I’m late on weighing in on this, but I wanted to get past the din of everyone’s ridicule of the book, Shades of Grey; to move beyond the predictable bewilderment and hostility that accompanies monster success like this. That it’s terribly written. That the heroine is silly, dumb, ignorant, naive. That the book isn’t even “real” porn, it’s pretend porn– “mommy porn,” which, apparently, means soft stuff for silly mothers who wouldn’t know good hard serious porn if their bodices were ripped by it. 

These assaults are not new. Erotic books are easy targets, but for hundreds of years the target was literary fiction– if written by women, that is. (I don’t see E.L. James has yet been accused of being “shrill” and “strident,” words historically used to belittle women with a voice, labels that deny women writers a right to power. I suspect Ms. James opted to let her heroine and herself be accused of idiocy, lousy writing and silliness over shrillness and stridency, due to the demands of Mr. Grey.)      

Women are eating  up copies by the hundreds-of-thousands. Why? It doesn’t matter; no one will believe their reasons anyway!  Freud’s contention that women don’t know what they want lives on, leaving critics and experts to jump in to guess. We’re tired of being the boss at work; we want to be bossed in the bedroom!  We need to be submissive because that’s our inherent nature! We miss the masterful man of yesteryear! We’re masochists at heart! The old “Dark Continent” idea about women’s desires prevails. As the late Carolyn Heilbrun wrote in her masterpiece, Writing a Woman’s Life, “It is hard to suppose women can mean or want what we have always been assured they could not possibly mean or want.”  

Nevertheless, I say it’s about power. Not power over (who is bigger, who is more dominant, who is richer, who is male), but power to….power to have her own narrative; to tell her own story of her own pleasure. She isn’t just chosen; she chooses; she does what she wants and she writes it. Here’s a woman who chooses to have sex that thrills but scares her. She chooses excitement, not marriage, as traditional dead-end plots would have young women do. She chooses to take very good care of herself too, which in this case happens to mean allowing herself to be very well cared for. She chooses to depart with the conventional, to go with her gut on some of Christian Grey’s sexual demands, and to reject those that repel her.  She negotiates her own desires carefully, and knows how to assure that they’re honored. (Whether we like her pleasure choices is beside the point, as is whether she signs that contract. It’s her story, not ours.) If power is “the ability to take one’s place in whatever discourse is essential to action, and the right to have one’s part matter,” and I’m quoting Heilbrun again, then the awkward little Anastasia Steele has, in choosing excitement and pleasure, wielded sensational power. 

Stories about women having power and control are pitifully few. Most—in porn as in life– are about pleasing, and the price paid for failing to please. Here is a woman’s story about mutual pleasure, which in my experience is how women define power in the first place.     

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Alta, yes; but somehow I’ve never associated Alta with the beehive state. Rather, its iconic status always seemed to stand alone, stately but stateless; the purists’s place, as Wildcat is the daredevil’s place or St. Anton, the ritzy one.

I can only attribute my ignorance to the kind of deprivation that leads to tunnel vision—I grew up in the east, went to school in the west. The questions were always, “Which do you like better, Vermont or Colorado?” “Stowe or Aspen?” Silly me: I just found a better question: How about Deer Valley, Canyons, Park City and Snowbasin—all of them, each one more wonderful than the next, all on the front of the Wasatch range (Alta, Snowbird and Solitude are on the back) and all close by–next week?

You fly into Salt Lake City and are on the slopes of any of the above in less than an hour—and that’s with no connecting plane deterred by cranky weather to frustrate you. I did the trip last month, and took advantage of Ski Utah’s celebration of the 10th Anniversary of the Winter Olympics by going down on the bobsled—on the same track that Olympians go down. That’s me in the picture in fact, second from the front.

For anyone else craving this thrill ride, there’s still time. Public bobsled rides on ice are available through March 17th. You can make your bobsled reservations online at www.UtahOlympicLegacy.com, or by calling 435-658-4206. Bobsled sessions sell out fast, so reserve asap. Once the ice melts, Park City opens summer bobsled rides. The summer rides, on wheels on a cement track, begin the second week of June through Labor Day.

If you can’t make it yourself, here’s the story of my own bobsledding adventure, with a link to full article on Everett Potter’s Travel Report website. Enjoy!

Embedded in a Bobsled

By Dalma Heyn

On a chairlift at Park City a few weeks ago I sat between two young vacationing North Carolina businessmen about to take their first ski run of the day. It was a perfect day: Lots of snow; sunny but not too. They were talking about a bobsled ride that afternoon. They and eight other guys from their firm had laid down $200 apiece (as you can, too) for the privilege of hurtling down the same ice track the Olympic bobsled teams did in 2002. (Park City’s track, in fact, is the only one in the world that lets passengers start at the same point as the Olympic athletes do.)

“I did it last evening,” I volunteered softly.

“Omigod,” one of the men said through his blue bandana-covered face: “Was it amazing?”

“Yes. It was.”

“Amazing, like a superfast rollercoaster?”

“No, not like a rollercoaster.” The men were staring at me now, awaiting specific description of what, if not like the fastest rollercoaster in Christendom, it was like.

“Amazing, as in…” I started, and then took leave of my vocabulary, “as in….” I grabbed the only word I could find “…as in intense. More than intense, really. Intensely intense. Intensively intense.”

Read the full article at Everett Potter’s Travel Report.

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Some people fantasize about having a driver, or a personal trainer, or an organic cook. I used to fantasize about having a mentor: that person who would care about my work, nurture me as I set out on my book—take me beyond my own thinking, hang in there with me as I think it through.

Even today, whenever I thumb through a book’s acknowledgments, I wonder who did what for that author. Was the acknowledged person a careful reader, a gifted fact-checker, an acquaintance, a relative, even a stranger who offered a single brilliant insight? Or a mentor?

Mentor himself—there was one—was, as Webster’s Dictionary puts it, “a friend to whom Odysseus, when setting out for Troy, entrusted the care of his house and the education of Telemachus.” Telemachus was the son of Odysseus’s foster brother, Emmaeus, so it was no small thing to hand over his nephew and his palace while he went off to war. Later, the lower-case word came to mean someone with influence or power who oversaw the education and career of a younger protegee or mentee; an influential senior sponsor or supporter. Aristotle and Alexander the Great. James Baldwin and Maya Angelou. Batman and Robin. Even now, when used more loosely, as I do, the idea of that wise friend and faithful counselor feels like one of the greatest of life’s luxuries.

I have had a mentor for two decades. She is a contemporary to whom I turn the moment I have a book idea; a writer, like me, and very brilliant, whose thinking is not necessarily a reflection of my own, but complementary and, I sometimes think, essential to its development. “My deep gratitude to Annie Gottlieb, whose inexhaustible intellect and support sustained me,” was my inadequate acknowledgment in my first book, The Erotic Silence of the American Wife, in 1992. I did a bit better with my next book, Marriage Shock: “I am deeply grateful to Annie Gottlieb, on whom I depended not only to help me process, map, and formulate all that I learned, but much more: to bring such intense material to life when its substance and meaning often felt—as it did to the women themselves—too slippery to unearth and articulate.”

You see where I’m going with these condensed tributes: Annie makes it matter to me that I get it right, from the thought itself throughout the thought process.

Annie calls this being “a writing buddy.” Writers do have colleagues and friends who matter tremendously to their work and to them, but Annie is different. The often inchoate expressions from women that I’m privileged to share with them, those slippery, tentative transgressive, angry and fearful thoughts about their lives, their loves, their frailties and failures and regrets and hopes, become magically simplified and amplified when I can process them, over years, sometimes, with Annie. Annie makes my idea matter. She makes how I say it matter. In so doing, she makes what I do matter.

There was a conundrum years ago when women dropped out of support groups, complaining of abandonment. Why would these groups withhold their encouragement not from the woman in the middle of a divorce or a breakdown; not from the one who reentered rehab or remarried the alcoholic; but from the woman who became successful in her work? There were many reasons for thinking such a woman wouldn’t need help, but today, as we flood the workforce, we know better. And we’re getting the once-forbidden hang of empowering her not only in her personal life but in her career.

Whether we’re influential or powerful, older or younger, whether we can pave the way for her or just help her find her way, we’re becoming I’ve-got-your-back mentors. We support, criticize, clarify, teach, empower. The next evolutionary leap? To move beyond merely pressing for equal pay and equal representation at the top, and insisting on them; assuming them. We take that leap by jumping in the way Annie did, to make what women do matter.

This essay was originally written for Open Road Media.

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So, who is narrating the story of this photo in Victoria’s Secret window in Fairfield, Ct.?  (We added the type to illustrate where it might have been more appropriately shown) Odd  that the moment when women are powering ahead, storefronts and magazine covers  feature skinny young girls not only made  up to look like fashionable adults, but posing in a  way that clearly suggests  subjugation—as  does the girl above. Whose viewpoint is this, do  you think? Who’s telling girls about to inherit a legacy of unprecedented power that their  REAL power lies not in their education and their upcoming careers, but rather, in looking  like baby hookers,  pouting and bruised and with their arms up in their air as if in chains?  Are storeowners telling this story so they  can sell underwear? Perhaps. Photographers,  who want to make their mark? Maybe.

But come on, folks, it’s endemic. Who’s so scared of women’s power that all they can do is send messages to young girls that say, Forget about it, girls: What you’re good for is sex. JC Penney and Forever 21 are right now offering them tshirts that say, “I’m Allergic to Algebra” and “I’m Too Pretty to do Homework.” Cute?  Innocent? Not when you remember who is coming home with more bachelors and masters degrees. Not when you know who is the majority of the workforce. Ask yourself, Who doesn’t like those facts?

If we’re not interested in who is urging this role on girls, who is urging them to be anorexic and provocative and passive, we shouldn’t be surprised that even the youngest teenagers are gaining popularity by giving fellatio at parties to as many boys as possible. (Have you heard the new one? It’s called “Pterodactyling,” and, like its sad little cousin, Rainbowing, young girls do it to get “street cred.”)

When girls are afraid to be round, as women really are, they’re also afraid to be women; they’re afraid to be imperfect; they’re afraid grow up.  So who’s teaching them to back off from being round, powerful, assertive women?  Who’s telling them to shut up and back off? Who’s urging them to become underweight and ill and to think of themselves as nothing other than–oh how tired and tiring this is–sex objects?  And—really, please, ask yourself not only who, but WHY?

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In reading Deborah Solomon’s interesting review of the new book, “My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Steiglitz”in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, I was struck once again by how free literary and artistic men have historically felt to reveal themselves in all their egomaniacal splendor or horror (think Picasso, Hemingway, Styron, Faulkner, Keroac, to name a few) while literary and artistic women have kept silent about themselves (from Austen on).. Steiglitz, the famous photographer and gallery owner, wrote letters that Solomon says “read like an exercise in negative self-salesmanship,” endlessly revealing his hypochondriacal, egomaniacal, wounded self without inhibition to the woman he first hoped to and then did marry.  O’Keeffe, by contrast, throughout their friendship and later marriage “retained her armor of discretion,” Solomon says. She remained silent about her deepest self in these letters–just as she remained silent when critics asked whether those luscious flowers of hers depicted women’s sexual organs.

It would be a mistake to assume that O’Keeffe kept silent about sexuality, and about her deepest self, unintentionally—and Solomon doesn’t suggest that she does.  One of my favorite writers, the late Carolyn G. Heilbrun, wrote a book, Writing a Woman’s Life, asking  why so many autobiographies and biographies of brilliant, important women were so poisonously boring. If famous men can speak of their
cutthroat ambition, their lust for power, mistreatment of women, their deals with drugs, alcohol and the devil,  why did brilliant women artists and writers hold back? Why did their biographers shrink from delving into the souls of their subjects’ lives?

The answer is, because women aren’t supposed to be too angry, too destructive, too ambitious–and God knows, too sexual. Any one of those could kill her reputation, if she was lucky enough to have a reputation while she was alive. One could be a monster of  arrogance, self-importance, destructive ego and temper, and still be thought a brilliant artist but only  if one happened to be a man. At the time O’Keeffe lived, in the early 20^th century, women artists and writers had to pretend to have got where they were through luck, happenstance, or the kindness of  strangers—as though no “unladylike” emotion ever propelled or undid them. And their biographers unconsciously colluded in the charade.

Forutnately, we now have women who feel less inhibited about telling the truth about their lives and themselves, and we have  biographers willing to help excavate these truths.  Knowing how women learn to blunt the pain of rejection; the strain of success and power; the rage and self-loathing at failure….the emotions with which all artists struggle, Heilbrun said in 1979, “We must ask women writers to give us, finally, female characters who are complex, whole, and independent—fully human.” O’Keeffe knew the thin line she walked in the 1920s and 30s, with some people calling her a minor talent; others calling her sexually obsessed, and chose even in her letters to her husband to shut up.  It is in no small part thanks to Heilbrun’s understanding of women’s self-silencing,  that  modern artists and biographers are exposing more of women’s deepest truths.

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I always want to know who’s doing the asking.

When you see a study claiming to somehow assess our morals, be suspicious of interest groups conducting that study—just as you’d be suspicious of a drug company conducting a study of one of its drugs. You want to know if it’s the Christian Right surveying people on their infidelity habits, say, or if it’s a neutral organization like the Pew Research organization, which analyzes census data. For when the Very, Very Righteous claim to be objective about a moral issue, I get very very nervous. Now the Barna Group, a research firm devoted primarily to the exploration of faith and spirituality, is not a biased group, and I don’t distrust its findings. So I was interested in its recent marriage study of 5017 adults selected from across the continental U.S. It concluded that born-again Christians are most likely to marry (84 percent of them, next to just 74 percent of those aligned with non-Christian faiths, and 65 percent of those who call themselves agnostics and atheists). That’s interesting. But don’t let anyone get all moral on you here: the study doesn’t show that Christians stayed married longer.

Christians of all stripes, born-again or not, are just as likely to divorce as anyone else. Born-again Christians in the study who were not evangelical (meaning, born-again Christians who meet less-stringent criteria among the born-again sect than do evangelical born-again Christians) were indistinguishable from the national average: 33 per cent have been married and divorced. Further, when evangelical born-again Christians and non-evangelical born-again Christians are combined under the heading of “born-again adults,” the number of their divorces is statistically identical to that of non-born-again adults: 32 per cent vs. 33 percent.

Ditto infidelity statistics, of which I’ve seen many—from Kinsey’s to Playboy Magazine’s to independent researchers’. It doesn’t matter if the study is sponsored by a group so morally righteous you don’t dare have a Hershey bar in their presence, any responsible method of taking our national moral temperature always uncovers one truth: We don’t differ much. Wel have the same fever, whatever our religious persuasion, however often we go to church, synagogue or mosque. Most of us marry at some point. Many of us do something we hadn’t planned to do that challenges that marriage and that may or may not end the marriage. Many of us divorce. Many of us then date for awhile, then marry again, then divorce again and then date around some more and maybe marry yet again. Increasingly we are a Singles’ Nation–which isn’t the fault of feminists ( a favorite group to point fingers at), of atheists, of non-born-agains, or anyone else.

Anyone who clears his throat to tell you otherwise—like that his group is in any way morally superior to yours–should be asked to go home and deliver his sermon to his own family…if his family still lives with him.

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That traditional marriage has been sensational for men but not for women cannot have escaped notice. Year after year, studies consistently show that men thrive—emotionally, physically, spiritually—inside the very same institution in which women tend to languish, become depressed, and lose themselves. This counterintuitive truth, that so many wives become less themselves in marriage, as if the very walls of the institution contract their souls, goes against our deepest assumption: that women want marriage more than men and that, moreover, it is the most natural place in which a woman might flourish. Not so. If it were, and if wives were thriving, then over two thirds of divorces wouldn’t be initiated by wives.

Created by men for the wellbeing of husbands and children and the safety of wives, marriage was indeed desirable for women. If a woman didn’t marry she had no other place to be; no income; no resources. So yes indeed women wanted to be wives: the alternative was to be a maid or governess, at best; out on the street otherwise.

A gay man or a gay woman who marries will not face the odd loss of self the traditonal wife has experienced, for the simple reason that, unless he or she chooses a traditional role scenario neither will ever be a wife. The conduct books of the 19th century that created the character of the wife, a character necessary in a culture that required women to stay home and be glad of it, nearly killed even the best of women. In 1942, when she was forty-nine and at the peak of her career, Virginia Woolf addressed a group of professionals about the “phantom” who threatened to ruin her writing, that “utterly unselfish” Angel of the House whose cloying goodness menaced the integrity of Woolf’s work. As she wrote then about this monstrous cultural creation known as a wife :

“I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing.”

Woolf went on to write that this beatific construct continued her characterological dirty work, hovering over Woolf’s own psyche aas well as her pages, “always creeping back when I thought I had dispatched her.” And this is what wives faced. It is what they still face. The task of killing off the wife, whose value is so bound up in her supposedly natural-born selflessness, her virtue, her moral superiority, her godliness that women who buy into it can’t think straight after awhile, is so daunting that I’m shocked, each day, to hear women say to me, “I like being married….but why don’t I feel like me anymore?”.

Gay men and women will not have to shake off this ghost of marriage past. There will be other daunting psychological issues we can’t foresee; other idealized images they’ll have to contend with.. But the killer icon, the dutiful, perfect, soul-smashing wife, that thing men once put on a pedestal, will not be one of them. Amen to that.

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More evidence that women’s attitudes toward  marriage have changed dramatically: The Pew  Research Center, which analyzes census data,  confirms what I’ve been hearing from  women:  the desire to make their own self-expansion as important as it has always been for men and children.

Women want more space in their relationships. Yes, I know, we used to mock men for saying they wanted more “space”– because it was such a cowardly euphemism for  “I’m outtahere.”  But women mean it differently: They don’t necessarily want to leave their relationships,  but they definitely want to expand; to flourish inside their relationships, just as men always have.  Hearing the word “space,” though, men tend to hear the worst: they hear the ambivalence; they  hear what they call women’s  “commitmentphobia.” Funny: That’s the very word women once used to describe their ambivalent, skittish boyfriends, the men who didn’t want to get married. 

But now, men do want to get married. And that women are thinking twice about it shouldn’t surprise anyone/ It’s long been clear that women often don’t thrive in the institution of marriage ….while men, emphatically, in every study, do. (If you want to know why, read my book, Marriage Shock.)

Another finding in the census analysis shows two other related cultural changes: First, that financial security isn’t scaring women into marriage as it once did; and second, that more men now “marry up,” wedding educated, successful wives who will bring home at least as much bacon as they do. Single women view this new fact not as an expectation of welcome equality but simply as one more addition to a wife’s should list: you know, that they should be cook, housekeeper, child-rearer, nurturer, lover, relationship-maintainer…and now, money-maker.

The question I’m always asked is this: If women are happy being single,  and they’re not racing into marriage either for financial gain or for children (another census finding, incidentally), what do they seek in a relationship? (Besides space., that is?)

They want what they’ve always wanted: connection. Connection with an emotionally present, relationally skilled partner who is also inclined to want intimacy. A partner who sees marriage as women do—as a place for growth and self-expansion for both partners, not just for one.  A partner who doesn’t want a high-achieving wife and then switch gears and want her to assume the old, traditional wifely role as well.

Does this sound unreasonable on women’s part? Are women demanding too much?

Not at all.

If a man wants a woman to be a breadwommer. and to marry him on his timetable, then she has every right to make her own demands on him.  And if she can’t get what she needs,  then why wouldn’t she decide to stay among the unprecedented 110 million unmarried people who make up the majority of households in America? Why wouldn’t she remain outside an institution that she fears might confine her, and instead join those single people who say they very much enjoyi their independent status… and their space?

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I’ve long been curious about the dearth of pleasure we experience in this, the most gratification-focused culture on earth, as are the many women I’ve spoken with over the years in my books.  I understand the reasons for it now, thanks to the extensive work I’ve done with brilliant friends and colleagues who have shared my passionate involvement in the issue.  Elizabeth DeBold, bestselling author, PhD. and EnlightenNext Magazine senior editor, some time ago provided me with  so much insight and understanding  as a result of her own work, and her amazing book, Mother/Daughter Revolution: From Betrayal to Power. Our dialogues then were indispensible for my writing of Marriage Shock: The Transformation of Women into Wives. We, along with other brilliant women concerned with the issue–Carol Gilligan, Deb Tolman, Dana Crowley Jack, Annie Gottlieb, the late Jean Baker Miller, to name a few– felt ourselves to be a kind of underground posse, excavators digging out the truth about what women want (and girls; and men; and couples) when the language for our desires seemed as deeply buried as the recognition of it was to Freud,  and we set about to dig for the reasons why our culture has been so hellbent on obscuring them.

I’m thrilled  that Elizabeth DeBold and I are  doing what we’ve so long wanted to do: discussing this and  many other deeply felt issues women face today, in a dialogue at M.I.T. in Boston (77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA; 7:30 pm) next Friday night, June 24th. It’s called “Women Surfing the Edge of Change: Life, Love and Work in our Confusing Time.”   We hope you’ll join us.  For more detailed information and to register, click here.

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How crazy is it that, at a time when there are more unmarried people in the country than married, we’re afraid to be unmarried? How frightening that age-ism of this kind makes the older among us cower to this bizarre cultural fantasy! How nuts are we that 13-year-olds are proudly announcing their “adulthood” by having “Rainbow Parties” in which the girls give the boys blow jobs with different colored lipsticks….but real adults, those whose grandkids are throwing these parties, feel the need to hide their perfectly lovely desire to be together and live together?

What and whom are we “protecting”  here….and for what?  Lying to keep age-ism in place?  To further confuse our kids with this goofy idea that Love in the Middle Ages is to be hidden? It’s so profoundly funny….and sad.

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