I prefer tall men. I don’t mean men that are simply taller than me. I mean men that are considered to be tall by everyone. The first boy that I dated, (fake dated because it was 8th grade), was 6’4 and the tallest person I have ever dated is 7 feet tall. My friends tease me occasionally, but I have never been made to feel ashamed of my obsession with height. Reading “The Other Side of Desire” made me think about the things that people find attractive and how some of these things come to be accepted as normal while some are not.
The last section of the book, Devotee, was interesting because it not only explored the disdain that people held for devotees, but it also looked at how those who are disabled feel about devotees and the people that see them as “freaks.” I cannot imagine life without my legs or arms, but I also cannot imagine life without love. Why is it that being an amputee means that people are not allowed to find you attractive? As Laura asks, “Was a preference for a single arm really all that different from a preference for a certain color hair, a certain tone of skin or shape of face or type of body?” (190). The only difference that I can see is that society has deemed amputees as beings that are abnormal and uncomfortable to look at.
Blond girls, tall girls, and brown-eyed girls, are not uncomfortable to look at so no one cares if you have a preference for one over the other. This last chapter shows that even family member and friends of disabled persons feel that to be attracted to this group of people is abhorrent. What does that say about how they feel about their loved one? Disabled persons experience enough pain and suffering; why should they have to experience it alone? Bergner uses the personal experiences of his interviewees to show that just because one’s desire is different from main stream society does not mean that the desire is wrong.
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