Different Loving

Description

A breakthrough in sexual literature, this work is a complete, comprehensive user-friendly guide to and tour through the world of alternative sexual lifestyles. While the topics are exotic and erotic, the authors handle each one in a sensitive, thorough, analytical, and fascinating way and manage to explain a secret world to those who might wish to visit.

Reviews

[div class=”clientquote”]Although the authors insist this tome “is not an apologia for sadomasochism,” it often reads like one. Rejecting theories that explain S&M in terms of low self-esteem or regressed sexuality, they portray sexual dominants, submissives and fetishists “as they see themselves: loving and compassionate individuals” for whom pain is pleasure and physical bondage is psychologically liberating. However, it is hard to reconcile this formula with the interviewees’ graphic accounts of whipping, spanking, “golden showers” (urination), the use of hot wax and clothespins, depersonalization fantasies (being treated like an animal or a chair) and so forth. The wife-husband Brames (she is a poet, he a novelist) and freelance writer Jacobs also devote sections to genital piercing, scarification (cutting one’s body with a knife), tattooing, female wrestling and transvestites and transsexuals who engage in S&M. Author tour.

-Publishers Weekly[end-div]

[div class=”clientquote”]Few books come with warning labels, but this one does: “Readers should not attempt any of the activities described in these pages.” Why not? Because the outr‚ sexual practices described by the Brames (she: a former therapist; he: a former archaeologist) and Jacobs (a freelance writer) in this bold report carry psychological and, often, physical risks–though that hasn’t stopped the two-hundred-odd practitioners whom the authors interviewed, nor the millions who share their passion for sexual dominance and submission (D&S). All D&S, the authors explain, involves a “power exchange” in which one partner “tops,” or dominates, and the other “bottoms,” or submits–whether through bondage, wrestling, whipping, body-piercing, etc. After running through the history of D&S scholarship–with expected nods at Krafft-Ebbing and Havelock Ellis–the Brames and Jacob present an overview of the practices themselves, which range from infantilism (the bottom often wears a diaper and sucks on a bottle) and depersonalization (the bottom may act like an object, perhaps a footstool, or an animal, most often a pony) to spanking, cross-dressing, foot fetishes, enemas, branding, and so on. The authors discuss the methods, psychological bases, and historical backgrounds of the practices, each of which is illuminated by interviews with practitioners who speak with great seriousness (“Deliberate, ritualized infliction of what we call pain can change the relationship of the body and that which lives in the body,” says Fakir Musafar, who likes to dangle from trees by way of “fleshhooks”). And as for the risks, nearly all of these sexual outlaws identify with the “Scene” (the vast D&S underground that’s highly self-aware: Two thousand infantilists, for example, belong to a “Diaper Pail Fraternity”) and with its credo of “Safe, Sane, and Consensual.” The definitive guide to the sexual styles of those who walk on the wild side.

– Kirkus Reviews[end-div]