally, it’s a powerful process. In my experience, as in Bentley’s almost without exception, bliss lies on the other side:

“It was here, in there, that I first tasted the experience of moving through pain and fear to that plateau on the other side where I met this man in a foreign land called Bliss. Bliss is not a pain-free zone; it is a postpain zone. Big difference.”

She addresses the ass fuck as a gauge for sexual connectedness: 

"The truth always shows itself with the ass. A cock in an ass operates like the arrow on a lie-detector test. The ass doesn’t know how to lie, it can’t lie: it hurts, physically, if