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

by Daniel Bergner

  She didn’t know what she would find in the forest. The genital arousal to assault she and others saw as self-protection; in evolutionary terms, prehistoric women had needed to be vaginally receptive to sexual aggression in order to avoid laceration and tearing. Perhaps female responsiveness to bonobo sex was related to this. Perhaps the sight of an erect penis was all it took to stir this primordial system of self-preservation. But then why the physiological arousal to lesbian scenes, an arousal more powerful than to scenes of homosexual men? And why—as she added videos—the arousal to a lone naked woman more than to a solitary nude man? And what would happen if she replaced the apes with chickens? How closely did the sexual participants have to resemble humans? What exactly were the women responding to?

  Young though she was, Chivers knew that a lifetime of research might take her barely inside the forest’s edge, might allow her only a dim glimpse of the factors that shaped female desire. “One of the things I think about,” she said, “is the diad formed by men and women. Certainly women are very sexual and have the capacity to be even more sexual than men, but one possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-and-get-it kind of sexuality it’s more of a reactive process. If you have this diad, and one part is pumped full of testosterone, is more interested in risk-taking, is probably a bit more aggressive, you’ve got a very strong motivational force. It wouldn’t make sense to have another similar force. You need something complementary. And I’ve often thought that there is something really powerful for women’s sexuality about being desired. That receptivity element. At some point I’d love to do a study that would look at that. We just don’t know much about it right now.”

  On her floor of sexologists, Chivers was surrounded by men studying paraphilias, and she wondered if the scarcity of female deviants was the result of male definitions. If the system for women was fundamentally different, then the paraphilias would be different as well. They wouldn’t be on the existing list. For women, the map of the typical and the aberrant hadn’t yet been drawn. The mapmaker would have to work her way through the giant forest. But in terms of traditionally defined paraphilias, it made sense to her that women seemed most likely to be masochists. Flesh bared and waiting for the whip, or limbs bound, or body suspended from the ceiling, the masochist was desired, receptive, the focus of the sadist’s lustful gaze.

  Chivers knew that women might be undercounted among traditional paraphiliacs. The man who flashed his erection at a toll booth would be arrested and perhaps treated for exhibitionism; the woman who flashed her breasts would more likely win applause. The expectations and allowances of the culture might be distorting the numbers. And she knew that the forces of culture might be affecting her own research. Physiological arousal to wide-ranging stimuli might be, as Freud had argued, the natural state for both males and females. Was it simply that the culture taught men more emphatically to restrict their lust to limited sets of targets while female desire was allowed more freedom? Was it merely that men, having internalized these lessons at the deepest level, responded physically within categories that were learned rather than natural? Were men and women different primarily because of experience rather than the innate? Chivers and her husband, Michael Seto, one of the researchers on her floor, talked about someday attempting an experiment that would use a type of magnetic resonance imaging to test whether particular inhibitory regions of the brain were more active in males than females as a variety of erotic stimuli were shown. And Chivers had already tried to eliminate learned inhibition as an explanation of her results. She had included male-to-female transsexuals among her subjects. These medically created women, both those who were heterosexual and those who were homosexual, showed categorical response patterns. They responded like men. This seemed to point to a system that was inborn. Yet one could argue that the forces of culture, of learning, had taken permanent hold within these subjects long before their surgeries and their emergence as females could have shifted the culture’s input. Chivers couldn’t fully isolate the innate, knew she might never be able to. The forest often looked impenetrable.

  But one thing was almost certain: women like the Baroness were nearly alone.

  And for much of her life, feeling a difference she could not identify, she had wanted to die.

  AROUND the time of our trip to Master R’s, the Baroness heard a Latin phrase. She had left school at thirteen. Now she listened to Proust on tape, was proud of her self-education, and was enamored, right away, of the words sui generis. The phrase means “of its own kind.” She felt this described her perfectly, felt she had been generated as though out of air. The hardships of her growing up, she insisted, had little or nothing to do with who she had become. They couldn’t explain her style or power or sexuality. “I am sui generis,” she said, elated, then paused in contemplation. “Yes. I like that.”

  She’d grown up in group homes and small orphanages in Britain until she was twelve. “There was nothing really horrible going on. The cruelest thing I remember is having to eat Spam, throwing up, and being made to continue eating it.” Much of her time had been taken up by reading. She’d been captivated by a series of books called The Famous Five: four kids and a dog hunting treasure and tracking down thieves. She wrote her own version. “It was a compilation of all the kids in one character. There was no damned dog, not even a cat. She was orphaned at a young age, free and independent, and I took my book around to the neighbors to sell.”

  At twelve she was adopted; her new parents soon moved with her to the States, to Los Angeles. At thirteen she began running away repeatedly. She spent long stretches of her teenage years in San Francisco during the sixties. “This is how I remember that period. I was awake and muttering for days at a time. I was frightened of people. The police picked me up off the street. If you’d told me there was something about me that was fabulous, I certainly wouldn’t have believed it. I had suicide headaches. For two or three years I saw only in black-and-white. I had shock treatments. Two times? Three times? Thirteen or fourteen would have been the first one. I feel I deserve everything I have now because I paid for it.

  “I remember being happy for the first time. There are moments when you know you’re truly happy. I’d just taken about sixty Seconal, and I thought I’d succeeded. But then I didn’t die. Some of this stuff is so embarrassing. I went down a tunnel. It’s so clichéd, and the last thing I want to be is common. There was a white light at the end, a triangle glowing white, and a conversation with some sort of being, invisible, at the center. Basically I was told that I couldn’t leave because I hadn’t realized my purpose in life. I said, ‘Tell me what it is. I’ll do it, and I’ll be right back.’ And the voice said, ‘No, you have to find out.’ And I felt myself being pulled back out through the tunnel.”

  Decades passed, decades of too many drugs, decades of designing costumes for movies and the theater (she had taught herself to sew at one of the British orphanages, and in San Francisco as a teenager she had made clothing and sold it on the streets), blurred decades of incidents impossible for her to place in time, partly, she felt, because the electroshock treatments had damaged her hold on chronology, but partly, too, it seemed, because an indifference to time fit with her sense of who she was and how she’d become herself—sui generis—with feeling that she had simply arisen. In the mid-seventies she moved to Manhattan. Two decades later, at a birthday party of hers—her birthday was on Halloween—a guest arrived dressed in rubber and carrying a bullwhip. He held out the whip toward her.

  By that point she’d been married to Mark for almost ten years and with him for thirteen. They’d met at Chemical Bank’s headquarters, where he was a corporate photographer. He’d just moved to New York from Wisconsin, where he’d grown up as the son of a man who built water-softening machines and sold them himself across the Midwest. Her boyfriend at the time, who worked in Mark’s department, stood her up for lunch one day. She had come to the office wearing “the most conservative clothes she could put together,” Mark remember
ed. “A white blouse with big sleeves, a huge collar, a short white skirt. Far from corporate.”

  They were drawn to each other right away, he to her boldness, to a woman he called “the only person I’ve ever met who is completely unfettered by convention,” and she to his stability, to a man she saw as “my rock.” Knowing her affection for the thirties and forties, he proposed to her at the Rainbow Room, between dances to the swing band, and they honeymooned in Paris, where he discovered his love for taking pictures of dogs. He began with a beagle that he noticed trying to drink from a bottle of beer. Soon he was photographing pugs and labs and dachshunds in adorable poses, tongues out, ears cocked, eyes plaintive, heads tilted fetchingly. “We are passionate about pets,” his Web site would later announce. “And we love nothing more than finding and capturing the unique character of each one we meet.”

  After their honeymoon, they settled down in the East Village. Their erotic life was traditional, with a coil of desire tightened by the months when she traveled to make costumes for films and they were apart. Then, at her Halloween birthday party, the guest offered his whip.

  “I believe I literally took several steps backward. I put up a barrier. I knew it—I knew that if I touched it I would be doomed. Nothing happened that night. But we got to know each other. I carved a V into his back shortly afterward. With a pin, but I do mean carved as opposed to scratched. With a fair amount of blood. We learned a lot together, he and I. It was on his body that I learned to use a whip the way it should be used. It’s one of the ways that I’m a geek. I like to do something over and over until I’m good at it. It should feel like touching.”

  Early in her education, her birthday guest, whom she later named Luminous, took her to the city’s best-known S-M club. What she lacked, then, in skill, she made up for in unrestrained lust. “Everyone is going to be talking about you,” her partner promised at the end of the evening. About “safe, sane, consensual,” she made it plain from the start that she didn’t observe rules.

  Before Luminous arrived in her life, she’d had some inkling of her unconventional yearnings. She remembered excitement, long ago, as she’d watched an old black-and-white movie: a British sailor bound to the mast and flogged. After his arrival, she felt she had found out something central about herself and, in expressing what had lain dormant for so long, that she “became a more balanced person, a nicer person.” And the question of purpose, posed by the voice within the white triangle, was answered. “I can give people their dreams. I have the power to change people. I get to do so much good.” She could liberate “the core of being” in the city’s masochists just as her own sadism had been freed. She could save them from the unhappiness and self-destruction that had besieged so much of her life. She could be, she said, “a beacon” to people like the Girl and Greg and Genevieve and Elvis and the countless others she had lured into confronting their desires for the first time or into receiving what they had needed.

  The clothing she designed was part of her plan to unbury the erotic truth in those who had endured thwarted lives. She saw the city as filled with women and men waiting, consciously or unconsciously, for such unburying. They were like homosexuals who suppressed their desire and distorted or destroyed the rest of themselves as well. The same was true for the masochist. The same had been true for her. She envisioned a multiplying flock finding their way to her, and the latex was one of the ways she pulled them in. The lubrication of the body that was required to slide the garment over the skin; the sudden encasement; the immaculate smoothness of this second flesh; its gleam, for she had her submissives shine every item in the boutique; the material’s capacity to create something sleek from the contours of any person of any shape; the way the wearer’s nerve endings responded if so much as the back of a fingernail was dragged lightly over the surface, a response somehow twice as electric as if the same gesture was carried out directly upon the skin—before anything explicit had transpired, her customers were already in a state of partial surrender.

  OUTSIDE New York’s annual Black and Blue Ball, the sidewalk and street were thronged with guests and onlookers, photographers, security guards. When the Baroness emerged from a taxi with Kathleen on a braided leather leash hooked to a collar, it seemed that everyone coalesced. The Baroness wore a floor-length gown of amethyst-colored latex with a pattern of ruffles cascading down the back and a train that Kathleen lifted off the pavement. Cameras flashed and people called out to her and someone from the ball’s staff guided her away from the main line and directly toward the door.

  Inside, amid the crush of men in top hats and tails and women in black wigs and rubber corsets and men naked but for leather jock straps and women clothed only in thin leather bands, guests paid homage to the Baroness. The loud pulse of dance music made their words difficult to hear, but again and again, on all fours, they kissed the toes or heels of her shoes or, heads bent and bodies bowed, pressed their lips to the back of her hand. It didn’t matter if they were leashed to another master. White men being led by black women; bare-chested women crawling alongside male owners or female dominatrixes—they showed their reverence for the Baroness without objection from those controlling them.

  The ball was less an occasion for play than a yearly convocation and night of greeting. Up on the brass-railed balcony above the dance floor, the Baroness ran into David, who approached her without any gesture of deference. Once, they had tried to develop a way of talking with their whips, each on separate rooftops; they had imagined a Morse code of whip-cracking. His face was haggard and, in a tank top, his arms were like wires—he had AIDS—but he could stand in the middle of Union Square Park and make the windows of the surrounding buildings, sixty yards away, rattle as the end of his whip broke the sound barrier.

  Below the balcony, an MC interrupted the dancing to announce that Carrie, one half of the lesbian couple that hosted the ball, had just given birth to a baby boy. David drifted away and Eliza and Ben drifted over.

  They were long and narrow, with dark hair and faces that seemed to belong on the covers of magazines. She worked as a fund-raiser, he as an architect. Sheathed in the Baroness’s latex, Eliza in red, Ben in black, she wearing six-inch heels and he platform boots, they might have been a pair of cartoon heroes ready to kick their way through animated adventures. But their adventures were erotic.

  Eliza hadn’t always looked so arresting, not in this way. She’d had childhood arthritis. She’d used a walker and crutches and a cane through adolescence, spent her summers at a place she called “cripple camp,” endured her own terrifying oddity growing up in the Maine town where her father owned a hardware store. “I felt no control over my body,” she remembered the years of illness that hadn’t ended until her late teens or early twenties. “I was sick, the pain was constant, and this is part of what that did to me: I don’t want to be powerless; how can I have power? This is one way to experiment with that. There are times when I’m totally dominant. But there are other times when I’m completely submissive. I want that intimacy, that pain. I want to feel: I’ve been here before but not like this.”

  I’ve been here before but not like this—her words echoed the psychological theory that we eroticize what has frightened us, shamed us, wounded us. In this way we attempt to escape our deepest hurt and confusion. Eliza didn’t dismiss explanations the way the Baroness did. She saw her arthritis as central to her sexuality, not only because it had made her long for both power and pain but because the strangeness of her young body and the alienation it had caused her made it easier to embrace difference now. She sought it out. And when she thought of her friends from cripple camp there seemed a high percentage who later found themselves on alternate sexual paths.

  Ben couldn’t conjure explanations, only early beginnings: the basement game he’d devised for himself and his neighborhood friends at the age of four or five, ending always with his imprisonment in an old unused diaper bin; the game in the woods at the age of twelve or thirteen, culminating with his being t
ied to a tree and two or three girls jabbing him with sticks.

  Through his twenties he’d been in love with a documentary filmmaker. “She was very liberal politically but personally very conservative.” He’d endured their vanilla sex life by spending his early morning hours staring at S-M Web sites. A chance meeting with a professional dominatrix, a Japanese woman who was a graphic designer by day, pulled him past fantasy. He booked a session at the dungeon where she worked.

  “The Baroness will call bullshit on all professionals,” he said. “For her it’s a purely human relationship. But they do offer an opportunity for guys who have this predilection, guys who are driven crazy, guys who are just, like, I really want to figure out who I am.”

  The session with the graphic designer helped Ben in the figuring out, and by the time he met Eliza at a bar, his yearning leaped out in the first flirtation. “If I have to have vanilla sex one more time,” he told her, “I’m going to shoot myself.” Without knowing exactly what he meant, she sensed he was what she needed. She’d been dating a man who wanted to marry her, and whom she couldn’t love because of something she felt missing in bed between them.

  Now they spent their nights and weekends at play with each other. “When we first got together we were two subs,” he said. “Clearly someone’s got to top. And once we started doing it, it expanded our experience.” This kind of versatility, too, the Baroness held in some disdain. But one recent evening he had burned thirty welts into Eliza’s buttocks with a cigarette. On another night he had come as, lightly, she whipped his penis. “It was so demeaning and so hot,” he said.

  To be the one in control was far more demanding. “You might commit yourself to carrying out a certain form of bondage,” he explained. “And then you think, I want to do that, but now she is all tied up this way and in order to get there I have to get her out, and it becomes inorganic. You want everything to flow. It requires choreographing. Like throwing a dinner party: come in, how are you, let me take your coat, sit down, something to drink. But if you walk in and right away there’s a three-course meal sitting in front of you and it’s only six-thirty: no. Things have to make sense next to each other, to emerge from each other.”