The Other Side of Desire, by Daniel Bergner

The Other Side of Desire
By Daniel Bergner
Ecco
Five stars
Reviewed by Jessica Gribble

The Other Side of Desire is both haunting and memorable. It’s short—about two hundred pages with very readable type. And yet it contains major questions about that perplexing and endlessly fascinating topic: human desire.

It would be easy to pick up this book voyeuristically, enticed by the word “desire” and the beautiful, possibly slightly bruised, blossom on the cover. However, Daniel Bergner is a journalist with a knack for drawing readers into the lives of the people he portrays. You may begin with a sense of titillation and danger, but you’ll end with a far more complex view of human desire and the ways it can draw people in like a moth to flame. Bergner studied people that many would call aberrant because he wondered how we all come to have the desires we do. How much is nature, born with us, and how much is imprinted upon us by our culture and experiences? Bergner spent time with people willing to talk about their unusual desires and with noted sex researchers and therapists to try to puzzle out the answers.

Each chapter of the book presents one person’s sexual desires and his or her attempts to fit them into “normal” life. The first character, Jacob, is a foot fetishist who is so disturbed by the intensity of his desire for feet—even becoming aroused when the weather forecaster mentions feet of snow—that he cannot discuss his desires with his wife and eventually takes prescription drugs that cause him to lose his sexual desire entirely. The Baroness uses her desire to inflict pain to give pleasure to slaves and followers. She is sexually gratified by the whipping, bondage, and training, as are the people who come to her for release. She’s empowered by their desires and her own, and is respected and comfortable with her lifestyle. But the result of her desire is true pain for some, including scars, wounds, and burns. The third chapter follows Roy through the therapy and probation designed to keep him from ever again sexually interacting with young girls, as he has with his stepdaughter. He’s a model citizen at work and a pleasant man. His attraction to girls, researchers have found, is shared by many men in American society. However, his abuse means that he will be on probation for thirty-five years, unable to function normally in a society in which children mingle with adults on the beach and at family functions. The final chapter introduces Ron, who has desired disabled people from a young age. He’s able to express some of that desire through art—he’s a talented photographer. He dates a succession of amputees, most of whom have been made to feel undesirable by a society that fetishizes youth and wholeness. When Ron meets Laura, he’s drawn to her sexually—she’s a double amputee—as well as mentally and emotionally, and their marriage is a source of joy to them both.

In the end, Bergner shows us that human desire lies on a continuum. Our biology is complex and our society often eroticizes what it pretends to condemn, particularly the violence found in popular movies and pornography and the sexualization of the young. In some ways, as a prominent psychoanalyst jokes, “perversion can be defined as the sex that you like and I don’t.”

Whether you find The Other Side of Desire compelling, frightening, or a testament to the human desire for connection, you’ll surely agree that Daniel Bergner has treated his characters with great respect and raised some very important questions about the desires that lie in all of us.