Reviewed by Gary Meyer
(5/10/00)
A toy balloon approaching a candle's flame. A bathtub full of melted Mars bars. A plush, stuffed raccoon. A wind-up key. Pinocchio's nose. A high-heel descending toward a worm. What do they have in common? They're all objects of desire. What about two-legged ponies, proud wearers of size 30 and their admirers, six-foot tall foxes, and women who rewrite Star Trek to make Kirk and Spock lovers? They're all people doing what does them.
An ovular work in the annals of sexual variation, Deviant Desires explores special interests that even jaded connoisseurs of pervery will find astounding. Though there have been several encyclopedia-style compendiums of erotic arcana and countless guides to BDSM, Deviant Desires' originality, depth, and authority rank it with the classics that define emerging subcultures of sensuality.
Two such tomes are RE/Search's Modern Primitives, the body modification bible of 1989, and Urban Aboriginals, Geoff Mains' ground-breaking 1984 portrait of the tribe of West Coast leathermen. Their titles evoke societies whose members embrace (rather than deny) their animal natures and seek (rather than suspect) states of rapture. Deviant Desires explores beast-selves, primal fantasies, ecstatic obsessions, and affirms that the creative libido is alive and well in the United States of Generica.
When our anthropologists catch "primitive" people engaging in weird activity, it's categorized as religious ritual. Nobody can accept that it's just something people do for fun.
--Shep, the Old English Sheepdog
Self-described pervert Katharine Gates, artist and founder/publisher of Gates of Heck, studied anthropology at Yale, and in 1995 collaborated with Annie Sprinkle on the Pleasure Activist Playing Cards. Pulling out my deck, I found Ms.Gates on top (she's a Joker), in a pose similar to one of her two author photos, the one where she's nude, clutching a mega-phallic assault rifle. In the other author shot, she's a mustachioed hardhat. Cross-dressing is covered here only in passing. How much more fun to be a robot or a Klingon, an Arabian Warhorse or a baby or a clown!
Monotones are very useful -- "Command. Protocol. Uplink. Established. This. Unit. Awaits. Your. Selection." sounds a lot sexier than "Yes, Master."
--Foxdroid
Juno is a former co-publisher of the RE/Search series, and Deviant Desires is in the same format, offering two hundred and forty 8 1/2 x 11 pages crammed with commentary, interviews, glossaries, resources, top ten lists, capsule summaries and over three hundred B/W illustrations. A quick flip through the pix finds a collage cover of Black Giantess magazine, a still from a Twilight Zone episode, and a gorgeous drawing entitled: "Pony Girl Being Eaten by Wolves." The book design is superlative. You can browse for hours or dig deep into the lives of the differently pleasured.
Gates is a smart and snappy, first-rate writer and journalist. She has amassed a mind-boggling depth of detail -- e.g. the distinctions among national styles of human pony armbinding, the top thirteen media moments for body-expansion fans, and the difference between plushies, furverts, and fursuiters. [Yum! Who knew? -- ed.]
In Plush We Thrust.
--unofficial motto of alt.sex.plushies
The wisdom in Deviant Desires' deeply probing analysis is its most subversive aspect: "Fat, like sex itself, is viewed as a sin of the flesh -- fat people are too sensual, too fleshy, and too unregulated...fat women take up too much public space, space that is supposed to be the masculine domain..." By "deviant," she means different, not depraved, as in swerving away from the herd. Change one consonant and you get "defiant." Perverts use "pervert" and "deviant" the way gays call themselves "queer." Deviant Desires is freaky, but never a freak show. Gates humanizes her articulate, thoughtful subjects and repeatedly tackles the toughest question: why on earth would anyone want to do this?
A sampling of Gates' well-thought answers:
Pony play: "It's a temporary vacation from their own humanity."
Balloonatics (the postmodern fetish): "What latex has...is the critical "smelly" and "touchy-feely" qualities required for the full-on fetish jolt."
Body Inflation: "The changes have to be unexpected or uncanny; they have to invoke a state of childlike wonder."
Splosh (the messy fetish): "Sploshing can help break down the barriers many of us have to intimacy...our fear of losing ourselves in the boundaryless sliminess of sex."
Slash (homoerotic buddy porn): "There is something liberating in seeing women make Kirk and Spock perform for them sexually. The stories are transgressive because they represent women owning their desires, making stuff that makes them hot."
The leather community is rightly credited with laying the ethical foundation of risk-aware, negotiated, consensual play. And play it is. It's innocent merriment where arousal and climax are liberated from the deadly serious, socially sanctioned mating game. Many of these turn-ons are beyond taboo (For where is it written that thou shalt not smear thyself with jam?), but it's never, "Anything goes." Human geldings aren't gelded, furverts don't mate with real animals, and balloon lovers don't play with children. Caution is paramount; sidebars include safety tips for pony play, trampling, and pie play (e.g. "Do not inhale when pie hits your face").
However it's not all fun. Gates doesn't neglect the dark and disturbing aspects of fetishism. Knowing that Romaine Slocombe's pretty young Japanese models are eager to be immobilized in hospital supplies for his trauma-aftermath chicks-in-splints shots doesn't make them any easier to take. Crush freaks identify with bugs or worms or baby mice stomped under a woman's shoe, and recent federal legislation outlawed crush videos. Our media-imposed image of the ideal female body -- simultaneously emaciated and pneumatic -- is shattered when confronted with 550-pound Teighlor, swathed in pillows of pendant flesh. Feeding for greater weight gain is controversial in the Size Acceptance community because many SSBBW's (Super-sized Big Beautiful Women) are already on the verge of incapacity.
To maintain my mobility I may only have about 80 pounds that I can put on -- I'm sort of saving myself for the right man.
--Supersize Betsy
That boundless repository of our collective subconscious, the Internet, is the key to salvation for thousands of tortured souls who heave great sighs of relief as they type, "I thought I was the only one." Deviant Desires serves the same noble cause. Whatever your personal fetish, you won't be nearly as frightened to face it after this. In fact, you might even begin to enjoy it.
