A foot fetishist, a female sadist, a child molester and an amputee "devotee" — these are the protagonists of Daniel Bergner's new book The Other Side of Desire, an exploration into various atypical forms of "lust and longing." In what could have been the worst kind of leering anthropology, Bergner instead finds compassion, sympathy and even commonality. He calls the stories in the book "autobiographical," and the book makes clear that its subjects will provide all of us with convex mirrors reflecting our own sexual desires and practices.
Even amid the sometimes-destructive impact of what sexologists call "paraphilias" — sexual "disorders" that most of society (and this interviewer too, accidentally) often call deviant — Bergner also envies the intensity of feeling that accompanies them.
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Bergner's book is an exploration of the people, stories and science behind paraphilias. It raises the questions of where our desires come from and what to do with them once they're there, but Bergner (and the scientists he cites) know that there are no easy answers. An adapted excerpt from his book entitled "What Do Women Want?" appeared recently as a cover story for the New York Times Magazine, but, like The Other Side of Desire as a whole, it's more concerned with exploring our questions about sexuality than with resolving them. Anecdote, authorial intuition and scientific research all tell us that sex might just be as big a mystery as we always thought it was.
I sat down with Bergner the other day and got him talking on his hunches about nature versus nurture, on whether porn hurts or helps, on what inspired or scared him and on the redemptive power of love. More about Daniel and his work can be found at danielbergner.com. — Jack Murnighan
"There was an almost immediate effect on me after spending a weekend among them."
Sex and sexuality tend to prompt so much gawking, I was impressed that your book moved beyond the anthropological and became quite intimate.
I feel like these stories are autobiographical, though that may sound strange to say. They are about states of longing, and they are about people fighting cultural constraints, cultural codes. Even for the most mainstream of us experience those things — think about the monogamous rules of marriage. Dismiss Freud if you like, but we all have an erotic layer, a powerful force inside us, a central force. And whatever we do with it — push it to the side, tamp it or live with it consciously — we are dealing with constraints and codes. Here are four really dramatic examples, and I felt in their stories a way to get to something, to some deeper understanding.
You continually address the question of inherency — nature versus nurture. Do you think that people are born quote-unquote deviants, with hardwired inclinations, or are they triggered culturally or experientially?
How we come to be who we are sexually was a question I wanted to address, not only by spending time with scientists but by telling stories. I spent time with scientists who were going so far as to take MRI images of the brain and literally point to distinctions in certain areas that they felt were correlating to differences in erotic direction. But the impact of culture is also clear in large and small ways. At the other end of the extreme of the debate is a really interesting set of studies by an anthropologist who spent time in Papua New Guinea and watched young men grow from homosexual relationships to heterosexual ones according to a sort of cultural script. His research points to the malleability of who we are sexually. On a much more personal note, I spent time in a lot of alternate sexual worlds with people who just see sex differently than I do. There was an almost immediate effect on me after spending a weekend among them: I would begin to see as they see. It wasn't a complete change — I'm still basically the vanilla guy that I am — but it does have its effect. You can feel how we're affected by our surroundings.
