Does porn help a child molester like Roy keep from acting on his impulses, or does porn encourage him?
Let's back up a little and talk about pornography in general. Porn can be incredibly liberating because it gives a sort of affirmation; it's a sexual mirror of society, in a way. The only thing that makes me worry, and I say this tentatively, is the solitary nature of it. In Jacob the foot fetishist's story, his shame just feeds on itself; he becomes more and more solitary, and of course if he were to just bring his desire for feet into his otherwise perfectly thriving marriage, he and his wife might be brought closer. I worry that pornography just serves the solitary and maybe doesn't get us to the place that Ron and Laura get to. Now in cases like Roy's, the thinking about porn is complicated. There's a big debate among experts who treat child molesters about whether pornography gives them a safe outlet or feeds their desire. It is such a raging debate; for me to weigh in would be silly.
Then there's the question of rape in general and whether pornography encourages rapists or helps satisfy would-be rapists.
I want to be really careful here because I don't want to be advocating limits on pornography — I think in the balance we'd better keep our free speech and therefore our free access to pornography. But we've got to acknowledge that to some extent pornographic images affect the way we desire, and ultimately to some degree may affect what we do with that desire.
In all the things you were exposed to, did anything give you a stronger sense of how wide the erotic world is or how to expand your own? And did anything scare you?
The easiest thing is to talk about the Baroness' world, because it contains the answer to both questions. There were certainly times with the Baroness when I thought, "No way could I ever do that to someone" — although the word "could" is tricky. I've spent a fair amount of time in war zones, I think we are all capable of doing pretty much anything to anyone, which is frightening.
Daniel Bergner |
But there were moments when the erotic force of the Baroness' connection with her submissives seemed revelatory — the kind of revelatory that I would want. When I think about the language of S&M — "surrender," "submit," "overtake," "overwhelm" — it's the language of love. All of our longing is embedded there. When I watched her submissives, I saw something that was enviable. They were being taken to a level of ecstasy that most of us may not experience. There was this one guy who was talking about onion skins being stripped from his psyche. I'll speak for myself: I want to get there. I don't necessarily want to undergo what that man was undergoing, but I do envy that experience. There was something profound happening.
Even beyond that, I saw again and again with the Baroness and the S&M world a level of communication about the sexual. The couple I call "Ben and Eliza" spent a lot of time planning their erotic encounters — which in itself is pretty erotic — and they take each other to places that are pretty deep.
I said to them, "So now this person you love is way down there in a place of submission, perhaps injured physically or psychologically, utterly vulnerable and exposed, but in a state of ecstasy. How does that person get back? How do you walk outside like a regular couple in the world?" And they said they take their lover in their lap and allow them to be reborn, to become their everyday vertical selves. That was very moving to me.
They really sound synched. It makes me want to see the divorce rates of S&M marriages.
It's like they've got it all there: being taken to complete revelation and vulnerability and transcendence and then nurtured back into everyday being.
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