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• Synopsis
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• Interview

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• More titles by Daniel Bergner

Synopsis

Jacob is a man with an overwhelming attraction to female feet. The Baroness is a clothing designer and evangelical sadist. Roy is a wedding band singer entranced by his step daughter. Ron and Laura are simply in love - only Laura lost both her legs in a car accident, and Ron is beguiled by a beauty many would be blind to.

How do we deal with desire? Our own, and the desires of others? How do we comprehend desires that are extreme, or unacceptable? And how do those who have them, live with them?

In The Other Side of Desire Daniel Bergner takes us on a journey into human passion suffered, endured, and celebrated. Desire is a sometimes anarchic, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes destructive, sometimes redeeming, and always powerful force.Immersing himself in it through the people whose lives he follows and the scientists he spends time with who are trying to understand it, slowly he exposes and illuminates layers of our humanity.

Phillip Birch, Assistant Editor, on The Other Side of Desire :

'This book describes the lives of people whose sexual desires would be considered abnormal, and perhaps repulsive, by the majority in most modern societies. It is not sensationalist, as a less sensitive writer might be, but gives a balanced viewpoint, considering the moral, physical and emotional consequences of each desire.

The author writes with scientific curiosity and an eye for human tragedy about the foot fetishist who opts for chemical castration rather than tell his wife of a decade what would really arouse him, the man who finds himself trying to seduce his stepdaughter of twelve via instant messenging, the dominatrix who supervises a human spit-roasting (literally, a naked man rotated on a pole above a fire, not close enough to be burnt to death) but ‘loves’ her slaves, and the ad-man whose working life is dedicated to finding beautiful women who will sell clothes and cosmetic products but who in his private life lusts after women with no legs. These stories force you to rethink your notions of what sexual perversion really is.'

Reviews

Interview

How do you describe your journey to the “other side,” as you call it?
My goal was to write a book about erotic longing, told through the stories of four people whose desires are likely very different from our own but whose lives illuminate some of the most basic human questions: How do we become who we are sexually? How do we live with our yearnings? What is the relationship between lust and love?

Why were you so drawn to this subject?
The erotic is so central to who we are as human beings, no matter what turns us on, and no matter whether we bury our longings or live them out consciously, constantly. Desire is a tangle of anarchic, ecstatic, destructive, redeeming—and extremely powerful—forces. I wanted to immerse myself in those forces through my main characters and through a set of scientists who have devoted their careers to understanding the way eros works within us.

Why focus on four such extreme forms of desire? How do these stories apply to the rest of us?
I’m always drawn to extremes in my writing, because the extremes illuminate the universal. My characters will strike most readers as glaringly different from themselves. But it would be too easy to divide human sexuality into the “normal” and the “aberrant”; we all exist along a continuum of desire. And the problems faced by these four people are shared by almost everybody. Take the question of how we cope with the constraints – societal and personal – placed on our desires. We all confront this problem in our own private ways; for my characters, the confrontations and the ways of coping are simply more dramatic. Jacob is a devoted husband and successful businessman, and his overwhelming attraction to women’s feet is harmless, yet he’s mortified by it – he feels utterly alien because of it. He conceals his desire from his wife and decides to suppress his sexuality medically, to eliminate it entirely, rather than find a way to incorporate it into his life. The Baroness, on the other hand, takes things to the opposite extreme. She embraces her erotic self completely and publicly; she’s an evangelical for the S-M community.

So you think most readers—the “vanilla sex” types as the Baroness calls us—will both be curious about and empathetic toward desires that are so far from their own?
I do. To stick with your example of the Baroness, her disciples submit to her in unsettling ways, but, at a fundamental level, are their desires so different from anyone’s? They want to surrender, to give themselves over. Isn’t this a nearly universal erotic longing, for the feeling of “oneness,” for the melting of the self, even if for only a moment? One of the Baroness’s submissives, a retired Wall Street executive, talks about having the layers of his psyche peeled away like onion skins when he’s with her. Watching the pain she inflicted on him was jarring for me, yet witnessing and hearing about his experience was also seductive.

Is sexual behavior based in neurology, or is it an expression of cultural forces? To what degree are we responsible for our behavior? To what degree do we have a choice?
A pair of prominent scientists showed me the MRI’s they’d taken of the brain and pointed to the way structural differences in the brain determine differences in sexuality. At the other extreme is an important anthropological study done in Papua New Guinea suggesting that desire can be dictated by cultural scripts. Neurological explanations are the fashion of our time, and I loved pouring over those MRI’s, but in the end there is the inescapable, infinite complexity of how we become who we are.

What does science have to say about the differences between the sexes when it comes to lust and longing?
I spent time in the lab of a researcher, Meredith Chivers, who was showing women and men an array of sexual images and finding that women get physically aroused by just about everything, including the copulation of bonobos, a species of ape, while men are much more categorical, much more limited, in their sexual response. She and other scientists are raising fascinating questions about the differences between male and female sexuality, and about what our erotic selves are really like beneath all the effects of cultural input and personal inhibition. As Chivers points out, the field has historically been dominated by men and this has surely skewed the way we look at women’s desire. She sees herself as cutting her way slowly into the forest, into the mystery, of female sexuality.

Which of the four stories was the most unsettling to write?
Roy's story, about a man who becomes entranced by his twelve year-old stepdaughter – a Lolita story – is probably the most upsetting to read, and it was definitely the most difficult to report and write. Yet all the science, all the testing, or, for that matter, all the images of barely teenaged girls used in advertising in our society, would suggest that even Roy is not so strange, not so Other.

What would you say you learned, after four years of immersing yourself in the world of desire, about the relationship between lust and love?
Well, I guess it goes without saying that the most difficult subjects, the best subjects, don’t lend themselves to easy lessons. But recently, I was at a dinner party and recounted a bit of Ron and Laura’s story, starting with the way Ron’s sexuality has been defined, from his earliest memories, by an attraction to women who are amputees. When I reached the part when he falls in love with Laura, and she with him, and they marry, someone asked abruptly, “But is his love pure?” A part of us, maybe a predominant part, wants to believe in “pure” love, an unconditional love that completely transcends the physical. The fact that Ron’s desire is so unusual makes it impossible to ignore; the physical is always strikingly present between him and Laura. So his story may seem to deny us our ideals. Yet at the same time, these two people have transformed each other’s lives. The story is uplifting, a happy ending to the book. Lust and love, here, are inseparable and redemptive.

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