Do you choose your desire?

             By Ashley Burger

         The Other Side of Desire, by Daniel Bergner, is a captivating book different from others that we have read so far. Bergner dives into the lives of Jacob and The Baroness in the first two chapters, exploiting their “different” ways of life. This book definitely kept my attention and was the most enjoyable read to date. The most interesting point to me was the differences between Jacob and The Baroness, who we are not told her real name because she is treated almost as royalty. Do we pick our pleasures and desires or is it instilled in us? To me, it almost parallels with homosexuality and whether it is a preference or biological.

            We see very different cases in Jacob and The Baroness. Jacob lives a normal life, but is trying to hide and suppress his obsession with feet. While The Baroness has created her own world around her pertaining to S&M, she has fully accepted herself and lives in complete ecstasy. As Bergner points out individuals who live with a paraphilia could experience a form of ecstasy that 'regular' people could never achieve by intercourse. The fact that Jacob is so ashamed over his foot fetish means he will never get to explore his full capacity for ecstasy. It is sad that something could literally take over your life as much as Jacob’s fetish did. Furthermore, that he could not even tell his wife, who should know everything about him and could probably help. I think above everything else, the repression of these feelings caused the most pain for Jacob, so much that he needed to buy a prostitute to live out his fantasies. I think if he was honest he could find a girl who might even love him even more for that unique quality and help him reach his full ecstasy. We see that Jacob would do anything not to be the way he is, and starts medication with huge side effects to his overall manhood. He has such a longing to be normalized and be just like everybody else. No one took the time to explain that maybe he could lead a normal life with this paraphilia.

            In contrast, it is hard for me to believe The Baroness was not revolting from being normalized. She submerges herself in her pleasures, almost too indulgently. I do think she ‘picked’ this paraphilia. It struck me when her husband commented on her just making this huge change in her life, which leads me to believe she led a completely normal life until just recently when she started her latex fashion designs and slave shop (if that is even what you call it). I am not passing judgment or condescending, it was actually so interesting to see that there are these different worlds out there.

            But, it is hard for this case to follow Jacobs’ because I sympathize for him and the fact that he would do anything to be normal. I feel that The Baroness could be normal, because she was before. Perhaps she had repressed desires and is living now them out, but she has a husband who could be just as into S&M as she is and she left him behind. 

            My point is between these two cases I really do believe one of them had a choice to be the way the are and one of them did not. The Baroness has taken the pleasure and interest she has in S&M and over indulged, without any guilt. I feel like that would be like me loving chocolate and eating it every meal, for the pleasure of it. If I was Jacob, my chocolate eating would be because I was allergic to everything else and it was the only thing I could eat. In result, I would probably hate it!