Young? Very. Whether politicians approve–whether WE approve–young girls have entered a never-before world of casual sex. Sex without marriage, without commitment, without promises, without exclusivity, without intimacy, without love, without strings: sex just for fun. You know, the sex young boys have had forever, and without censure. Unthinkable? The most recent Kinsey report says that ten percent of 13-year-old girls are having sex. Twenty-five percent of boys and twenty-six percent of girls have sex by the time they’re 15. By 17, that number doubles.

This isn’t about what we want or what we believe or what our particular church advocates. These are the real numbers from real, legitimate, national studies, and so this is about caring for our girls, among other things. Not lecturing, punishing or shunning them–caring for them. So when we form the various committees to figure out why this piece of Obamacare is falling through the cracks (a “disappointed” Senator Patty Murray of Washington has asked Sylvia Mathews Burwell, secretary of health and human services to investigate….so you can well imagine how long this will take, and how many people will be “looking into it”–and how Obamacare will take the blame for the problem.

Besides the truth of what girls and women are experiencing, there is another truth: We as a culture seem unable face the fact that all women need good medical, gynecological preventive care. All women need protection against having unwanted babies. It’s at this point that I wonder why there isn’t a bill that requires men to raise and take care of all babies born by the women they impregnate, if those women don’t want those babies. I’ve never seen anything that remotely approaches such a  radical bill. Or such a radical thought. Because on some level we believe two things, deep in our cultural bone marrow: That young girls and women who have sex should have babies, and that women who don’t want babies shouldn’t have sex.

If we believed otherwise, insurers would be honoring the law. But they know, on some level, we kinda approve of their disregard for it.

The post NOT Covering Birth Control: Don’t Blame Obamacare appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

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.

The post My Bobsledding Adventure appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

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.

The post Women Mentorship: Helping Each Other Thrive appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

It’s weirdly fun, on the cusp of Banned Books Week, to look at the titles of books that have been banned: Gone with the Wind; To Kill a Mockingbird; Beloved; The Great Gatsby; The Catcher in the Rye; and, of course, Ulysses.  And the bylines: The authors of the aforementioned, along with Voltaire and Defoe, Chaucer and Aristophanes, Rousseau and Paine, Pascal and Steinbeck and Hemingway and Faulkner and Twain.

Okay, “fun” may not be quite the right word (although Brave New World was banned as recently as 1980 for making “promiscuous” sex “look like fun”). But can’t you just see censorship committee members, one more sanctimonious than the next, poring over page after page to find a “filthy” word or an “indecent” scene? Oh, the outrage these men must suffer in their noble venture! The vicious arguments they must have over the subtle differences between “lewd” and “obscene”;  between “filthy” and “indecent”!  What a responsibility! And all to protect us from…..from what?  Alice Walker’s The Color Purple was banned for its “troubling ideas about race relations, man’s relationship to God, African history and sexual relations,” all of which troubling ideas are the reasons she wrote it.

The first book I wrote was banned. Walmart took one look at The Erotic Silence of the American Wife (pictured above) and refused to carry it, calling it “a dirty book,” even though its spokesperson admitted that they hadn’t actually read it. The cover of the hardcover edition, a lovely black-and-white stock photograph of a woman’s bare back, is the reason it was deemed “dirty.” KMart followed suit.  I was stunned—and angry.

Rebecca West called banning books “a practice as indefensible as infanticide.” As a new breed of the Super Righteous begins an insidious, rabid new form of censorship—actually attempting to alter famous authors’ own words and to insert the amended ones into books retroactively–the idea of murder does cross one’s mind. Not of babies, though. Of censors.

Please like my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter, join my LinkedIn network, and visit my YouTube channel to receive exclusive content. 

The post Coming up Next!: The Weird Fun of Banned Books Week appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

 Soon, though, my longtime readers and clients began asking, Where did Dalma go?  The Love Goddess, they felt, was a lovely being, but soft:  her advice came from the part of me that gently urged relationship equanimity, but these people missed the rest of what I stand for, and, apparetnly, my cranky, mortal voice. As one reader put it, “You’ve spent years saying to women, Don’t hide! Be you!, and here you are with  both a blogsite and a tv show that don’t even have your name on it!”  

Too, some readers came looking for what I don’t deliver: like psychic readings. And spiritual guidance.

 So, after careful thought, I’m back. My site isdalmaheyn.com and my show is, as of next week,  The Dalma Heyn Show. They’re both still about women’s most important concerns, and about our relationships; and about uncovering our truest selves. But there’s more to them than merely “the best advice in the universe.”

 So please, even if you loved The Love Goddess site, come to dalmaheyn.com. I think you’ll like it even better. I’ll still give those viewers who want it the best advice I know,  but there will be  much more.  And please, let me know how I’m doing. I want and need your input!

Thanks so much–

Dalma

Please like my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter, join my LinkedIn network, and visit my YouTube channel to receive exclusive content. 

The post Goodbye, Goddess! appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

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.

Please like my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter, join my LinkedIn network, and visit my YouTube channel to receive exclusive content. 

The post “So, Georgia, Are Those Flowers Really Vaginas?” appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

I worry particualarly about women, vulnerable now to similar magical-thinking-solutions. I’m hearing young women talk about finding a guy to marry—quickly. I’m hearing older women talk about the futility of trying to reinvent themselves and instead figuring they’ll just hang on for dear life. As with trying to solve the world’s problems with faith and belief systems, trying to stay safe through all the old conventional means is dangerous to our collective psyche. When the economy is tight, and when men get scared, certain things happen like clockwork: There’s more domestic violence. Women tend to retreat; to return to the home, if not literally, then figuratively, as if the homely virtues ever paid off. We imagine that things were so much better long ago.

I’m feeling a backlash coming on. Before I read a new study showing that women are better off marrying earlier, or that men are happier with young women who aren’t focused on their careers,  or that corporate women are  leaving top jobs to “spend more time with the family,” I want to weigh in.  Throughout history, women have taken the heat for the culture’s fears, and in specific ways.  Whether they’ve left work so men returning from war can have the jobs, or raced into marriage before they’re “too old” or too successful, women have tended to feel powerless to avert the scary endings. and we’ve envisioned no bravery other than falling back into old roles.

Women, conventional goodness isn’t your friend. Maintaining your vision for the future is. If we do all the things we used to do when chaos frightened us with, oh, loss of love, loss of husbands, loss of social approval, loss of funds, loss of everythng, we lose something far more precious: We lose our hope for evolving as women. We mustn’t ever again let anything, especially a flagging economy, threaten our own ability to push through the confines of that old story, the Romance Plot, the one that hurls women back into the kitchen.  Yes, we all yearn for security, but it never did come in the form of  old ideas, old roles, old habits.  Don’t idealize what never was. We’ve spent years setting free a new narrative, one that promises forward movement in the home, in our relationships, inside ourselves. The old story that we fantasize as being magically problem-free, actually brought more women lifelong depression than it did safety and security.

Please like my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter, join my LinkedIn network, and visit my YouTube channel to receive exclusive content. 

The post The Coming Backlash appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

An interviewer not long ago asked the creator of “Mad Men,”  Matthew Weiner, whether he felt Don Draper’s fall from power and failed marriage was a result of his basic, underlying badness–a badness like, say, Tony Soprano’s.

Not at all, he replied. Draper, unlike Soprano, “has a lot of admirable qualities and is basically a moral person, and he makes mistakes. His morality is conflicting. It’s situational, which is the disease of the 21st century.”

There it is.

Today’s Times asks researchers why masters of the universe (and Draper is the tv example of one) screw up and dissemble and hurt everybody they love.  Some researchers say it’s testosterone. Some say it’s power. Some say it’s a fusion of ambition and desire. Some say it’s a control system gone awry in the brain. While I look forward to more such answers in the future—to, say, why sports champions hit the top of their game and suddenly decide to cheat; what prompts  politicians to have children with their household help;  why billionaires defraud and ruin the financial lives of their clients,  I imagine we’ll eventually find something pretty dull. Like, that they feel they occupy a realm above the law and without consequences. And that they feel frighteningly secure in that rarefied air, but, armed with their raging testosterone and entitlement, get itchy to move on to a way cooler place.

And when they ‘re under pressure to say, as Anthony Weiner did, “I don’t know what I was thinking,” I believe him, but alas, I feel nothing. When they eventually feel bad and start apologizing to their wives and families, I yawn. At least  Bernie Madoff  has the courage of his sick convictions. From his jail cell he reportedly announced, “Fuck my victims. I carried them for twenty years, and now I’m doing 150 years.”

Yeah, well, whatever.

Please like my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter, join my LinkedIn network, and visit my YouTube channel to receive exclusive content. 

The post Weiner’s Reasons? Schwarzenegger’s Apology? Do We Care? appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

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.

Please like my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter, join my LinkedIn network, and visit my YouTube channel to receive exclusive content. 

The post Women Surfing the Edge of Change appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

It works like this: The man comes on to the woman, crazy about her looks, her confidence, her high achievement, and yes, her salary. She’s busy–too busy to pay too much attention to him. So he amps up the come-on–sends her sushi lunches at her desk; texts adorable messages while she’s working through her yellowtail. Tells her he’s never met anyone like her; that finally, FINALLY, here’s the woman he can actually relate to, since she’s so….fabulous and cool and successful.

So she says okay. Saturday night. And it’s great–he does appreciate her job, her ambition, her focus. Listens to her.  Tells her she’s the one. They have sex. They date more. They become a couple.

And then it starts. Subtle shifts in the appreciation of her work ethic (as in, “Do you have to put in that much work? God, you’re a workhorse.”) Subtle changes in how he views her ambition (as in, “Do you think about anything other than success?”) Subtle changes in bed (“Maybe we can have sex again when you actually have some time for me.”)  Like that. Suddenly, the man who knew the deal doesn’t like the deal anymore. The man who had such respect for your job thinks you’re too focused on it. He pulls away. Suggests that “real” women don’t work so hard. “Real” women–women, that is, he suggests he’d rather be with–like to cook a lot for their man. They focus a lot on their man. They revolve around their man. You, you mean thing, don’t understand what a man needs.

Dearest earth girls, this is just the beginning. If a man loved you at first knowing about all that you’re doing and all that you’re trying to achieve–and then suddenly holds you hostage to a view of women that doesn’t include that vision of yours, you’re in trouble. It means he was attracted to you because you’re vital, smart, successful, sexy–who WOULDN’T be?–but really has a whole other vision. An old one. A man-centric one. And you are not fitting that vision. You keep wondering, Why did he choose someone whose dreams he then undercuts? Why doesn’t he choose someone he approves of?

Because he’s not attracted to the kind of woman he thinks he is. He’s attracted to 21st century women. Unfortunately, he’s s  20th-century guy with an outmoded template stuck in his head.

All you can do is gauge your own fatigue level; gauge whether you’re increasingly in trouble. Maybe he’ll catch up to his modern girl and not try to make her fit an old-fashioned mold. And if he can’t?  If you’re getting more exhausted dealing with him? If he’s getting grumpier as your achievements pile up? If sex has gone out the window and he says it’s all your fault? Well, dear earth girl, here’s your choice: Return to the past and give up your dreams so you can better fit an old template, or stay on course–and find someone who isn’t just attracted to your vitality….but embraces and supports it.

The post Why Do Men Bother Choosing Women They Can’t Love? appeared first on Dalma Heyn.