Customer Reviews

The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing

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Journalist Daniel Bergner has a knack for getting inside his subject matter, which often focuses on the edgy extremes where most of us will never venture in real life, and about which little has been written. In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West Africa gave us a glimpse of Africa's poorest and most violence-ravaged nation, Sierra Leone. In God of the Rodeo: The Quest for Redemption in Louisiana's Angola Prison, Bergner introduced us to the rodeo champions of Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana, "the last slave plantation." Here, Bergner give us a glimpse of another forbidden zone, that of extreme sexual practices.

Bergner's status as a skillful writer for the New York Times Magazine shows in his ability to bring both insight and compassion to bear on characters that might otherwise come off as mere freaks. The narrative is woven around four stories, involving a dominatrix, a foot fetishist, an amputee fetishist and -- of interest to those of us who work with sex offenders -- an incestuous stepfather. Describing that case of "Roy," Bergner introduces competing theories of sex offending and describes the time he spent with Roy's pedophilia therapy group as well as with well-known experts in the field.

If you are undecided about whether to buy this book, you can start with a little taste from the Internet: Bergner's New York Times article of January 22, 2009, "What Do Women Want?" illustrates his knack for translating dry science into accessible prose. Salon's January 27 interview with Bergner, "Sexual perversity in America," briefly describes all four cases featured in the book. Finally, you can check out Bergner's web site, danielbergner.com, which features some of his other writing. There, under the "articles" tab, I especially recommend his 2005 article, "The Making of a Molester." Perhaps that cutting-edge character study (which was influential back when he wrote it) sparked his interest in doing this book, which he has spent the past several years researching.

At any rate, I highly recommend the book.

For some reason, I couldn't decide initially if this book was fiction or nonfiction. The truth finally hit me when the narrative referred to "Fred Berlin"--a well-known sex therapist and researcher in my neck of the woods. In any case, we get to learn quite a bit about the strange, the weird, the odd, the bizzare and the different. There was some, but not a lot, of prurient material despite the potentially explosive nature of the pathology described. More cut-and-dry than sensationalistic. Gives a sympathetic viewpoint of persons with atypical sexual impulses and behaviors. Uses commonsense to skewer the cockeyed theories of "major thinkers" in the field.

I found the book to be a disappointment. From the reviews I read before I purchased this book, I expected an exciting , cutting edge presentation. However, in reading the book, I found nothing of the sort . At best thre is a luke warm coverage of what 10 years ago may have been new and exciting subjects.This author has missed a lot that is happening in our everyday world. 'boring'... Save your money . For all the buildup of the author pertaining to the psycho/sexual, please add 'Mundane'.
Ray

Q: What's the difference between weird and kinky?
A: Weird is when you use a feather. Kinky is when you use the whole chicken.

That's essentially what you get with this book, but what is weird, and what is kinky? Where's the break line, and who gets to define where the line is? What is it like if you're on the "wrong" side?

I came to this book after reading Mary Roach's outstanding Bonk. The two are very different in content and approach, but the core subject is still the same, and the two complement each other quite well. I recommend Roach's book be read first, one because it's better written and more entertaining, and two because it's a better overview and serves as a good foundation from which to explore.

This book is about what Bergner calls "eros," the fringes of desire, or to be much more direct, sexual desire. The heart of the book asks what is a fetish, and when does it become a liability? How does one end up saddled with an overpowering fetish, or urge? And most importantly, is such a fetish normal or abnormal?

There are four real-world observations--these aren't nearly direct and detail-laden enough to be called "case studies"--on that edge. One reader will call these people sick or twisted or even evil, while another might just place them in the decidedly flatter areas of the traditional bell curve of human sexuality. Bergner's biggest success in this book is that he provides no solid judgment of his own as to whether these folks are wrong/right or normal/deviant; the reader is left to make that determination, if such a determination is even appropriate.

This is definitely an adult read, 18+. This is not a book about sex freaks, no parade of the sick, twisted and thoroughly abnormal, which may disappoint some. While not prurient or jaw-dropping--the coprophilia bit might wake you up--the general subject matter is decidedly adult and the specifics of these aspects of sexuality make this reading for the mature adult, ideally one who is already somewhat familiar with various aspects at the more distant ranges of sexuality. There is nothing really shocking here, but if you don't know what "BDSM" means, or if you've never heard of a foot fetish, you'll be lost from the start.

The four observations are of a foot fetishist, an S&M dominatrix, a convicted pedophile, and an acrotomophiliac (a "devotee" of amputees and paralysis victims).

The foot guy I saw as in deep and maddening denial, unhappy and giving in to think of himself as too many others see him, as a sick freak. His fetish has got him a bit dysfunctional, yeah, but he's not sick, just wired differently. In many ways, his story was the saddest, as he was letting others define him and control him, rather than just being himself.

The dominatrix embraces her "role," but nowhere does she actually admit "I like hurting people. I like humiliating people." She cloaks her justification in new-age BS about empowerment and freedom, all nebulous and euphemistic gunk that doesn't offer what I suspect her truth is: she gets a sexual charge out of inflicting pain and humiliation upon others. (But nothing's wrong with that, as long as everybody is willing, and getting out of the exchange what they want.)

The pedophile's case in many ways is the most accessible. There are aspects of it that are truly ambiguous, while there are others that purely black and white. Bergner provides all kinds of information showing that female physical sexual maturity (puberty/menstruation) comes on early as a result of evolution, and that a male response to this highly visible change is in its own way normal. This smashes against Western societal and cultural norms, as well as set-in-stone legal statutes. While male desire may be awakened, and brought to life just as nature intends it to, acting upon it, while "normal" in a scientifically notional way, is flat-out illegal, and you deserve everything you get if you allow yourself to take that path. Blaming the victim, as we get here, is nothing but wrong.

The amputee/paralysis guy seems to me to be the most honest and straightforward. Sure, he's on the edge of what is normal (yes, what exactly constitutes sexually normal is one of the points of the book), but his actions are not exploitive, nor are they unethical, immoral or illegal. He's found something he enjoys, and he embraces it completely. And it seems the handicapped recipients of this attention also are being tended to fairly and appropriately.

Some comments on this book have used "florid" to describe Bergner's work, and I agree. Some of his contextualizing is too maudlin, relying too much on detailed descriptions of settings, right down to describing office furniture, plants and wall decorations, as if they had something to do with the subjects at hand. At times, some of the contextual narrative came off as sappy human interest TV, without the video.

Bottom line: if the relatively detailed dynamics and vagaries of human sexuality interest you, then this is a book for you. If you're shy and uncomfortable with open discussion of any aspect of, well, you know, then this book might really really work for you, if you're reading it secretly, that is. But if way down deep you don't want to hear about other people's sexual proclivities, yearnings well outside what they taught you about in 7th grade health class, and how those non-mainstream feelings may have developed and become overpowering forces in those people's lives, and that some of these folks are actually very happy with the way things have turned out, then get out your Saturday Evening Post back-issues, and you'll be all set.

I loved the first chapter about the sympathetic foot fetishist and the idea that sexual compulsions are entirely separate from the self, similar to a disease or other medical condition. However, I found myself bored by the remaining chapters, more for the subject matter (not another B&D madame) than for any deficiency in the writing.

I've read most of Bergner's books and this would have to come in last. It is undoubtedly well-written and fascinating, but is more of a long magazine article than an in-depth book. I was expecting more; it was too short and only touched the surface.

In few areas does the human mind seem as perplexing than in the field of sexuality. The range of what lights one person's fire while dampening another's is so vast that even the experts probably hear something new now and then. And that does not even cover the question of why. Why are some attracted to this rather than that? Even your own quirk, if you have one, is probably of unknown origin.

Daniel Bergner provides us with four very readable and, sometimes twistedly so, entertaining vignettes of paraphilia, which, he notes, are only found in the human species and, even then, mostly the men. In the first, a man has a fetish for feet so powerful that it makes a `normal' man's appreciation for, say, the derriere or breasts decidedly pedestrian. Indeed, Bergner writes of this man so well that we truly understand why he might want to just do without a sex drive at all. Far from a pleasant amusement while in the sack, the fetish totally controls his life to the point that no other life is really left.

We are next treated to the rare phenomenon of the female paraphilic and, even rarer, the true female sexual sadist. As Bergner tells us, most female paraphilia is found in those tending towards masochistic tendencies. The woman who truly enjoys inflicting pain on others, truly enjoys it sexually, is apparently quite the find. However, this vignette focuses a bit too much on the wider world of sadism and masochism, not the sexual nature per se of the action or fetish, as is done for our foot aficionado discussed above.

The most powerful chapter is easily the third, about a man lusting for his 12-year old step-daughter. It is powerful because, unlike the others, there is a serious question as to just how abnormal such desire really is. We are introduced to researchers of human sexuality and their studies demonstrating that some attraction to those well below the age of consent is rather common, no doubt far more so than most people would like to really think. Certainly there is the clear distinction between fantasizing and doing, and the subject of this chapter crossed the wrong line. Yet the man's current boss revealingly notes that the man only did what "everyone" thinks about. Well, maybe not everyone, but an awful damn lot. There is a reason why Nabokov's LOLITA was and remains so controversial, and that reason is not because it touches a subject beyond the pale but because it touches a subject many would like to really touch and do not want to admit it, least of all to themselves.

THE OTHER SIDE OF DESIRE ends on the fascinating subject of men attracted to cripples and amputees. The story is told tastefully and one is left with the solid impression that such a desire, although more unusual in terms of numbers of men with such an attraction, does not differ that much from a sexual taste for some other, less controversial, characteristic such as blonde hair or long legs. Bergner notes of the stigma attached to this paraphilia and one cannot help but think of the general happiness that would result if it were lifted. Many amputees, picking up the societal message that men attracted to them must be freaks, avoid those exact men who might actually provide them the solace and love they seek.

Bergner does an excellent job of humanizing all of subjects. By doing so, he makes subjects that might otherwise be uncomfortable really quite accessible. Pick this up if you are looking for a book about those on the margins but are not looking for the sensationalism that often comes with it.

Society's collective thinking process regarding sexual issues appears fraught with value judgments and tends to vary across both cultures and centuries. The term paraphilia, as first coined by the noted pioneer of sexual research John Money, was meant to be a benign description without regard to negative connotation. A paraphilia describes a nonstandard or unusual sexual interest. Paraphilias are much more common in men, and manifest as recurrent, obsessive and intense sexual urges and sexually arousing fantasies, usually involving an object. A paraphilia is generally specific and unchanging. An example would be an obsessive sexual preoccupation by a man with women's high-heeled shoes. According to Dr. Money, a person exhibiting a full-blown paraphilia may become preoccupied with reaching sexual fulfillment relative to that paraphilia, to the extent of total distraction from other responsibilities, even to the point of dangerous or anti-social behavior.

This book sheds a good deal of light on the subject of paraphilia's and, although "normalization" is not the precise word for what happens here, one's understanding and compassion about the issue becomes greatly enhanced. I heartily recommend it.

Daniel Bergner
The Other Side of Desire:
Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing

(New York: ECCO/HarperCollins, 2009) 208 pages
(ISBN: 978-0-05-088556-4; hardcover)
(Library of Congress call number: HQ71.B356 2008)

Exploration of the paraphilias of four people:
foot fetish, sadism, pedophilia, & amputees.
The author is a journalist, who created this book by talking with the people profiled
and by their various psychological consultants.
The book will offer comfort to all who have unusual sexual fantasies.
They will know that they are not alone.
But it does not offer any deeper understanding of why some people
do in fact have these out-of-the-main stream sexual interests.
The hypothesis of sexual imprinting is compatable
with everything reported in this book.

Search the Internet for the following comprehensive bibliography:
"SEXOLOGY---SEX-SCRIPTS---BEST BOOKS".

James Leonard Park, author of
Imprinted Sexual Fantasies:
A New Key for Sexology.

I bought this book, eh...um about a month ago. I sat down and read it in 2 days. As the overused line goes "once i picked it up i could not put it down"

Dan Bergner has gone into 4 distinct, unusual, grey worlds and show me insight that I thought I would never be able to have. With an objective point of view, never judging or criticizing, He lays down the stories and lets the reader judge for him/herself.

If anyone is interested in finding a new perspective on love/lust/sex/Eros this book will help you immensely. Caution though some stories were (at least to me) hard to read. Not as in the spelling or sentense formation hard, but in the sheer amount of detail and honesty. Overall a great piece of journalism.