The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing

by Daniel Bergner

  THERE were psychologists who wouldn’t have thought the Wall Street retiree or Genevieve or the Baroness herself were pathologically weird at all—or, if they did catch themselves thinking it, would swiftly have cautioned themselves against subjective judgment. “Perversion,” Muriel Dimen, a prominent New York psychoanalyst, joked as we sat in her Greenwich Village office, “can be defined as the sex that you like and I don’t.” And Mark Blechner, editor of the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis, said, “Remember that a century ago psychoanalysts were talking about fellatio and cunnilingus as perversions. As long as what she does is consensual,” he went on, after I’d described the Baroness’s life, “I don’t think it’s anyone’s role to judge.”

  Dimen, whose dark gray ringlets of hair brightened suddenly to a dramatic white rim around her face, mentioned that perversion, in one current psychiatric conception, is characterized by “relationships in which relatedness disappears,” but added that sadists and masochists may feel a resonant union. Erotic excitement, she had written, can send “you into bodily and sensory realms of abjection foreclosed long ago in the necessities of maturation.” She used “abjection” in a psychoanalytic sense, to mean an infantile state before the boundaries of identity are formed—and to listen to the Wall Street retiree talk about surrendering and having onion skins stripped from his psyche, or to listen to the Baroness recall the violent and blissful merging of selves that had taken ungovernable hold whenever she and Genevieve were in the same room, was to hear a hint of the profound, the unbounded.

  Dimen was reluctant to speak about causes of sadism or masochism; she worried about implying that such desires were disorders. But other psychoanalysts were less hesitant to see pathology. Doris Silverman, her hair dyed a soft, calming wheat-like shade, suggested that some lack of parental bond, some wounding absence or brutality, probably lay behind the sexual drives of people like the Baroness and those who submitted to her. Even Blechner, who refused to judge, suspected that the Baroness was responding to some long-repressed cruelty in her childhood. Then again, he warned that such psychoanalytic explanations had proved misguided in the past, that schizophrenia had once been attributed to cold and rejecting mothering.

  ROBERT worked with computers and was the president of his local Lions Club. Under his leadership, the club raised money to combat diabetes and childhood eye diseases. He served in the apartment the Baroness shared with her husband, cleaning and running errands and bringing her coffee in bed. He slept on her floor. A friend of his, who would soon become the first American reporter killed by insurgents in Iraq, had introduced him to the Baroness. She told me: “I love that people will come to me and say, ‘You changed my life.’ If you can leave a legacy of people better than they were before, you’re blessed. I’m blessed in that way.”

  Other slaves she found by advertising in downtown newspapers. Applicants were instructed to arrive for an interview with a résumé detailing any previous service. Kneeling for her questions, one man explained that he had made, from scratch, the paper for the résumé he offered her.

  Alex lived in a distant city. He phoned the Baroness at precise moments throughout the day—12:55, 3:37, 8:12—according to her commands and their synchronized watches. At each call, she told him what to do: bind himself more tightly, contort himself more unnaturally, burn himself. If he missed the time she assigned, her instructions might be more severe, or she might withhold punishment altogether, which was terrible in itself.

  Sam was a contractor to the wealthy, the well known. He had waves of unkempt, shoulder-length brown hair and a way of wearing his T-shirts that communicated an indifferent self-assurance. As an offering, he did carpentry in the boutique, which had opened not long ago; he had made the elegantly curved counter, and he waited for the harm she might give. Susan, his wife, taught science in the New Jersey public high school from which she’d graduated twelve years earlier. She had jet-black hair, a delicate nose, full lips, a slender body; the Baroness used her for a model.

  The couple had never lacked for heat between them. The first time they’d slept together, on a summer night, he’d gone to his freezer and taken out the tangerine sections he kept frozen there to run over a lover’s nipples and thighs till they melted and were eaten. Later they’d seen the Baroness interviewed on HBO and ventured to her shop to buy each other latex outfits. A three-way flirtation had begun, and along the way the Baroness learned that Susan had endured a childhood illness that had left her back heavily scarred. Hearing about them, seeing them, the Baroness was enamored of those marks. “I’m somebody she looks up to, somebody she trusts,” the Baroness said to me. “Everybody else tries to tell her, ‘It’s okay, they’re not too bad.’ I want to make her a dress to show off her back. I like the marks of life. Hers are massive. Marvelous, thick, like a ladder. You could climb down her back on those scars.” And Susan told me that the Baroness was beginning to transform her.

  Even those who hadn’t entered the Baroness’s world, even near strangers, seemed to feel altered by her attention. A crippled teenage boy drove his motorized wheelchair along the blocks near her boutique. His neck sagged, his head keeled, his knees leaned together. His wrist was inverted over the chair’s little black driving knob. But when he saw the Baroness stepping toward him in her sidewalk-length leather coat, with her purple spiked heels, her fireball of hair, which sometimes contained a streak of white or magenta to complement the flames, her many silver rings, two or three to a finger, and her sleek iron cane, which she carried as an accessory and which looked like a gallant’s sword, all obliterating her age, making the nascent pouches of her face irrelevant, making any measure of prettiness irrelevant, substituting flagrance for conventional standards so that, even in the East Village, where the outlandish was banal, every eye turned toward her—when he saw her approaching his face brightened and, though perhaps it wasn’t possible, his neck seemed to straighten slightly, his head to lift.

  “Hello, Baroness.”

  “Hello.”

  It was the same with the woman who walked with forearm crutches, the same with another woman, who seemed not quite homeless but plainly dislodged, as disheveled in her mind as in her hair and clothes.

  “Hello, Baroness.”

  “Hello.”

  Sometimes, on the streets in the evening, she stopped to chat. Then the forearm crutches seemed momentarily unnecessary; the dishevelment disappeared, replaced by intriguing idiosyncrasy.

  The effect might have been due to her flaunting her difference, to their recognizing a champion misfit. But she claimed another power. She said it was because she was willing to look at them. Most people averted their eyes from the crippled and avoided the lost. She, strutting loudly in her spiked heels along a line as straight as her iron cane, gazed not only into their eyes but at their bodies and into their minds. To do anything less, to pretend not to notice, was, she felt, to cause shame rather than diminish it. She was willing to see them, without fear, exactly as they were, and that freed them, for a few seconds, to be themselves.

  ONE torrential Saturday afternoon the Baroness took me upstate for an overnight gathering hosted by her friend Master R. I picked her up outside her apartment building, and her husband, Mark, walked her out to the car. He had a sharp nose and a sharp chin, a ponytail and a goatee, and the graceful reserve of men with plenty of height. A photographer, he kept his distance from her world, except to take pictures at the monthly parties she threw. That was as close as he wanted to get. He preferred to take portraits of dogs, which he considered his calling. He’d started a Web site, phodography.com, to advertise his vision: “Your dog is unique. (S)he is loyal. (S)he provides heart-healing humor and unconditional companionship. We understand completely.” He and the Baroness had been married almost a decade before she’d discovered herself. He was still perplexed. Before we drove off he leaned down to her open window; they kissed warmly, devotedly. “Good-bye, handsome,” she said.

  On a hushed country road, Master R lived
in a run-down bungalow he called La Domaine Esemar. There were deep puddles in the bald front yard and a feeling of manginess in the rooms within. He was a short version of Mark: a ponytail, piercing features. Wearing black velvet pants, he apologized to the Baroness, saying that because of the downpour the turnout might be slim—his guests tended to drive long distances from other rural towns. Then he led us down to the basement and introduced us to those who were there: a cherubic Asian car salesman; the owner of a restaurant chain and his wife, a hospital administrator; a transsexual in a black slip of a dress, with lush lips and large teeth.

  Aside from the exposed air ducts, the basement was the best-kept part of the house. All was clean and orderly. On blond shelves sat an endless variety of clips and clamps and stainless steel weights to be attached to testicles—all polished and gleaming and aligned in tidy rows. A black box, its bottom cut out, dangled from the ceiling so that a submissive could stand with her head inside. From facial piercings, her lips and tongue, ears and nose and eyebrows could be stretched and fastened to screw eyes that lined the inside of the box. To larger screw eyes on the outside, her wrists could be hooked, so that her hands would remain for hours and hours at the height of her ears. The box hung directly above a revolving platform on the floor. The submissive would be sent spinning with her head in darkness, her hands latched helplessly, and her face stretched to the point of tearing.

  There was a red cross, a trellis of whips, a chandelier of chains from which to suspend subjects, a dentist’s chair, a doctor’s examining bed. Plastic sippy cups, the kind toddlers drink from, were lined on a shelf “in case a slave loses consciousness and needs water,” Master R said.

  The Asian Chevrolet salesman started to bind Kathleen, the Baroness’s often-leashed apprentice, who had come along with us. Using heavy rope, he created a delicate corset, then cinched it tighter and tighter around her ribs like the step-mother suffocating Snow White. The artistry of Japanese bondage, he said, had begun centuries ago, when Samurai policemen devised elaborate ways of roping prisoners according to their social status. The restaurant owner and Master R listened while lashing the transsexual’s back. Wispy streaks of new blood crossed lines of old scabs. She gave out deep groans of arousal, lips and teeth parted wide. Her head lolled forward and wagged. Her groans reached orgasmic levels. They lashed her thighs, which trembled, then pushed her down on all fours. Master R pinned her head to the concrete floor with his boot. She groaned from a yet more central place, utterly animalistic.

  The Baroness was unmoved. “There isn’t going to be any oneness for me tonight,” she muttered; no one here would desire the extremity of pain she needed to give. Two years ago, in Master R’s backyard, she had roasted a horse buyer named Elvis on a revolving spit.

  Soon the hospital administrator, unclothed, had her ankles and wrists tied to a pair of freestanding poles, which were held upright, one by her husband and the other by the car salesman. They leaned the poles backward slightly; if they let go she would crash to the floor, her skull cracking against the cement. A woman who’d just arrived in a diaphanous skirt put her mouth to the administrator’s crotch. The administrator floated on air and trust as the woman began to lick.

  Released by Master R, the transsexual told me that as a man she’d been a neo-Nazi skinhead with a wife, a five-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son, and a job as a computer specialist at a law firm. Her kids still called her Dadda, though she had injected spectacular doses of estrogen into her body, dropped from two hundred and fifteen to one hundred pounds, and had only the shrunken vestige of male genitalia, which would soon be surgically removed. “They’ll always call me Dadda or Dad,” she said. She wore a slender silver ring on each hand, one for each child. “They’ll never come off.”

  As a male she’d been walking alone on a beach one afternoon, flooded with anti-depressants but sobbing and saying aloud, “God help me.” She’d known for years she simply wasn’t meant to be what she was. “That guy died that afternoon. When I was a neo-Nazi, I didn’t hate people, I hated myself.” She paused, contemplative, tranquil after the violence that had just enveloped her. “The beating here pulls out my inner female; it goes so deep; I want to receive. It’s like heroin. It takes me from a high head space, down through all the levels, down to someplace at my core. Everything gets brighter. Everything gets amplified. This is where I learn the whole. I stay with Master R for the weekends. Leaving is agony. The other world is agony. I have a hard time coming down. I’m jonesing. The law firm was good enough to keep me on after the sex change, but this is where I belong. It’s two different worlds, this and the vanilla. This one is totally alive. That one is dead.”

  Master R handed me his unpublished autobiography, and I went upstairs where there was enough light to read. Much was about the obliteration of boundaries, the annihilation of identity, the finding of a new, undelineated being through the giving and receiving of pain: “I slipped the ropes around her waist, pulled them tight, took the working end and ran it between her legs. I could almost see her lips engorge as the rope cut deeply into her labia. I felt my own cock swell in communication with her lust. Slipping my hand down I felt the wetness. My own pussy sighed in joyous communication and her cock hardened in my hand. I felt my nipples turn to hard little berries as the cock in my hand became rigid.” And as twine stitched through her labia was pulled taut: “I rubbed my wetness against him and moaned in return, as I stroked my cock and rubbed my clit. We were both lost in the intensity of our metamorphosis.”

  No one had an easy time leaving at the end of their stays, he claimed. He talked of a young corporate lawyer’s adjustment each time he walked out the bungalow’s peeling front door and drove back to his life in Manhattan. “How can you go out into the world afterward? People are trembling physically.”

  The Baroness was not trembling. But she recalled the day with Elvis. They’d agreed that she would roast him, and she’d called Master R for assistance. One of his slaves, a welder, built a massive spit: huge bases supporting a metal pole that was about ten feet long, a wheel at one end and spoke handles at the other. It joined a vegetable garden behind the bungalow. Maple and birch trees rose around it, leaves in brilliant color on that bright autumn afternoon. Slaves spread coals onto the bed. Elvis, naked except for a leather jock, was led from the house blindfolded, strapped to the pole, basted with honey and ginger. The coals glowed; the spit was a foot or so above them.

  Skin turned red, on the verge of blistering. Elvis screamed while around him the guests, masters and submissives, entered into an orgy of pain inflicted and received. Under the Baroness’s direction, slaves turned the spit slowly. The roasting went on for three and a half hours. When the pole was at last raised away from the heat and Elvis removed from it, he couldn’t stand upright. His eyes were glazed. He collapsed and was carried to bed, guests forcing him to drink water and trying to keep him from going into shock.

  “My thighs press together just to think of it,” the Baroness said. She spoke about the different kinds of orgasms she experienced in vanilla sex with her husband, to whom she was faithful as far as vanilla sex went, and in the rest of her erotic life, which some might not have recognized as sex at all: it involved no intercourse, no touching of breasts or genitals. The orgasms in conventional sex were “spikier.” The others were far longer, deeper, left her half-blind, mostly deaf, mute, slack-jawed.

  IN the S-M world, Master R told me, orgasms without typical sexual touching weren’t uncommon, especially for women. He mentioned training a slave to climax when he brushed the roof of her mouth with his finger. And I thought of the woman I’d met after a lecture the Baroness had given, the speech therapist for stroke victims, who reviled her own orgasmic sensitivity: if a sadistic lover whispered in her ear in the right way, she could come without any touch beyond the grazing of his breath. An Orthodox Jew whose grandparents had been slaughtered in the Holocaust, she felt tormented by her own craving for harm.

  There was science to
support such orgasmic claims. Beverly Whipple and Barry Komisaruk, professors at Rutgers University, along with Gina Ogden of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, had collaborated in measuring the increased heart rate, blood pressure, pupil diameter, and tolerance for pain during orgasm in women who said they could come—without any touch at all—by imagining lovers or phrases of music. In the lab, the women were strapped to monitors. They rested their chins on an ophthalmology platform and stared through the eyepieces of a pupillometer. Then they made themselves climax both merely by thinking and by stroking their clitorises. No matter the method, the measurements were similar.

  I wondered not only about the Baroness’s orgasms but about the law governing how she got there. Was roasting someone on a spit legal? Did a submissive’s consent mean that the sadist couldn’t be prosecuted? In legal terms, could a person rationally agree to be assaulted, or was such willingness viewed as inherently irrational and legally void? The law was blurry. Probably the most relevant case involved a doctoral candidate in microbiology who, in the late 1990s, spent almost two years in prison for allegedly raping and burning, beating and biting a college student while keeping her roped to a futon for twenty hours. The conviction was eventually overturned on appeal, because the trial judge had refused to allow the jury to consider e-mail messages sent by the girl to the defendant laying out her masochistic desires. Consent, the ruling implied, couldn’t be disregarded.