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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 are 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 moreecstasy than the rest of us?
In speaking to experts in the fields 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.
Review:
"As if it weren't already difficult enough to find a suitable mate, what if a prerequisite was that the lover be missing an arm or a leg? Or willing to be roasted on a spit? Comparatively, a mild-mannered foot fetish seems, well, pedestrian. Bergner (God of the Rodeo) 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: is a man who desires feet any less odd than the psychiatrist who treats him or the scientist who studies pedophilia or the journalist who describes a whipping session in precise detail or the reader who becomes voyeur? It's all fairly delicate and disturbing material, and while the descriptions can grow florid, the author's strongest moments (e.g., evoking the tabooed desires impelling the artist Hans Bellmer's work) compensate for the lapse. Bergner has an empathetic sensibility and convincingly suggests that what a fetishist needs is a willing and loving partner with complementary interests." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
Journalist Daniel Bergner's past research has carried him to the grisly civil war in Sierra Leone, and to the dangerous maximum security prison in Angola, La. Here he takes an inward journey, burrowing into the minds of people who go weak at the knees when they see, for example, bare toes or, conversely, a lover with no toes at all — with, in fact, a comely stump. Structured as a... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) series of elegant portraits, "The Other Side of Desire" considers four people possessed by paraphilias: sexual deviations that make "vanilla sex" distasteful or downright impossible. Jacob has been haunted by a foot fetish since his earliest erotic stirrings in the second grade. Roy destroys his marriage and life pursuing his 12-year-old stepdaughter: a sequel to "Lolita," with instant messaging. Ron, an advertising man, pushes photos of bombshells for a living but secretly craves only limbless or disfigured women. And the Baroness — in this case, her real name, or at least her real pseudonym — is a designer of latex clothing whose East Village storefront helps her attract cadres of masochists. She scoffs at the standard S&M whip and stiletto-heeled boot in the face; she's legendary for the creativity and harshness of the pain she inflicts. Bergner takes us into the "anarchy of lust" that consumes his subjects. He discusses their strategies for dealing with their obsessions, from the foot fetishist's tortured shame to the Baroness' flamboyant celebration of her talents. He also provides a layman's overview of current theories about paraphilia's causes and treatments. The old nature-vs.-nurture argument rears its head. Many researchers believe that once "technology (advances) to better illuminate the brain," desire will be proven to be genetically or prenatally determined. MRI's of pedophile's brains do indeed show some differences, suggesting that sexuality is hard-wired. Other researchers, however, remain convinced that sexual deviations can almost always be traced to early abuse: The Baroness' sadism, for example, must be traceable to "some long-repressed cruelty in her childhood." Still others prefer a more evolutionary model. Animals, one sexologist notes, have virtually no sexual kinks. Humans' brains, more complex, are also given to complex malfunctions: "It's like with each new version of Windows we just end up with more problems." While some psychiatrists prescribe anti-androgens to eliminate desire and its pesky discontents, others don't discourage their patients from fantasizing with pornography and would hesitate to judge as "wrong" even the most extreme sexual tastes. Quips one New York psychiatrist, "perversion can be defined as the sex that you like and I don't." Parts of "The Other Side of Desire" definitely require warning labels for the faint-of-heart. "Elvis," whose sexual gratification requires being trussed and roasted on a spit for three and a half hours, makes this reviewer particularly queasy. But the book can't be accused of sensationalism. Bergner insists that even the sadist — even, for that matter, the "zoophile," who prefers mares to women — thinks in terms of love. 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. Ron believes that Laura "was his muse, who brought life to his dreams, and he had brought life to hers." They are — in the fullest sense — the lids for each other's pots. Bergner, a New York Times Magazine staff writer, keeps his prose simple and straightforward. He's the old-fashioned fly on the wall. Except for noting how "repelled" he is by the pedophile with a victim exactly the age of his own daughter, Bergner does not dwell on his own reactions and interactions. Given how much of paraphiliac experience involves the twin poles of mortification and exhibitionism, Bergner might have engaged in a little more metajournalistic revelation about his presence, as a witness, at a group session for sex offenders or at an S&M sex party. Still, the book's strength lies in its attentive, carefully controlled tone. It would be easy enough to express outrage with the child sex-abuse educator who insists that pedophiles "are not monsters. They are us." Bergner hardly ratifies that view. But he does ask us to try to understand people who often feel like the Hunchback of Notre Dame or are driven to suicide, and to admire some of them for finding a harmless way to live outside the norm. His goal is empathy. He gives depth and shadow to his subjects' longing, never mocking, oversimplifying or vilifying. Lisa Zeidner's last novel was "Layover." She directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Camden. Reviewed by Lisa Zeidner, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Synopsis:
A terrific reporter with a novelist's eye ("New York Times Book Review") explores the essence of human sexuality through four provocative, personal stories, revealing the hidden nature of desire within everyone.
Daniel Bergner is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazineand the author of two previous books of nonfiction—In the Land of Magic Soldiers, a Los Angeles TimesBest Book of the Year and winner of an Overseas Press Club Award and a Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage; and God of the Rodeo, a New York TimesNotable Book of the Year. Bergner's writing has also appeared in Granta, Harper's Magazine, Mother Jones, Talk, the New York TimesBook Review, and on the op-ed page of the New York Times, and is included in The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Nonfiction. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"As if it weren't already difficult enough to find a suitable mate, what if a prerequisite was that the lover be missing an arm or a leg? Or willing to be roasted on a spit? Comparatively, a mild-mannered foot fetish seems, well, pedestrian. Bergner (God of the Rodeo) 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: is a man who desires feet any less odd than the psychiatrist who treats him or the scientist who studies pedophilia or the journalist who describes a whipping session in precise detail or the reader who becomes voyeur? It's all fairly delicate and disturbing material, and while the descriptions can grow florid, the author's strongest moments (e.g., evoking the tabooed desires impelling the artist Hans Bellmer's work) compensate for the lapse. Bergner has an empathetic sensibility and convincingly suggests that what a fetishist needs is a willing and loving partner with complementary interests." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Synopsis"
by Ingram,
A terrific reporter with a novelist's eye ("New York Times Book Review") explores the essence of human sexuality through four provocative, personal stories, revealing the hidden nature of desire within everyone.
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