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

This book illuminates a part of the human condition that's normally kept in the shadows. I wondered if certain portions should be kept in the shadows given the disturbing nature of some of the subjects' desires. Suffice it to say that some erotic obsessions that were exposed in the book could do psychological harm to the people who indulged in them or to others. Other parts concerning the kinky agreements between consenting adults were surprisingly titillating and harmless to the well adjusted. There were a handful of case studies that went from the common to the bizarre and I suspect that each reader would react to them differently. All in all I learned some things I didn't know before from this stylishly written material. Michael J. Foy Author of The Kennedy Effect

Eating is one of our great inner drives, and it is not at all surprising to us that other people like eating things that we do not, or even that they eat things that disgust us. Sex is one of our great inner drives, too, and while all of us realize we don't perform every single act in the sexual smorgasbord of our species, we find some of those acts by others pretty repellant. We also tend to be curious about them. Daniel Bergner, who has previously written about Sierra Leone's civil war and Louisiana's Angola Prison, turns his journalism to exploring inner worlds with _The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing_ (Ecco). The journeys are those of a foot fetishist, a female sadist, a child molester, and an amputee devotee, with side views of even stranger trails. These lives will seem peculiar to most readers, but from Bergner's pen, they are not completely foreign. All of us have our drives and our kinks, even though they may not extend to these extremes. Bergner stresses commonality, and extends (and engenders) compassion and sympathy. There is some humor here but no leering. There are also few firm answers about how these people came to their puzzling enthusiasms, but there are appealing accounts of how they made peace with them without ruination of their lives or those of others. Start with the most distressing, the child molester. Roy was convicted of groping his preteenage stepdaughter. Roy's current wife knows of his past, as does his workplace. His boss says, "Everybody has these thoughts. The only thing that separates him from you and me is we didn't act on them." It turns out that researchers agree. Roy himself, with credible introspection, gets to groups, keeps a journal, talks to himself positively, carefully follows all the rules of his 30 year probation, and tentatively requests increases in privileges. Less worrisome is the foot fetishist. Jacob, a decorous and otherwise conventional man, is afflicted by an erotic attraction to women's feet, and is tortured by it. He does not want to share his obsession with his wife, whom he loves deeply. It is not just that looking at feet or imagining feet as sexual vessels is a bother to him. He hates winter, for the weatherman will talk about how many feet of snow will be coming. "Imagine," he complains, "if snowfall was measured in breasts and you were the only man with that sick desire." Ron from age five has felt drawn to women whose legs are misshapen or missing. Ron photographed cripples in his spare time because he gets an erotic zing from them. Unlike Jacob, he could come to terms with a fascination others might find shameful, and found the ideal woman, in his words: "She was smart, she was cute, and she had no legs." The one woman profiled here is the Baroness, a dominatrix who specializes in extreme pain, and also in latex fashions. Unlike the dominatices-for-hire you can find in the Yellow Pages, the Baroness takes real se

Bergner's first two books were on extremes: /God of the Rodeo/ was about the rodeo champions of Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana, /In the Land of Magic Soldiers/, Bergner traveled though Sierra Leone, reporting the dichotomy of life there between black and white; citizens, soldiers, victims, and observers. In /The Other Side of Desire/ he heads off the into the hinterlands of sexual longing, looking for patterns on what makes people desire things that aren't "normal" by many standards, using four varied and unusual cases. He has a foot fetishist, a dominatrix, an acrotomophiliac (Google it), and a pedophile. Each chapter tries to find not only the original source for that person's longings, but also continues Bergner's thoughts about desires, pleasure, and nature of ecstasy itself. Some of the descriptions are mildly graphic, but for those of a more prudish nature, /Desire/ may not be to your liking. Some of the subjects (and not just the main ones, such as when Bergner includes other side stories as he goes along), fear or hate their proclivities, others embrace it. But, Bergner doesn't condemn, simply tries to find common themes between them.

Daniel Bergner is one of the best literary journalists in the business. His journeys to a prison farm, an African war zone, and now the frontiers and dark corners of sexuality are uniformly illuminating. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the provocative topic (who isn't?) and/or in excellent reporting and writing.

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.