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Surveying the Outer Reaches of Lust


Pedophilia and Fetishism: Sexual Paraphilias

http://samvak.tripod.com/pedophilia.html

Narcissists, psychopaths, sex, and marital fidelity

http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/narcissisticabuse/message/4920


Surveying the Outer Reaches of Lust
By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: January 23, 2009
Daniel Bergner, 48, the divorced father of two teenage children, is what sexologists would call a straight, vanilla teleiophile. He is attracted to adults, that is, prefers the opposite sex and doesn’t shop for lovemaking accessories — clothespins, clamps, carabiners, rubber gloves — at Home Depot. He has never allowed himself to be basted with honey, naked except for a leather jockstrap, and roasted on a spit over glowing coals.

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Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times
Daniel Bergner, who has written about civil war in Africa, interviewed a range of sexual fetishists for his new book.

Related
What Do Women Want? (January 25, 2009)
Browse Inside 'The Other Side of Desire' at HarperCollins.com
 

A man who did just that during an S&M orgy, however, figures in “The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing” (Ecco), Mr. Bergner’s new book. So do a couple who pick up sex toys at the hardware store and a man who, all things considered, would just as soon have sex with a horse as with a woman. “The trust factor,” he said, explaining his preference to Mr. Bergner. “I find that I’m closer to horses.”

“The Other Side of Desire,” which comes out on Tuesday, is about people most of us would call perverts or weirdos. The main characters, all of whom Mr. Bergner interviewed extensively and some of whose identities are disguised, are a man with a foot fetish; a woman called the Baroness, who runs an S&M dungeon and designs latex fetish attire; a man with a fixation on his 12-year-old stepdaughter; and a photographer who is turned on by women with missing limbs.

The book is not written in clinical Krafft-Ebingese, but neither is it leering or salacious. The portraits are serious and even sympathetic, and their cumulative effect is to make readers realize that they understand a lot less about sex than they thought. The hardest person to warm to, Mr. Bergner said recently at his apartment in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, was Roy, who was convicted of groping his stepdaughter, and about whom he wrote in a 2005 article for The New York Times Magazine.

“There were moments when he ‘adjusted’ the truth, changing the girl’s age from 14 to 13 to 12,” he explained. “He’s got the one issue that’s utterly condemnable, but he was really quite open. I found it appealing that he was so introspective and so searching.”

The most touching character is Jacob, the foot fetishist, a traveling salesman and devoted husband whose fixation occasionally brings him extreme pleasure but more often crippling shame, so that he couldn’t even tell his spouse.

“At one point I even stepped out of my role as a journalist,” he admitted. “I said to him, ‘What would happen if you made this a part of your life with your wife?’ I thought it might work, but he said he wouldn’t want his wife to accept it. There was something about him that spoke to that part of ourselves that lives within pretty severe constraints — cultural restraints, religious boundaries, et cetera — that we wish we could elbow our way out of.”

One of the questions that interested Mr. Bergner is how we come to have the sexual desires that we do. As he interviews scientists, psychiatrists and sexologists, the book toggles between two general theories. There are those like Dr. Fred Berlin, a Baltimore expert on sexual disorders, who believe that from birth we are more or less wired to be the way we are; and those like John Money, the famous Johns Hopkins researcher, who think eros is mostly learned, not inborn.

“Our culture — or our scientific culture, anyway — is leaning prettily heavily right now toward the wired theory,” Mr. Bergner said. “The idea that someday not so far in the future we will be able to take detailed enough images of the brain to determine where the anatomical difference is located.”

But, he added, “I’m not quite ready to go there.” He then described a weekend he spent at a Connecticut motel observing a mixer between female amputees and their male devotees, as men who are attracted to such women are known. “After a whole weekend your vision ever so slightly starts to shift,” he said. “Not that I became an amputee devotee; far from it. But I began to see as these other men were seeing. That’s what our culture does, and it has a tremendous effect. We find attractive what others do, and I don’t think all the M.R.I.’s in the world are ever going to get to that.”



The other big thing he has learned, Mr. Bergner said, is that the lines defining what is normal sexually and what is not are vague at best. We abhor pedophilia, for example, and yet our culture worships teenage girls. “When you get to the Baroness, the blurry lines are barely lines at all,” he said. “When you start talking about the connection between pleasure and pain, there’s a whole body of psychological literature that says that’s pretty common. To watch the things the Baroness does and the people who submit to her is to be attracted — at least abstractly.

Skip to next paragraph
Related
What Do Women Want? (January 25, 2009)
Browse Inside 'The Other Side of Desire' at HarperCollins.com
“The whole language of S&M is appealing: what we want from sex is that experience of being taken somewhere deeper into ourselves and to a deeper connection with someone else. That’s what the Baroness is offering, perhaps at a dangerous price.”

Mr. Bergner’s previous books were about the Angola prison in Louisiana and the civil war in Sierra Leone, and both demanded arduous and often uncomfortable reporting about worlds most people ignore. He said that reporting “The Other Side of Desire” didn’t seem all that different.

“I decided I was going to go inside eros, inside our sexual selves,” he explained. “Not to be melodramatic, but that sounds like a pretty extreme journey. When I went to Angola, I thought, ‘Here’s a chance to look at why we live.’ There were people living lives there that were all but exterminated, and yet those lives were in some ways pretty full. In Sierra Leone I thought I could learn something about myself, something about race. I thought that from all these people I’d learn something about us as human beings and the force of the erotic, and when I did this book it didn’t feel like a departure, really, just another extreme.”

He explained that when he met Ron, the photographer of amputees, and his girlfriend Laura, who had lost both her legs in a car accident, he felt something “intense in the way that that physical lust was highlighted in a way that was uncomfortable in the extreme and that brought that lust to the fore.”

“And yet they created a relationship that was very loving,” he added. “That really stark physicality and transcendent love — I felt it was going to be revelatory.”

“I guess my own perversion is that I’m not depressed easily. Some of this stuff is pretty dark, but maybe my own sense of coloration is different. Even the Angola book didn’t seem that dark to me. It was sad but also uplifting. And Ron and Laura’s story is really happy. It’s practically a happy ending.”

Mr. Bergner hesitated when asked if working on the book had changed him. “Well, it definitely deepened my sense of the power of the erotic,” he said. “And if I was always at least fairly comfortable talking about sex, now I’m very comfortable. That in itself has led to something good. It’s good for cocktail party conversation.”

He paused. “The Baroness has joked that she has helped my sex life. It’s possible, not because I’m binding or getting bound, but because that world can teach you a lot about being open about desire.”


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Encyclopedia of Narcissism and Psychopathy

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Jul/18/2009, 8:39 am Link to this post  
 


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