reviews
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"riveting...bergner's gift as a writer is his ability to combine the story-telling of a talented novelist with a journalist's skill at standing back and letting his subjects speak for themselves -- and to do so with compassion and curiosity rather than judgment...on one level, this book has all the elements of a top-rated HBO series -- provocatively graphic sex, humorous dialogue and moral ambiguity. but what makes is so powerful is that it's as much about desire and what's normal as it is an exploration of why we are the way we are...long after reading these disturbing stories, i can't seem to turn them off."
-- lori gottlieb, new york times book review
"elegant portraits... bergner takes us into the anarchy of lust that consumes his subjects. but the book can't be accused of sensationalism. the last portrait, "the devotee," is most adamantly a romance. laura, a woman who has lost both legs in a car accident, meets ron, the photographer turned on by limbless women. no question that the pair, now married, finds real fulfillment, not only sexually but spiritually... bergner gives depth and shadow to his subjects' longing."
-- washington post
“girded with scientific data about the nature of sexual identity, THE OTHER SIDE OF DESIRE is a foray into extreme passion, in quest of the human soul.”
-- O magazine
"descriptive and finally poetic...bergner's book has a musical quality. the vignettes form a sequence of theme and variations. the juxtapositions give rise to a host of paradoxes and connundrums."
-- slate
"speaking of love and heartbreak, daniel bergner’s THE OTHER SIDE OF DESIRE is just as good as the various rave reviews promise. with a minimum of psychobabble and a maximum of tight-focus unsentimental and unsqueamish reporting, mr. bergner tells the story of four people with “abnormal” sex lives: a foot fetishist, a dominatrix, a man obsessed with his stepdaughter and a man sexually attracted to amputees. the reader, of course, is transformed into a voyeur—but the author’s cool authoritative tone and openhearted acceptance of what he’s exposing wash away all taint of kinky vicarious thrill. it’s enough to make you think that in this case, good reporting isn’t just morally neutral. it spreads the love."
-- the new york observer
"bergner is the kind of author who is able to delve deeply into the darkest and most forbidden realms of the human psyche and behavior... a consistently engrossing and highly edifying read."
-- the san francisco chronicle
"by the end of the book—once the many often inexplicable narratives of desire unfold scene by scene, character by character—the reader is left with a sort of orgasmic and almost dreamy slew of images and (unanswerable) questions. intermittently, the climax is reached, and humanity hits you in the face. you wonder for a moment, but what of my own sexuality? am I normal? is there even such a thing?"
-- new york press
"moving and unsettling... vividly rendered... a meaningful reflection on desire, a need shared by nearly all."
-- time out new york
"passion is as instinctual as thirst or the need to sleep. while most of us may live on this side of desire, bergner's book helps us begin to understand the other side...unblinkingly, bergner probes these passions with respect and sensitivity, introducing readers to four unusual sexual realities and what meaning they have for the rest of us."
-- richmond times-dispatch
"bergner grants us entree into dark worlds of extreme lust and longing: there is the foot fetishist wracked by shame, the dominatrix so turned on by inflicting pain on others that she once roasted a man on a spit, and the stepfather capsized by lust for his 12-year-old stepdaughter. there is even a love story involving amputee fetish. but what's remarkable about bergner's book is not the way these tales shock or confound or titillate (though they do those things sometimes), but how sympathetic their plights and hungers become. bergner, whose previous books include 'god of the rodeo,' about convicts in louisiana's angola prison, is a keen storyteller but above all a humane one, and in his hands, these characters do not seem like freaks so much as shadows of ourselves."
-- salon
"delicate but unblinking tales of extreme sexual longing"
-- guardian uk
"daniel bergner's characters live in erotic no-go zones where most of us would fear to tread. their stories will sadden, enlighten, disturb, and move you -- for they are completely, intimately human, which is a tribute to bergner's great skill as a journalist and his understanding that the normal and perverse exist not in separate worlds but on a discomfiting, even threatening continuum."
-- george packer, new york times bestselling author of THE ASSASSINS' GAME
"searching, deeply humane…our reactions to the stories daniel bergner recounts reveal as much about ourselves as they do about his oddly winning subjects."
-- jennifer egan, bestselling author of THE KEEP
"in a culture that pays clamourous lip service to the idea of tolerance, daniel bergner's THE OTHER SIDE OF DESIRE is that rare instance of the real thing. the author levels a curious yet compassionate gaze at his subjects, who grapple with the way desire disfigures and exalts. in their struggle to accept themselves for wanting what they want, they are desperate and often heroic figures."
-- will blythe, author of TO HATE LIKE THIS IS TO BE HAPPY FOREVER
"bergner investigates how we become who we are sexually, whether our lusts are common or improbable. the book's combination of titillation, shock value and documentary evokes a set of page-turning conundrums."
-- publishers weekly, starred review
"in carefully etched prose, Bergner unpacks the tightly twisted roots of desire, power seeking, self-hatred and theatricality that motivate his four pseudonymous subjects...compassionate wisdom about dark needs."
-- kirkus reviews
"this arresting book...lures readers into a journey to unanticipated corners of human longing."
-- library journal
features
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New York Times
January 24, 2009
SURVEYING THE OUTER REACHES OF LUST
by Charles McGrath
Daniel Bergner, 48, the divorced father of two teenage children, is what sexologists would call a straight, vanilla teleiophile. He is attracted to adults, that is, prefers the opposite sex and doesn’t shop for lovemaking accessories — clothespins, clamps, carabiners, rubber gloves — at Home Depot. He has never allowed himself to be basted with honey, naked except for a leather jockstrap, and roasted on a spit over glowing coals.
A man who did just that during an S&M orgy, however, figures in “The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing” (Ecco), Mr. Bergner’s new book. So do a couple who pick up sex toys at the hardware store and a man who, all things considered, would just as soon have sex with a horse as with a woman. “The trust factor,” he said, explaining his preference to Mr. Bergner. “I find that I’m closer to horses.”
“The Other Side of Desire,” which comes out on Tuesday, is about people
most of us would call perverts or weirdos. The main characters, all of whom
Mr. Bergner interviewed extensively and some of whose identities are disguised,
are a man with a foot fetish; a woman called the Baroness, who runs an S&M
dungeon and designs latex fetish attire; a man with a fixation on his 12-year-old
stepdaughter; and a photographer who is turned on by women with missing limbs.
The book is not written in clinical Krafft-Ebingese, but neither is it leering or
salacious. The portraits are serious and even sympathetic, and their cumulative
effect is to make readers realize that they understand a lot less about sex than
they thought. The hardest person to warm to, Mr. Bergner said recently at his
apartment in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, was Roy, who was convicted of groping his
stepdaughter, and about whom he wrote in a 2005 article for The New York Times Magazine.
“There were moments when he ‘adjusted’ the truth, changing the girl’s age from 14 to 13 to 12,” he explained. “He’s got the one issue that’s utterly condemnable, but he was really quite open. I found it appealing that he was so introspective and so searching.”
The most touching character is Jacob, the foot fetishist, a traveling salesman and devoted husband whose fixation occasionally brings him extreme pleasure but more often crippling shame, so that he couldn’t even tell his spouse.
“At one point I even stepped out of my role as a journalist,” he admitted. “I said to him, ‘What would happen if you made this a part of your life with your wife?’ I thought it might work, but he said he wouldn’t want his wife to accept it. There was something about him that spoke to that part of ourselves that lives within pretty severe constraints — cultural restraints, religious boundaries, et cetera — that we wish we could elbow our way out of.”
One of the questions that interested Mr. Bergner is how we come to have the sexual desires that we do. As he interviews scientists, psychiatrists and sexologists, the book toggles between two general theories. There are those like Dr. Fred Berlin, a Baltimore expert on sexual disorders, who believe that from birth we are more or less wired to be the way we are; and those like John Money, the famous Johns Hopkins researcher, who think eros is mostly learned, not inborn.
“Our culture — or our scientific culture, anyway — is leaning prettily heavily right now toward the wired theory,” Mr. Bergner said. “The idea that someday not so far in the future we will be able to take detailed enough images of the brain to determine where the anatomical difference is located.”
But, he added, “I’m not quite ready to go there.” He then described a weekend he spent at a Connecticut motel observing a mixer between female amputees and their male devotees, as men who are attracted to such women are known. “After a whole weekend your vision ever so slightly starts to shift,” he said. “Not that I became an amputee devotee; far from it. But I began to see as these other men were seeing. That’s what our culture does, and it has a tremendous effect. We find attractive what others do, and I don’t think all the M.R.I.’s in the world are ever going to get to that.”
The other big thing he has learned, Mr. Bergner said, is that the lines defining what is normal sexually and what is not are vague at best. We abhor pedophilia, for example, and yet our culture worships teenage girls. “When you get to the Baroness, the blurry lines are barely lines at all,” he said. “When you start talking about the connection between pleasure and pain, there’s a whole body of psychological literature that says that’s pretty common. To watch the things the Baroness does and the people who submit to her is to be attracted — at least abstractly.
“The whole language of S&M is appealing: what we want from sex is that experience of being taken somewhere deeper into ourselves and to a deeper connection with someone else. That’s what the Baroness is offering, perhaps at a dangerous price.”
Mr. Bergner’s previous books were about the Angola prison in Louisiana and the civil war in Sierra Leone, and both demanded arduous and often uncomfortable reporting about worlds most people ignore. He said that reporting “The Other Side of Desire” didn’t seem all that different.
“I decided I was going to go inside eros, inside our sexual selves,” he explained. “Not to be melodramatic, but that sounds like a pretty extreme journey. When I went to Angola, I thought, ‘Here’s a chance to look at why we live.’ There were people living lives there that were all but exterminated, and yet those lives were in some ways pretty full. In Sierra Leone I thought I could learn something about myself, something about race. I thought that from all these people I’d learn something about us as human beings and the force of the erotic, and when I did this book it didn’t feel like a departure, really, just another extreme.”
He explained that when he met Ron, the photographer of amputees, and his girlfriend Laura, who had lost both her legs in a car accident, he felt something “intense in the way that that physical lust was highlighted in a way that was uncomfortable in the extreme and that brought that lust to the fore.”
“And yet they created a relationship that was very loving,” he added. “That really stark physicality and transcendent love — I felt it was going to be revelatory.”
“I guess my own perversion is that I’m not depressed easily. Some of this stuff is pretty dark, but maybe my own sense of coloration is different. Even the Angola book didn’t seem that dark to me. It was sad but also uplifting. And Ron and Laura’s story is really happy. It’s practically a happy ending.”
Mr. Bergner hesitated when asked if working on the book had changed him. “Well, it definitely deepened my sense of the power of the erotic,” he said. “And if I was always at least fairly comfortable talking about sex, now I’m very comfortable. That in itself has led to something good. It’s good for cocktail party conversation.”
He paused. “The Baroness has joked that she has helped my sex life. It’s possible, not because I’m binding or getting bound, but because that world can teach you a lot about being open about desire.”
Salon.com
January 27, 2009
SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN AMERICA
Author Daniel Bergner talks about extreme erotic behavior and why we have more in common with sadists and fetishists than we might like to believe.
By Sarah Hepola
A Wall Street retiree wearing a red latex bodysuit and a black hood is strapped to a table while electric shocks surge into his penis. Talking to Daniel Bergner in his new book, "The Other Side of Desire," the man compares his masochistic ecstasy to having onion skins stripped off his psyche.
"Is this a weird way to deal with life?" he asks Bergner at one point. "Consider the man who bought Mark McGwire's seventieth home-run ball for three million dollars. Who's weirder?"
In a series of four stories, Bergner grants us entree into dark worlds of extreme lust and longing: there is the foot fetishist wracked by shame, the dominatrix so turned on by inflicting pain on others that she once roasted a man on a spit, and the stepfather capsized by lust for his 12-year-old stepdaughter. There is even a love story involving amputee fetish. But what's remarkable about Bergner's book is not the way these tales shock or confound or titillate (though they do those things sometimes), but how sympathetic their plights and hungers become. Bergner, whose previous books include "God of the Rodeo," about convicts in Louisiana's Angola prison, is a keen storyteller but above all a humane one, and in his hands, these characters do not seem like freaks so much as shadows of ourselves.
A New York Times Magazine staff writer, Bergner spent four years compiling "The Other Side of Desire," delving into vast psychiatric research and fascinating anthropological studies along the way -- from a tribe in Papua New Guinea that instructs young boys to fill themselves with semen by performing blow jobs on male teens to recent eye-opening research on female desire, all of which he weaves throughout the narratives. (The latter topic was the subject of Bergner's recent Times magazine cover story, "What Do Women Want?") Struggling to find answers among an ocean of conflicting data and evidence, the sex therapists become as much a focus of the book as the afflicted. They remind us of the frustrating imperfection of science as we try to unlock the riddle at the core of these tales: How is our sexuality created, and why do we want what we want?
Salon spoke with Bergner on the phone from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y.
The first character we meet is a foot fetishist. Can you tell us about him?
Jacob is an Everyman in a sense: this devoted father, successful businessman. But he has, from a very young age, been powerfully attracted to women's feet. He lives in a northern city, and when the weatherman talks about "feet of snow" it can drive him mad with desire. He's got a great relationship with his wife, but he's too ashamed to tell her. He doesn't want her to be tainted by it.
And one of the questions becomes, where does this foot fetish come from? What are the theories?
The debate breaks down, to be a little simplistic, between forces of nature and forces of nurture. The doctor he seeks out, a compassionate psychiatrist named Dr. Berlin, puts the emphasis on the purely biological. At the other end of the spectrum are psychologists who put much more stress on our experience. One psychologist thought -- well, Jacob had severe reading disabilities as a little boy. Being called on in the classroom, looking down at the exact moment when he felt anxiety, when he felt such an intense charge, might have resulted in the eroticization of the objects he saw. That might sound far-fetched, but I do think there's something to the idea that experience plays a significant role in how we become who we are sexually.
And why are feet a common fetish?
There are all kinds of theories. One is that they are very rich in smell, and smell plays such a big part biologically in terms of our animal ancestry and our sexuality.
In the book you mention how some fetishes may be informed by the culture and times.
Yes, it's very interesting -- one of the sexologists I spent time with pointed out that if by looking at pornography one tries to trace the evolution of fetishes, one can see real changes, and those changes can be linked to shifts in the way we live our daily lives. Fetishizing hair is something that was much more prominent when women and mothers would sit in front of the mirror and do their hundred brushes of their locks every night. Or rubber fetishes, he pointed out, were more prominent when training pants were made of rubber.
One of the most poignant things about Jacob is how alone he feels. You would think one of the things the Internet would provide would be a brotherhood of people who feel the same way.
There were times with Jacob, especially toward the end, when I did step out of my journalistic role and say, "What would happen if you brought this up to your wife? Are you really so alone -- don't you realize there are other people out there?" And he just couldn't hear it. The shame was so strong. That might be hard for people to understand, because foot fetishes sound so benign, even comical. But I think what has to be understood is that, for all of us, sex is this shame-prone realm. If you think about being very different in that realm it might help explain why he insists on secrecy and can't even find solace in the fact that, yes, the Internet would suggest there are plenty of people not unlike him.
Do you see that potent shame as being something that is particularly American?
The anthropologist Margaret Mead would tell us that other cultures have a far different attitude toward lust. Mead was probably partly right, but my guess is that the private place of eros within us, no matter the culture we live in, is prone to shame, because eros is a force that cultures all over the world regard with some degree of fear and attempt to constrain.
In reading his story, and a lot of these stories, I kept thinking of political falls from grace -- Eliot Spitzer, Larry Craig, Mark Foley. In each of their scandals, there was such a potent mix of denial, shame, lust. How did working on this book inform how you saw those scandals?
Though of course there was plenty of humor in the predicaments of these politicians -- who can forget Spitzer's socks? -- and plenty to worry about with Foley, there was also plenty to sympathize with. We're so quick to ridicule and regulate lust, probably because the forces of eros often make us uncomfortable about ourselves. We can handle desire, so long as it's moderated. When lust gets out of control, as in the cases of these public figures, we leap to purge it from our presence. It's as though we're trying purge our own psyches, rid ourselves of our own powerful longings, make sure our own desires don't overtake us.
On the opposite end of the shame spectrum is the story in your book about a dominatrix known as the Baroness, who is not the least bit embarrassed about her desires.
I do see her as a counter to Jacob. Where he is consumed by shame and self-loathing she completely embraces her erotic self, to the point where she's evangelical about the S/M world. She was a rare glimpse at someone who becomes orgasmic through inflicting pain. There are plenty of paid dominatrixes out there, but only a few who are getting that level of direct sexual charge from their work. And then to watch the people who came to her was fascinating, because what they were after seemed very much universal -- that is, having sex take them to deep places within themselves.
I found myself so curious about how the Baroness became this way. One psychoanalyst you spoke with talked about how sadism and masochism might be brought about by some "lack of parental bond, some wounding absence or brutality." Did you think that was that case?
I don't know. I also talked to other psychoanalysts who were very reluctant to assign any cause at all to the behavior. I mean, what is perversion? As one analyst in the book describes it, perversion is the sex that you like and I don't. Oral sex was once seen as a perversion.
You mention that there are very few true female sadists. Why is that?
Well, that's my understanding, and it seems to be true. There are very few women with paraphilias, in general, by which we mean outlying sexualities. But then, is that really true or are they just perceived differently? For instance, men who flash in public get arrested, and women who show their breasts get applauded.
If it's true, one of the theories is that men's sexuality is more visually driven and therefore more prone to misdirection. Women's sexuality is more emotionally driven, less prone to aberrant directions. But there are a lot of unknowns. This is complex terrain, and there's still so much that's unexplained and maybe inexplicable.
The third character is someone who gets in trouble for giving in to his overwhelming desires. Tell us about Roy.
Roy was arrested and pled guilty to fondling his 12-year-old stepdaughter and making some very explicit propositions over the Internet to her. His story was disturbing to me in all kinds of ways, not the least of which is that, during the time I was spending with Roy, my daughter was the very same age as Roy's victim. There were parts of Roy's personality that made me distrustful of him. For a long time he added a year or two to his victim's age to make it sound less horrific. On the other hand, he was desperately wanting to understand what had happened, how far he was from other men, why he had lost control. It was this fascinating glimpse inside a man for whom sexual urges got way beyond control.
One of the things that makes Roy's case so interesting is that he falls in this blurry area on the continuum. When he's given tests intended to uncover and mark his sexual preferences, he shows a desire for 15- to 16-year-old girls slightly more than for adult women -- according to therapists who work with sex offenders, if that's outside the norm, it's barely so. It was a real indication that the psychological boundaries are a lot less clear than we'd like to think. All the people in the profession expressed that to me. We all want there to be a clear line, and there just isn't.
Somebody from his office even says, "Everybody has these thoughts. The only thing that separates him from you and me is we didn't act on those thoughts."
And his boss takes him back, despite the arrest, despite the articles in the local paper. He thinks there's something's fundamentally good about him.
His story really brings up the way in which we're mixed up about desire and young women. On one hand, we're very protective of them. On the other hand, there are, say, American Apparel ads.
The American Apparel ads -- even after I spent a year and a half with Roy's treatment group, the American Apparel ads still stun me in their brazenness, their direct appeal through the sexualizing of young women. They are an emblem of this schism in our society. In one way we blatantly eroticize young women -- girls, really -- and then we flee from that eroticizing, we condemn it, and we act as though we've been clear all along.
After spending so much time with a male pedophilia group, what did you think about the treatment they received?
The men in Roy's group were receiving thoughtful care. Since finishing the book I've checked in now and then on Roy's progress, and so far as I know, he hasn't reoffended. Do treatment groups like his work with all sexual abusers of children? No. Do the other methods, like aversive conditioning or psychoanalysis? They're surely no more effective. But a significant percentage of these men can be helped. Very few, if any, are monsters. You know, I began my reporting of that story by contacting a prominent victim's advocate. She would repeat what I just said even more emphatically: They are not monsters. In fact, she would say, they are us. Not that we all would do what Roy did, but that such urges lie within us.
The last story in the book is about amputee fetish, one of the more baffling fetishes. How do you explain it?
I wouldn't dare explain it. [laughs] There's so little research about it and what there is seems very conflicted. But there was so much to me that was fascinating about it, and about the questions it raises.
Like what?
Well, let's look at it through the perspective of Laura. She's a beautiful young woman, but she's in a horrific car accident and loses both her legs. For a long while, her life seems to her completely over. She would rather be dead. She thought of her beauty as what she had. She sees herself as utterly destroyed.
When she first finds out that there are men drawn to amputees, she's wary, but she's also wondering why she hasn't been told about this by any of her surgeons or therapists. Eventually she marries Ron [a photographer powerfully drawn to women without legs] and she feels ultimately incredibly lucky to have met him, but there are moments still -- and these were some of the most painful moments of our discussions -- when she would confess that there would be times she felt like less of a woman. She wondered if she could attract a "normal" man. She knows she shouldn't think that way and knows that desire is subjective and tells herself that being drawn to a woman without legs is no different than being drawn to a woman with large or small breasts, and yet she can't fully think her way past that, and she sometimes feels diminished.
But there is something incredibly sweet about their finding each other. With her as his muse, he leaves his career in advertising and becomes an art photographer. And with his support, she goes back to college and graduate school and now counsels the mentally ill. They have a complete relationship, intensely physical and loving, both. And it reminds me of how mysterious attraction can be -- how you can have something about yourself that feels so painful, and yet you might be able to find someone who not only doesn't mind that but is actually attracted by it. It's beautiful that you could find the person who fits you like that.
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how do we come to be who we are sexually? how do we cope with the forces of desire? how can we understand the relationship between the transcendent and the physical, between the wish for love and the anarchy of the erotic?
daniel bergner looks for answers in the stories of four people whose longings may be very different from our own: a devoted husband burdened by an insatiable foot fetish, a clothing designer who finds ecstasy in the pain of others, a man smitten with his young stepdaughter, and an advertising director who casts traditionally beautiful models but who is attracted only to amputees. bergner finds in their desires metaphors for the issues that confront us all and raises fascinating questions about the erotic differences between men and women and the nature of ecstasy itself: are some people actually experiencing more ecstasy than the rest of us?
in speaking to experts in the field of psychology and neurology, and by threading the personal stories of several modern-day kinseys throughout his riveting case studies, bergner has written a provocative, profoundly insightful, and brilliantly illuminating book about the most fundamental of human needs.
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