The Other Side of Desire (16 page)

Pedophiles, too, might learn to manage without their mother tongue. Fedoroff talked about putting them through a second puberty. His plan depended on the idea that everyone had once been pedophilic. As children we’d had our primary crushes on other children. For most of us, our preferred objects of desire grow older as we do, at least through puberty and for several years beyond. But for the pedophile, Fedoroff thought, something had gone awry around puberty’s onset—and the solution was to set the patient back into a prepubertal state. This could be accomplished, at least as far as the sex drive went, by giving anti-androgens. With the lust for children out of the way, emotionally romantic attachments with adults would be given a second chance to develop. Then the dosage of anti-androgen could be gradually reduced, allowing sexuality to join up with the romantic sentiments.

It was a theory somewhat like the one Berlin had described as central to Money’s thinking—and as disproved. What made Fedoroff confident that an attraction to adults would gradually rival the longing for children wasn’t fully apparent. He hadn’t yet tested his idea, though he intended to soon. His self-assurance seemed to rely on another analogy: on thinking not only in terms of language but in terms of cuisine. “I tell my guys, ‘What you’ve been doing is like eating at fast food restaurants. Your fast food days are over. The gourmet dining experience is coming. If all you’ve experienced is sex with children, you have no idea what it’s like to have sex with someone who can actually reciprocate and play on the same level as you. Once you’ve had that, once you’ve had gourmet food, you won’t want to go back.’”

The metaphors seemed to buoy him above all doubt. And to be around him was to float above darkness and to feel that desire need hold no threat, no anguish. “If you haven’t noticed,” he declared one evening at a dinner party at his home, “I’m very sex-positive.” The house embodied a mix of the intellectual and the sensual. A sculpted relief of three nude backsides decorated one bathroom. A large library, lined with built-in bookcases that rose from floor to ceiling, opened onto a small indoor swimming pool. On the floor above, a balcony in the living area overlooked the water and whoever might be swimming or floating languidly. Directly behind the house, which was a ten-minute drive from downtown, a tributary to the Rideau Canal ran past. Fedoroff could fish for carp from his back deck. And the force of this water, seen through the windows, seemed to stitch the bookish and erotic elements of the house inextricably together.

At the opposite end of the dining table from where he sat, Fedoroff’s wife, who had served takeout Indian food for the occasion, joked about her cooking with one of his interns. “He has to put up with my experimenting.”

Overhearing, he called across the table, “Are you talking about our sex life?”

Someone asked whether his patients ever turned in any strange sex toys, whether he kept a collection.

“I’m his sex toy,” his wife yelled out.

She had a tousle of long hair, dyed blond with dramatic dark roots. She wore black pants that clung to her slender hips and a tank top that showed off her arms, her breasts. They’d met when she was a psychiatric nurse on a ward where he was doing rounds. To their guests, she told a story about being trained to wrestle unruly patients to the ground. She told stories, too, about a pornography convention she and Fedoroff had attended because of some research he’d done. She’d had her picture taken perched on Larry Flynt’s lap, in his wheelchair. And Candida Royale, a porn star “known for her ass,” she said, had patted her on the butt, which she had taken, she recounted, smiling half-ironically, as a particular tribute.

Considering the perfect body and profligate hair and brazen conversation of his wife, I thought, No wonder he has such an optimistic vision of the erotic. Everything is easy—reality is fantasy—in his house. Then, amid the laughter that followed the Candida Royale story, his wife said, “I used to be insecure about my boobs,” and explained raucously that they had been much smaller before she’d contracted breast cancer and gone for prosthetics. The laughter doubled, hers the loudest of all. So they’d had their share of darkness, I thought. There had been anguish to fight through.

FEDOROFF
didn’t deny that his metaphoric reasoning was imperfect, that his own analogies could work against him. A person might gain fluency in a second language, and might live for years far from his native soil, but still have a longing to return home and speak his mother tongue. A person might discover haute cuisine, develop his palate, and take keen pleasure in the food’s complexity, but still have a hankering for McDonald’s. Yet Fedoroff believed that stubborn desires could be dealt with in the pedophile—partly through pornography. He and Patrick Liddle thought in opposite ways. Liddle wanted his men nowhere near pornography, not even images of adults; he wanted lust circumscribed, narrowed, in some ways negated, for fear that it could lead so easily to the uncontrollable. For Fedoroff, desire wasn’t pervaded by threat. He ran groups like Liddle’s, gathered molesters around him in circles of chairs, gave them a place to gain self-control. Yet he didn’t seem anxious that they might be one step away from molesting again. At the dinner party, he said that staring at child pornography could help the men; they could masturbate, diminishing their urges, their yearning to speak the mother tongue, their wish for fast food. He mentioned a study showing that during a period when the availability of child pornography had increased in Denmark, sexual offenses against children had declined. The same had been shown in Japan. Fedoroff encouraged his molesters to fantasize. Fantasy hurt no one. Touching yourself hurt no one. And with the craving sated, the patient could turn his attention back to developing the second language, the taste for the gourmet.

One evening, as Fedoroff led a group that held a range of offenders—against children, against adults, against animals—a patient who’d assaulted a woman confided that he’d been looking at pornography online. A Muslim in the circle, another patient, inveighed against this: “Our scholars tell us that looking leads to touching and this will destroy.” He had a thick black beard and wore white leather Converse high-tops. He could have been speaking for Liddle. And Fedoroff replied, “Billions of people find pornography pleasurable. It’s okay. There’s nothing in the Koran about
Playboy
. There’s nothing in the Koran about X-rated videos.”

“Not specifically.” The Muslim stared Fedoroff down.

But nothing could shake him. One morning, a patient settled himself on Fedoroff’s couch for one of his periodic check-ins. With neatly cropped dark hair and a blue crewneck sweater, the man talked about having just found a girlfriend online, using the dating service Lavalife.

“Do you have a profile?” Fedoroff asked blandly.

“Uh-huh.”

“What do you say about yourself?”

“Just a paragraph.”

“Now, you have some special sexual interests—do you mention any of those?”

“Nah.”

The special sexual interests included binding women in a certain position, arms behind their torsos, accentuating their breasts. Twice the man had kidnapped women from parking lots, driven them out into the country, forced them from the car, used large screw clamps to bind their ankles and arms and a knife to slice off outer clothing. During one of these assaults, the sight of the woman in his favorite position had been enough to make him come without any touching. The other time, he’d been about to rape his victim, threatening her with an ice pick, but stopped when she begged him not to go on. He’d spent a few years in prison. A few months ago he’d been arrested for soliciting a prostitute. As he talked with his patient, Fedoroff turned to me and explained that in Ottawa prostitution was legal but soliciting a prostitute was not. The irony amused him. He seemed concerned by the societal schizophrenia reflected in the policy. He didn’t seem worried by the fact that his patient had been negotiating to bind the prostitute in his preferred way. He didn’t seem too concerned that the man was free and courting women on Lavalife. He didn’t seem panicked that the man’s dose of medication was apparently not enough to subdue a desire that, the patient told him, sometimes felt “like anticipating a fix of heroin.” Fedoroff told me later that trying to arrange for a prostitute to be tied up was a sign of significant progress—a move away from the violently coercive and toward the consensual. He didn’t see it as a sign that the man might soon again be wielding an ice pick.

The patient went on his way, out Fedoroff’s door and out into the world. The psychiatrist mentioned to me that successful phallometric testing for tendencies toward violent, coercive sex was difficult. Among all men, sexually violent pictures and audiotapes were “too generally arousing.”

At the dinner party, he mused about giving sex offenders Viagra. A parallel approach had worked with AIDS patients. “People say, ‘Men with AIDS on Viagra?’ They’re incredulous. But men with AIDS get erection problems, especially when they’re put on all these drugs. They stop using condoms. Instead, you prescribe Viagra so they’ll have safe sex.”

For offenders who had trouble getting erect “in appropriate contexts,” he went on, Viagra might help in learning second languages. He imagined writing prescriptions for pedophiles. Then came another metaphor to go with language and cuisine: his plan to interrupt the sex drive with anti-androgens was “like an orthopedic surgeon breaking an arm intentionally in order to let it mend and redevelop into a healthy limb.”

The metaphors were seductive, each one seeming beyond argument, each one substantiating the others. Couldn’t we indeed learn fluency in second languages? Wasn’t a four-star meal more compelling than a Big Mac? Didn’t orthopedic surgeons sometimes do exactly as Fedoroff said in treating a malformed arm or leg? Fedoroff seemed a visionary. “Some guys spend their time in the lab,” he said over dessert. “They’re the ones who win the Nobel. But—all right, I’m drunk—I want to change the world. I might not succeed. But that’s what I want.”

He longed to prove that desire could take fundamentally new paths. To succeed with pedophiles would draw everyone’s attention. The prevailing opinion was Cantor’s, that transformation for such men was impossible: talk therapy couldn’t accomplish it, conditioning couldn’t accomplish it. The only hopes were to extinguish eros with drugs or to teach techniques of self-restraint, the way Liddle did, and pray that they were enough.

You
are
drunk, I said silently to Fedoroff at dinner, but then thought of a tribe ten thousand miles away in the jungle highlands of Papua New Guinea. An anthropologist, Gilbert Herdt, had lived among them during the 1970s and discovered that the erotic lives of their boys and men passed through stages as transformative as any redirection that Fedoroff envisioned. The Sambia, Herdt had called the tribe in reporting what he’d found, using a pseudonym to protect the people from an onslaught of Western attention.

Sambian boys, at around the age of seven, began performing fellatio on the teenage males of their clans. The act was considered necessary to fill the young boys with semen. The fluid would then manufacture more of itself inside the boys’ bodies, but to build up a sufficient base in order to create a life’s supply, the boys had to give frequent blow jobs. In this way, both the young, who swallowed, and the teens, who climaxed, were performing a service for the survival of their people. As the teenagers grew into men, they passed beyond homosexuality, took wives, and impregnated their women. But in addition to allowing for reproduction, the homosexual rites offered pleasure, not only for the teenagers but, Herdt observed, for the boys, who had their favorite partners. Sambian males seemed to pass seamlessly from being homosexual givers of oral sex to being homosexual receivers of oral sex to being heterosexual.

Audibly, loudly, despite the vast distance and the decades that had passed, Herdt’s research argued that the direction of lust could change—easily. It could change according to a culturally constructed system; the learned seemed far more potent than the congenital, the prenatal. And I’d sensed this often as I spent time with the paraphilic.

One night, on my way to a lecture the Baroness was giving to a society of sadists and masochists, I glanced up through my taxi window at a billboard in Times Square. The model’s face filled me with a wanting so keen I felt bereft. Then I walked down a set of gray metal stairs and entered the fluorescently lit basement room where the Baroness was speaking. The dominatrixes in the audience had bodies ranging from the thick to the obese; their faces were plain. Yet the room was charged with the craving, the devotion, the love of the submissives who surrounded them. Three hours later, as I headed back through Times Square in another taxi, the woman on the billboard was almost unrecognizable. Her looks had little effect on me. I hadn’t adopted the ways of seeing that suffused the basement air, but I had absorbed them. I hadn’t become enamored of the obese and plain, but my way of seeing had shifted. It would shift back. It wouldn’t take long. A rush of conventional culture, beamed through the taxi windows from the rest of the neighborhood’s huge and luminous advertisements, would be enough to carry out the reversion.

IF
Sambian males could change so radically, couldn’t Michael Thayer? With tight blond curls and a way of locking his gaze to the eyes of anyone he spoke to, he attended one of Fedoroff’s groups each week. He had licked and sucked his young daughter’s genitals, and been sentenced to treatment. Fedoroff had put him on a strong dose of Lupron. Before that, merely reading a book with a child character could overwhelm him. He talked about finishing a novel in which a boy was killed. “I was grieving over this child. Responding as though I was in love. And it was like that in my life. For the conversation, for the teaching, for the sexual—the same as you’d fall for an adult, I would fall for a child.”

The Lupron put him “totally to sleep.” He lost not only all interest in sex but almost all inclination to socialize. He worked as a groundskeeper outside a government complex, weeding flower beds, scouring graffiti. “People were always around me, asking me for directions. This included children,” he recalled in an e-mail he sent me. “I was a little nervous being around the kids, but that is all. Everything was fine with my attractions.” Then, abruptly, though there had been no change in dosage, he “woke up.” It was Canada Day, and the grounds were thronged. “It seemed that every child in the city was there playing and running around. I had to walk through groups of them to get to the various work sites. It was okay for the first couple of hours, but eventually my defenses and nerves broke down. The thoughts were so severe that I had to rush home. I spent the next two days alone in my apartment virtually in tears. The thoughts lasted for two weeks and refused to give up. It was so bad that I almost approached my probation officer to ask her to call the police and take me into custody.”