Daniel Bergner is a New York Times journalist whose previous books have examined life in a maximum-security prison in Louisiana and the fallout from war in Sierra Leone. This fine, brief, intense study is not a departure from such territory so much as a development of his interest in existential extremes. The Other Side of Desire is the result of long periods Bergner has spent in the company of paraphiliacs - people who operate in what are, for those of us who practise mere "vanilla sex", remote regions of erotic experience.
He tells the stories of four subjects. There is Jacob, a discreet man desperate to be cured of a fanatical foot fetish that, though it shames him, also offers a route to transcendent ecstasy. More morally confounding is Roy, a husband on probation for attempting to seduce his 12-year-old stepdaughter. Operating (just) on the legal side of consensual, but at eye-watering levels of sadism, is a well-known New York dominatrix called the Baroness, who gets true erotic satisfaction from her work. And then there is Ron, a "devotee", whose insatiable yearning for sex with amputees gives rise to a redemptive love story.
Bergner evinces remarkable levels of trust and candour, not only from his subjects, but from the sexologists and psychiatrists whose clinical sessions he attends and who also provide him with a hinterland of incidental case histories - from the harmlessly eccentric to the sexually murderous. These cases are presented neither as circus parades of the weird, nor as mere clinical accounts of deviant sexuality. Instead, with the utmost sensitivity and intellectual curiosity, Bergner extends an invitation to view all such variants as belonging to a continuum of ordinary human desire.
His most obvious moral-psychological dilemma comes in the confrontation with paedophilia. While Roy is a man at war with himself, and not guilty of actually having sex with his stepdaughter, Bergner inserts clear signposting (the only time he does so) to make sure the reader does not confuse the author's curiosity with anything too close to empathy. Yet having done so, he incorporates the findings of research showing that 21% of a study group revealed sexual attractions to children, while 7% indicated they might have sex with a child if not caught. "Given the probable social undesirability of such admissions," an eminent British psychiatrist observes, "we may hypothesise that the actual rates were even higher." What makes Roy and other more predatory paedophiles socially deviant is less the character of their desire than the extent to which they are compelled to act on it.
The moral stand-off between desire and action is what underpins the finely nuanced counterpoints of Bergner's writing. If, in the case of the paedophiles, it is only in resisting action that they remain within a moral framework, what of unfortunate dreamers such as Jacob, whose desire is harmless? If only he could have admitted his foot fetish to his wife, instead of trying to annul his yearnings with prescribed medication, he might have gained unique happiness and saved his marriage from an emotional void.
The story Bergner tells that most movingly reveals the paradoxical naturalness of perversity is that of Ron, the amputee fetishist. "Devotees", as they are known, are often considered repulsive even by amputees themselves. That's how Laura views Ron when they first meet. A car-crash victim, her legs were severed near the tops of her thighs. As a result, she left her husband, despaired of being a good mother and attempted suicide. Yet, having overcome her initial misgivings, she now lives with Ron, a man whose socially alienating desire dovetails exactly with her physical handicap. This, it transpires, is not merely a compensatory relationship, but one in which Laura finds a fulfilment that was absent in her previous existence. In this union of the misshapen, Ron and Laura uncover a deeper geometry.
What is desire and what shapes it? This is not just a nature-versus-nurture muddle. Some of the cases in this book reveal a clear biology of desire. Others reveal the delineations of social or cultural formation. Make no assumptions about which may be which, however, because that may lead you to miss the less palatable realities of human psychology - of how a paedophile may be born and not made or how a rape victim may experience orgasms.
In the cases of Jacob and Roy, desire becomes an instrument of destruction. In the cases of the Baroness and Ron, aberrant desires turn into instruments of healing. In Bergner's delicate but unblinking tales of extreme sexual longing, we glimpse the more routine truths of human psychology, also operating by some inescapable law of perversity.
