Toni Bentley
Toni Bentley danced with George Balanchine's New York City Ballet for ten years. She is the author of five books, all named New York Times Notable Books, which include "Winter Season, A Dancer's Journal," "Holding On to the Air" (the autobiography of Suzanne Farrell co-authored with Farrell), "Costumes by Karinska," "Sisters of Salome," and "The Surrender, An Erotic Memoir." Her essay, "The Bad Lion" (originally published in the New York Review of Books) was selected by Christopher Hitchens for Best American Essays 2010. She writes frequently for the New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Playboy, the Daily Beast, Vogue, Vanity Fair and other publications. She has been invited to give talks at Harvard, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rutgers, Middlebury College and the THiNK Conference 2013 in Goa, India. "The Surrender" has been adapted into a one-woman play that premiered in January 2013 in a production by the Spanish National Theater in Madrid, Spain, and it will have its English-language world premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2013. She is the recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship.
“It's my hurt, my pain, and who are you to take it from me? I don't need rescuing, I don't need pity, I don't need opinions, I need fucking--and maybe a little spanking for indulging my anger.”
“Women are taught that size doesn't matter, that it's the motion in the ocean. But this is a theory propagated by those bright guys with insecurities who need big theories.”
“A man must have confidence in himself and his cock, to fuck a woman in the ass. If he does not have this control, his cock will direct the action; he will move too quickly, hurt the once-willing woman, and rarely, rightly, will he be given a second chance.”
“If a man can possess a woman sexually -really possess- he won't need to control her ideas, her opinions, her clothes, her friends, even her other lovers.”
“Dancing may not be the perfect substitute for love, human love, but it certainly requires all the time and thought and energy that could otherwise be dedicated to love.”