Review: Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us by Jesse Bering

This is an interesting book to read on the train, or in a hospital. At least your fellow passengers and patients seem to regard you with some interest anyway... or maybe that's just concern. To some extent though, that's Dr Bering's point with this book. Sexual deviance is far more common and far less dangerous than is commonly believed, and shouldn't be regarded with fear or disgust. Even if you are sat across from a grouchy looking redhead reading a suspect-looking book.

Summary: “You are a sexual deviant. A pervert, through and through.” We may not want to admit it, but as the award-winning columnist and psychologist Jesse Bering reveals in Perv, there is a spectrum of perversion along which we all sit. Whether it’s voyeurism, exhibitionism, or your run-of-the-mill foot fetish, we all possess a suite of sexual tastes as unique as our fingerprints—and as secret as the rest of the skeletons we’ve hidden in our closets.

Combining cutting-edge studies and critiques of landmark research and conclusions drawn by Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, and the DSM-5, Bering pulls the curtain back on paraphilias, arguing that sexual deviance is commonplace. He explores the countless fetishists of the world, including people who wear a respectable suit during the day and handcuff a willing sexual partner at night. But he also takes us into the lives of “erotic outliers,” such as a woman who falls madly in love with the Eiffel Tower; a pair of deeply affectionate identical twins; those with a particular penchant for statues; and others who are enamored of crevices not found on the human body.

Moving from science to politics, psychology, history, and his own reflections on growing up gay in America, Bering confronts hypocrisy, prejudice, and harm as they relate to sexuality on a global scale. Humanizing so-called deviants while at the same time asking serious questions about the differences between thought and action, he presents us with a challenge: to understand that our best hope of solving some of the most troubling problems of our age hinges entirely on the amoral study of sex.

I actually ended up really liking this book. It's been on my wishlist for a while, but I never took the plunge and got a copy in case it was one of those heavy, dry scientific non-fictions or one of those fluffy popular science books. In the end, it was neither. Dr Bering writes very well and avoids, for the most part, becoming stuffy or condescending. It was an accessible read and one that I enjoyed picking up in the evenings.

The point of Perv, in a nutshell, is that the sexual preferences of others (homosexuality, acrotomophilia, sadism, etc) is completely and utterless harmless in itself and should be treated as such. If it isn't causing any damage, why does it matter? It sounds fairly logical, but then Dr Bering brings up the concept of paedophilia. The meaning has been distorted in recent years, but he points out that the word refers only to those with a preference for young children not those who act upon their desires or have been convicted of a sexual offence. Suddenly the 'has any harm been caused?' doesn't seem so innocuous, but what's the alternative? Imprisoning people for their thoughts?

It's an interesting point. He raises the example of a (hypothetical) necrophilia club that devised a way for their members to have sex with dead people. Each member would donate their body to the club after death so the other members could have sex with the corpse. A study asked participants whether it would be wrong for a man to have sex with a dead woman who has given her body to the club.

Most participants in this study defaulted to a 'presumption of harm' in their moral reasoning. Even when they were told explicitly that the woman didn't have any family members who might get upset if they found out what happened to her corpse, that the club isn't interested in recruiting or harming living people, that neither the man nor any of the other club members suffer any regrets or anguish about their sexuality, that the group's activities are kept private and consensual, that the man used protection to prevent disease, and per her instructions, that the club cremated the woman's body after the man was done having sex with it, people still insisted that somehow or other, someone, somewhere, must be getting harmed.   

Perv looks at why/how we attempt to impose our own morality on others by assuming that a certain sexual preference is 'wrong' and therefore must be harming someone, even when there's zero evidence to support that view. That said, it's not a preachy book at all. Dr Bering doesn't look down from his high horse to lecture on how we should all be more open-minded. It's more of a psychological perspective than a sermon.

I particularly appreciate that the book took the time to explain the differences in sexual 'deviance' between men and women, and gay and straight people. For example, men are much more likely to have a paraphilia (an abnormal sexual desire) than women, but sexuality was irrelevant. A lot of similar books either lump everybody together or only deal with heterosexual male preferences, so the expansive explanation was interesting.

I do recommend reading this. I learned a lot but, more importantly, I actually enjoyeding reading this book too. I was quite happy to just sit with it for several hours on the go - it's fascinating, accessible, thought-provoking and downright enjoyable.

What non-fiction books have you been reading this year? 

Review: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Anybody who's read anything about We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves will be aware that there's a 'twist' about a third of the way into the book. I use the quotation marks because, after talking with JimjamJenny, I can't quite decide if it is a twist or common knowledge. I knew about it before I read the book and I can't really review it without mentioning what it is, so you have been warned: this review contains mild spoilers. I think.

Plot summary: Meet the Cooke family. Our narrator is Rosemary Cooke. As a child, she never stopped talking; as a young woman, she has wrapped herself in silence: the silence of intentional forgetting, of protective cover. Something happened, something so awful she has buried it in the recesses of her mind.

Now her adored older brother is a fugitive, wanted by the FBI for domestic terrorism. And her once lively mother is a shell of her former self, her clever and imperious father now a distant, brooding man.

And Fern, Rosemary’s beloved sister, her accomplice in all their childhood mischief? Fern’s is a fate the family, in all their innocence, could never have imagined.

This isn't about what I thought it would be about. While this happens fairly frequently and isn't usually the end of the world, I was actually looking forward to reading about what it didn't turn out to be about... *shakes head*... Did that even make sense? I shouldn't write reviews at this time of night morning, I swear. Anyway, I was expecting to read an adult's assessment on how on growing up as a scientific experiment impacted her life, but the novel barely even touches on the issues relating to that.

Instead we're treated to a not-very-subtle novel about the horrors of animal testing, which occasionally reads like a preachy essay. It's barely disguised, as the plot itself isn't really strong enough to hide it. The premise itself is interesting and I've never seen anything like it done before, but it's obviously quite unusual. The problem is, the novel never tries to make it believable so I couldn't take it seriously.

Rosemary quite frequently says, "Nobody understands what having a chimp for a sister is like..." but then never actually tries to help us do so. "Oh no, people just don't understand that Fern wasn't a pet - she was my sister!" Well, no... I still don't. I could have got on board with the whole idea if the book had gone for thoroughness instead of shock value, but it didn't. It feels very flat for the most part, with little explanation and no emotion. One minute Rosemary didn't care, and then suddenly did... and then didn't. Ad nauseam.

While I obviously object to pointless experiments on animals in general, I can't say I objected to the treatment of this chimp in particular - mainly because Rosemary didn't either.  There was just no feeling there, which is a feat in itself considering it's a first person narrative. For a theoretically 'moving' novel with the main purpose of drawing attention to laboratory conditions, it's quite distant.

I actually quite liked Rosemary as a narrator; she was just too flat to be liked as a character. I really enjoy self-conscious narrators and it was carried out very well in We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Occasionally she'll mumble during the prose that so-and-so isn't really part of the story or that she'll explain a certain point later on. It adds a little kick to the writing and makes me care that tiny bit more.

Most importantly, this device allows her to look back over her five-year-old self's memories and assess the reliability of them herself. Usually a reader is left to figure this out off their own back, so it's quite interesting having a character become part of that process. I struggled to see her as the 40 year old woman she apparently is, but I suppose that's the difficulty of having characters discuss their own childhood.

I think my main problem with this book is that it's actually kind of pointless - nothing happens. It's more of Rosemary sat in her bedroom wondering what happened than anything else. Even the grand denouement itself is remarkly anti-climactic (if that isn't an oxymoron). I remember finishing the book with a raised eyebrow as I realised that nothing had actually changed from when I began the novel, aside from my being grouchy and a day older. 

There are worse books, don't get me wrong. I just don't see this as a Man Booker Prize contestant - I'm glad I've read it, but it hasn't blown me away and I don't think I'll feel the need to read it again. For a more subtle yet impactful novel about the ethical treatment of laboratory apes, I'd go with Ape House by Sara Gruen (although it shocks me that I wrote that review in 2011...). 

Read JimJamJenny's review of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves at I Spiral Down. 

Review: The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder by J.W. Ironmonger

Okay, so this isn't anywhere near the top of my unreviewed books list, but I had to bump it up and talk about it RIGHT NOW. It doesn't seem to be The Big Thing that it deserves to be -  I probably wouldn't even have come across it if Lewis hadn't found it at the library and dangled it in front of my face. However The Notable Brain of Maximian Ponder is casual, poignant and yet thoroughly amazing. It has to be the best undiscovered book of the decade.

Plot summary:  Maximilian Ponder shut himself away for thirty years in an attempt to record every memory he ever had. Now he lies dead, surrounded by his magnum opus - The Catalogue - an exhaustive set of notebooks and journals that he hopes will form the map of one human mind. But before his friend Adam Last can call the police and inform them of Max's death, one rather gruesome task remains in order for Max's project to be complete...

Interspersed with sections from The Catalogue, Adam tells the story of the man he knew - a man whose life changed dramatically the day he buried a dead labrador and fought a duel with his father. What emerges is both the story of a friendship and also of a lifelong obsession, a quest to understand the human mind, memory, and how we construct the story of our lives.

It's probably going to take half this review to explain the damn thing although on the face of it, it's quite a simple concept. Maximilian Ponder is a recluse - thirty years ago he closed the door on the world in an attempt to record everything on his brain for scientists of the future to unravel. He compares it to a neurological Rosetta Stone - experts may be able to compare his brain with his notes from The Catalogue, and thereby finally unlock the secrets of the brain.

In essence, it's a story of a man's perspective upon witnessing either genius, madness or both. It gets quite philosophical at parts and clearly there's a psychological aspect there as well. That said, it's never difficult to read. The narrator, Max's long-term best friend, talks in an informal style as if he's simply explaining his friend's eccentricities over a cup of coffee. Intermixed are excerpts from The Catalogue, the form which the project begins to take.

It's this that really makes the book. Mr Ironmonger has clearly put an awful lot of thought into exactly how somebody would go about this ambitious project and then ensures that we understand perfectly. There are three parts to it - firstly, in the main part of The Catalogue, Max details his memories. He can only write down what is actually in his head and cannot check details with anybody else, even if he thinks he may be misremembering. Secondly, the Appendix contains Max's knowledge. Lists of dog breeds, for example, or every film he can remember. People he has known also feature here and as much of a profile on them as he can put together. Finally, there is Max's Day Log. Here he details everything that happens to him as he is actually doing the project, although it may only consist of conversations with Adam and his meals.

Entries from The Catalogue itself and the Appendix feature in the actual novel, sometimes relating to Adam's narrative, sometimes not. It gives a very jumpy feel to the book, especially as Adam doesn't really attempt any kind of chronological order either. Normally this would annoy me, but it works so well here. I mean, what's more inconsistent than the human brain?

It's clever. So very clever. There are sometimes tiny but deliberate discrepancies between Adam's account and Max's Catalogue entries to emphasise the core point that two people's experiences of the same event may be very different. As the book itself points out, no man steps in the same river twice, nor two men into the same river. It also brings up the point of false memories - how much of what Max remembers is correct and how much was 'filled in' by his imagination?

The ending is one of the best I've read, ever. I wasn't sure whether to cry or throw up or what, but my heart was hammering and my fingers were gripping the sides of the book so hard I left permanent indentations. It's just perfect. It's a slow build-up, but it makes so much sense and left me absolutely desperate to know what happened. It almost, almost matches 11.22.63 and we all know how much I loved that one. 

Sometimes when you review a book you loved, you can't really explain yourself and your review post ends up a tangled babble of mush, much like this one. I know I'm not being coherent or even particularly helpful, but read between the lines. I loved this book. I want to hug it at night and weep. This is the book that the words 'modern masterpiece' were created for.

You can read an extract from The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder by J.W. Ironmonger here.