The Other Side of The Other Side of Desire
The Other Side of Desire, by Daniel Bergner
Ecco/HarperCollins $24.99
The best part of Daniel Bergner's new book, The Other Side of Desire, is that it very thoughtfully takes an open-minded and open-hearted look at the lives of four people whose sexual desires fall outside of mainstream norms. Through in-depth interviews and time spent hanging out with those he profiles, Bergner gives us a sense of really getting to know these four individuals, and helps us see them in terms of more than just their sexualities. This potentially goes a long way toward destigmatizing unconventional sexual expression.
The Other Side of Desire is broken into four sections, each focused on an individual whose story, Bergner hopes, will help answer questions like "What do we do with the desires we cannot bear, the desires we or the society around us strain to restrict or strangle...?" (Introduction, x). We first meet Jacob Miller, a severely learning-disabled yet successful salesman with a foot fetish that causes him such shame he is sexually alienated from his wife and driven to seek anti-androgen therapy to diminish his desire. Regardless the source of Jacob's foot fetish, his story is one about the destructive power of shame.
The next story, that of the Baroness, a designer of latex clothing and a consummate sexual sadist, demonstrates the satisfaction a person with very kinky desires can have when they are free of shame. The Baroness is all self-confidence and self-acceptance. She has found community with others who share her orientation to sexuality and in doing so has maintained a happy marriage to a man whose sexuality is much more "vanilla." As she walks around her New York City neighborhood she creates an air of acceptance for other "misfits." Bergner writes "The effect might have been due to her flaunting her difference, to their recognizing a champion misfit. But she claimed another power. She said it was because she was willing to look at them" (61-62). The social good that comes from truly looking at each other, and at ourselves, and accepting what we see, "deviant" or not, is the lesson of the Baroness.
We next meet Roy, whose story about desire that transgresses the law will be familiar to anyone who recalls Bergner's January 23 2005 New York Times Magazine article "The Making of a Molester." Roy is a convicted sex offender. He groped his step daughter and her friend, and sent an instant message to his step daughter telling her how he wanted to have sex with her. His story is one that unsettles us because it reveals that an ordinary desire rather than a pathological one drives some men's sexual interactions with young teens. Roy's scores on the Abel Assessment, a test that measures how long a person looks at images of people of different genders and ages, puts him "within the realm of ordinary male desire." He has attractions for images of "adult females and, slightly more so, for females in the adolescent range" (115). Bergner tells us that Patrick Liddle, the therapist overseeing Roy's sex offender treatment group, says that a strong erotic response to images of adolescents is entirely normal. Roy is not a monster. Roy is an ordinary man who failed to control his normal desire and broke the law and hurt a teenage girl, and ultimately we do not know why. Liddle, the therapist, says "The difference between me and my guys is a very, very thin line," (116) and we don't know why some of us cross that line while others stay on the safe side.
The last chapter introduces us to Ron, whose desire is enflamed by women who have undergone amputation. The chapter begins with a rather long story about Laura, who is important to the story because later she marries Ron, and the accident that led to the amputation of her legs. It is a strange interlude in the book because her sexuality is not at issue and it takes a while to understand how she fits into the story. As we watch Ron learn to understand his own erotic attraction to amputees we also read about Laura's struggle with her own self acceptance, one part of which is fueled by her learning that there are men out there for whom she is the erotic ideal.
With the exception of Jacob, the man whose shame so interferes with his ability to connect with his wife, each of these people is happily in at least one long-term relationship. And while the Baroness certainly represents an extreme in the world of BDSM, none of these individuals represents a "type" of kinkiness that is in itself terribly rare. The strategy of in-depth profiles is very helpful for seeing these four as whole people and Bergner treats each of them with respect and thoughtfulness, spending time with them and making what seem like genuine connections with them, but the trade-off is that we do not get a larger window on the diversity of human sexuality. We do not know how they were chosen or what their stories mean in relation to the questions about eroticism and desire with which Bergner begins the book.
Another problem is that Bergner does not help us weigh the different psychological perspectives on fetishes and desire that he weaves throughout the book. He seems to privilege those that ground desire in the biological and yet he seems to favor therapies focused on self acceptance over medical treatment. And while he does eventually, on page 147, get around to discussing anthropological evidence of culture channeling sexuality, he remains firmly in the realm of the psychologists overall and disappointingly he never does come out and argue that the dominant culture in the United States - the world of these four individuals - limits sexual expression in damaging ways.
Perhaps my nagging dissatisfaction with the book begins with my reaction to Bergner's title. The Other Side of Desire implies a binary relationship, as if there is a good side and a bad side, a light side and a dark side. But desire is multifaceted, and the lines between acceptable and unacceptable desire are arbitrary and socially constructed. I was hoping for a book that would expose those arbitrary lines, that social construction, and what I read was a book that reveals instead a deep ambivalence about the diversity of erotic orientations and that raises more questions than it answers.
Beginning a conversation about "The Other Side Of Desire"
The second half of Elizabeth's review questions my book on the level of issues and ideas. It's a level I deal with throughout the book, sometimes by threading the perspectives of scientists through the personal narratives, and sometimes more quietly, by implication. I rarely if ever come out and argue a point to the reader; I never say, Here's what you should think. Yet I will say here that Elizabeth may have misread my perspective.
She says that I seem to "privilege" biological interpretations of sexuality, that I don't seem to credit ideas of social construction. Not true at all. The nature vs. nurture debate is complicated and nuanced, and I try to give voice to both sides. That Fred Berlin, who emphasizes the biological, appears early in the book, while Gilbert Herdt, who stresses the cultural, comes later, is a product of the arrangement of the book's personal stories and how they unfold and how the science fits within them; the placement does not reflect my own ideas. The book is short and meant to be taken as a whole.
Elizabeth worries that the book does not fully recognize that, in her words, the "lines between acceptable and unacceptable desire are arbitrary and socially constructed." Yet one of my favorite remarks in the book comes from a psychoanalyst and anthropologist, Muriel Dimen, who says, "Perversion is the sex that you like and I don't." The line has been widely quoted in reviews of the book, and to me, it pretty much says it all. With the codes surrounding sexuality, we're in very subjective territory. Constantly, I hope, the book questions what Elizabeth calls the culture's restraints on sexual expression. Perhaps the book's questioning of these restraints isn't explicit -- again, I'm a story teller -- but it is certainly central to the writing.
About the title, I think Elizabeth may be partly right. There's the risk that the title implies a vision of good and bad and, even worse, of us and them. But anyone who reads the book will know that every story is about blurry lines, about continuums, about universal truths, about the humanity of the characters -- it's all "us" and no "them." I think all my books have had this vision. To me, the title suggests a journey. I hope to take readers deeply inside the realm of the erotic. Elizabeth's readers may be used to taking such journeys. Many other readers may not. I hope the title beckons people to see deeply inside themselves.
Daniel Bergner
danielbergner.com
The other side of the other side
Nice title for your review, Elizabeth, and nice to see Mr. Bergner's reply. But I still dunno... I'm halfway through it and have posted my grumpy first impressions. My concern may actually be more about the cultural context within which his book perhaps has to appear -- but it's one in which despite his cautious qualifications, I still feel there's a whole lot of pathologizing of kink going on.
I'm skeptical of that. People who aren't in the kink world for the mystique and foreignness of it generally don't spend a whole lot of time on the "am I a monster?" thing. His shoe fetishist, for instance, were he in my office, might be better seen as a seriously obsessive compulsive fellow, which is neither rare nor monstrous, but the point is that such a condition is more or less irrelevant to his kinkiness. If it weren't that, it'd be something else he'd be fretting over. (I have to qualify this of course: haven't seen the guy, can't diagnose, etc.) But he looks a lot more like Detective Monk than, say, your average happy foot fetishist.
One of the problems with "profile-based" journalism is that it places the journalist in exactly the same situation as the non-research based clinician. Freud has been criticized often, and deservedly, because the database for his theorizing about human personality and development was a bunch of self-selected sick people. They were atypical. Likewise, the folks in this book are not necessarily the best example of healthy kink.
Of course, a writer can pursue any examples he or she wants. (I'm glad Freud and Oliver Sacks held out for the odd examples!) But there is still something of a high-stakes "culture war" going on, and that includes fervent pleas from the NCSF folks to please please call a hotel chain every time some Christian group wants to pathologize a convention of perfectly well adjusted kinky folks. So it bothers me, in that context, that a book comes out that seems to suggest (in deniable ways, but still...) that "those people are well beyond the 'other side' of normal... If I were a young person wanting to explain kinky preferences to my mom, I don't think this is the book I'd share with her.
Daniel, thank you so much
Daniel, thank you so much for hanging out to answer questions about the book. I'm glad you mentioned the Muriel Dimen quote. I loved that too. I think given the range of psychological perspectives you included I didn't get a sense of which one you were most aligned with, yourself. And I understand that that might be because you were focused on telling the stories of the four people you profiled.
That raises a question I've been wondering about for a while. How did you choose these four? I'm reflecting on Greg's comment, also, about Jacob's foot fetish seeming to reflect other psychological issues and not just a sexual orientation. I wondered about that given that you describe him as having a severe learning disability that led him to other trauma growing up. In fact much of his behavior seems very compulsive. (This may have nothing to do with his foot fetish of course.)
As I was typing that last sentence I found myself about to type "It makes him probably not very representative of people with foot fetishes." And that made me, again, realize that the book you set out to write and the book I wanted it to be are not the same book, and that does not necessarily reflect poorly on the book you set out to write :) For example, where I might have wanted a book that more clearly explores sexuality outside the mainstream and does so in a way that advocates for destigmatization, I understand that your book is one that explores the experience of stigmatized desires on the lives of four people who have them. And it is interesting that those experiences are so different from each other. (I'm especially struck by the difference between the Baroness - who is completely self-assured and unapologetic - and Jacob - who is paralyzed by his shame.)
So I suppose another question I have (after "how did you choose these particular individuals to profile") is this: What are the most important lessons you would hope readers take away from the book?
...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
Again, thanks to Dr.
Again, thanks to Dr. Korgeski, to Elizabeth and to Clarisse for the time and care taken with my book. I'm actually on my way this morning toward the midwest, and toward an interview with Clarisse, so this response is going to be too brief.
I hope that, above all, my book presents the people I wrote about as entirely human, not as oddities. I spoke to so many people on my way to writing about Jacob, The Baroness, Roy, and Ron and Laura -- above all, perhaps, I chose these four because I was deeply compelled by things beyond their sexuality, by The Baroness's clothing designs, for example, or by Ron's engagement with the art of Hans Bellmer, or by Roy's intense introspection. These are, I hope, full human beings, not emblems for particular sexualities.
To me, the stories taken together -- and they should not be read as separate entitities -- say something about the way we -- all of us, vanilla and kinky, straight and gay, repressed and erotically engaged -- do and don't deal with the forces of eros. I hope the stories say other things as well. But Elizabeth is right; I probably didn't set out to write the book she and others might hope for. I'm not, primarily, an advocate. And I'm not a scientist (though I've read a lot of science). I hope that my writing can open people's hearts and make people see inside themselves in new ways. I hope my books provide a deepening of experience.... Perhaps I should leave it there, and wait for Clarisse's questions in Chicago....
It's great to see some of
It's great to see some of the same questions I had about this book articulated here. As a pro-BDSM activist, I have been thinking a lot about this! I believe that Mr. Bergner has very good intentions -- in fact, he will be giving me an interview next week when he comes to Chicago. I'll post that interview (as well as a review of the book) to my blog soon after I speak to him.
So at least Mr. Bergner's comment here, and his agreement to talk to me, demonstrates his willingness to engage with those of us who could be personally affected by his work. In my book, that counts for a lot.
Clarisse, thanks for
...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
I surely will. <a href =
Brief follow up
Eager to see Clarisse's post. Meanwhile, I did a follow up on my blog . I think the main thing that stands out to me still is the concern that blending child abuse with other "kink" and the presentation of this stuff as some kind of "dark side" realm of sexuality, may play into the hands of people and organizations who really, really, really want to criminalize anything that isn't mainstream vanilla sex. I'm still not totally comfortable that one can be responsible as a journalist and still oblivious to this kind of issue.
Which is sad because in so many other respects this is a truly beautiful and touching book.
Greg Korgeski
Interview with Daniel Bergner
Here you go!
http://clarissethorn.wordpress.com/2009/03/10/interview-with-daniel-berg...
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