peccavi

[rivkat]

I wrote Castiel/Mary over in the Castiel commentfic thing. My prompt, which everyone is encouraged to fill, is Sam/Castiel, bonus if it’s because one or both is pining for Dean. justabi already did one version, yum, but the more the merrier.

Daniel Bergner, The Other Side of Desire: Four case studies of people with non-normative sexual lives—a foot fetishist, a sadist, a pedophile and an amputee fetishist. Bergman can write pretty elegantly about how painful it is to desire what you think, and what others agree, is disgusting. The chapter about the pedophile is disturbing in a lot of ways—compared to the fetishists, who feel constant guilt and have to be talked down, he struggles to feel guilt. Given the evidence discussed in the chapter that huge numbers of adult men show sexual arousal in response to images of adolescent and even prepubescent girls (and, not for nothing, violent sex), that’s not all that surprising. But he returns to justifying his desire because of his victim’s behavior, even as he mentally revises her age upwards, even as he also repeats the words he’s learned in therapy. Bergman doesn’t draw any conclusions, though one’s left with a sense that once fetishes are formed they’re essentially impossible to change, unless people are given drugs that suppress desire and manage to reroute their sexual attractions during that period of suppression.