We’re trained to see ourselves through men’s eyes. Am I thin enough? Does this phot make me look sexy enough? Am I young enough, hip enough? Will he mind that I have a child, two ex husbands, a dog?  My response to this is, well yeah, we’re all in this weird online competition, but listen to the goddess: this is important.

        You must say very specifically what you want in a man. Not vague stuff (“Fit and athletic”), but very clear. I’ll tell you right that you’ll recoil from this–it’s our training–but I want you to do it. “Looking for a man who skis. He’s prompt. He likes to dance will actually find places for us to do so. Likes Mark Knopfler. Knows why Joni Mitchell is important. ” Does this sound silly? It sure doesn’t to the legions of women who have too many guys contacting them, none of whom have any qualities or interests they REALLY want in a man. What these women have done is diversionary: made themselves appealing enough to warrant a thousand hits or flirts or winks….which is very nice if they want to spend the next thousand nights having coffee with new guys. But they don’t. They just are afraid to say what the

        Go for the most specific qualities you can think of and yes, you’ll narrow the field. But the men who contact you will feel they fill the bill, and even if there are three of them, you might get to talk about skiing and dancing and country music with someone who has a lot to say about these things you love.  As for the other nine hundred ninety  seven? Let someone else go out with them.

The post Your Online Profile appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

It got me thinking: Can this marriage– between secret behavior and the worldwide web –be saved? I don’t think so.  Among those millions of cheating hearts lies at least one who’s out for vengeance, either of the web visitors or the website itself.

Many years ago, when I was a guest on Oprah!, women all over the country who were having or who had had affairs were invited on the show to discuss a book I’d written,The Erotic Silence of the American Wife.  In they came,  thrilled to be flown into Chicago for their favorite daytime show.  “Don’t you care that you might be found out?” I asked several excited young women when they arrived in the studio.

“My husband doesn’t watch daytime TV,”  they answered.

But your friends and family?

No worries, they assured me. They would wear disguises–wigs and sunglasses and hats and other flimsy covers. Really? With a studioful of women in what seemed like fright wigs and groucho noses,we could have been on the set of  I Love Lucy, watching Lucy Ricardo in her endless attempt to try to hide something from Ricky.

So much for secrecy. While secrecy is the engine that fuels affairs, I think these women were ambivalent about keeping their affairs a secret–or they wouldn’t have come onto a national TV show. To tell or not to tell?: That is the question, and mental health experts (like me) disagree wildly. Some advocate telling all; others, going to the grave with your mouth shut.  These women, like those on the hacked website, feel two opposing impulses simultaneously after it’s over : the moral imperative to speak the truth to one’s spouse–being honest–and the moral imperative to hide it, so as not to hurt one’s spouse and jeopardize the marriage–being honorable. (Openness  usually wins, for better or worse: it is the American way. Discretion–the European way–is not popular here. As a nation, we believe “discreet” to be more like “deceit.”) Beyond the guilt that affairs engender, there’s a deep, deep ambivalence about keeping the secret.

Just as the Oprah guests can’t have been entirely psychologically committed to keeping their affairs a secret, so must many visitors to sites like Ashley Madison be ambivalent–and in denial–about the security and privacy of any such site, no matter how impenetrable they imagine them to be.  I have to believe that the millions of people willing to open their pocketbooks, fantasies and libidos to website managers and anonymous potential lovers are ambivalent–hoping subconsciously as much to reveal their secret desires for love and sex as to keep them.  It is a push-pull toward and away from safety, toward and away from freedom, toward and away from moral rectitude. And it’s an ambivalence as old as marriage itself.

Tell me your thoughts. (But please, no moralizing! This isn’t about good people vs bad people!)

–Dalma

The post The Hacking of an Extramarital Affairs Site appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

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.

Who needs men to ridicule and demean executive women when women will do it for them?

When my mother wrote a humor column , “The Wit Parade,” in the Journal of The American Medical Association (JAMA), she wrote it under the byline, “E.E. Kenyon.” The initials suggested that she might well be a man. Why not claim her gender and put her real name (Ethel Elizabeth Kenyon)?– Because, she told me, “No one thinks women are funny. No one wants to see jokes picked out by a woman. No one would pay attention.” Granted, she wrote a hundred-plus years after George Eliot made a similar decision, but her point–that no one would have her back at JAMA if readers found out she was a woman and rejected the column, was well-taken. (When I had my first magazine column in Mademoiselle, under my own name, my mother said “Well, lucky for you to have the name Dalma. It could be a man.”)

“She’s right,” says the wonderful master improvisation performer and teacher, Holly Mandel. Holly, like Elizabeth (above) cares deeply about women’s evolution–hence, the name of her program, “Improvolution.” She insists that everyone in her classes go to the mat for each other–no matter how disastrously they may fail. In fact she wants them to fail–in a safe, caring, collaborative setting. “Women risk everything when they do stand-up, and the last thing they need is to take the huge risks they have to take, fall flat on their faces–as male comedians have long said they would–and then have other women turn away from them. I tell them, While you’re here, we have each others’ backs completely–or don’t be in my class.”

Look, we’re trained to be wary of each other. We’re trained to think we’re after each other’s men; we’re after each other’s jobs; we’re after each other’s friends, money, lives. Let’s make history. Let’s consciously bury the fear and envy that Patriarchy (yes, I know, but there it is) instilled in us centuries ago, and tell our colleagues and our friends, whether they succeed (and everyone attacks) or fail (and everyone attacks): You did good, sister. And don’t worry, whatever they say about you, I’m here. I have your back.”

The post “I Have Your Back!” appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

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.     

The post Shades of Women’s Power appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

The post A Special Video For Women’s History Month 2012 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.

Not long ago, The New York Times reported a list of “money disorders” linked to our economy. Overspending. Underspending (hoarding); serial borrowing (we all know what that is); financial enabling (too much money forked over to adult kids); and so forth. Stars like Wynona Judd (overspending), admitted to once buying too many cars and Harleys, but doesn’t anymore.  

But “financial infidelity” caught my eye: “Cheating on a spouse by spending and lying about it.”

Oh dear: Is that a disorder?  If I told my spouse what, say, a new ski helmet costs (which I won’t buy, but still, mine is a little shaky on my head), he’d wonder about my sanity, not to mention the new goggles required to fit over that ski helmet. I repeat: I’m not doing it, so don’t call Richard and tell him I’m cheating on him).

Who reports back to a spouse what she spends? Unless you’re married to a guy who knows–really knows– retail, what woman in her right mind tells her spouse, over a pizza, “Darling, guess what? The bag our daughter wants has been reduced to a $125 from $450.”? Most men I know don’t see $125 as a bargain for anything but a new bicycle, but most girls have peer pressure going on that, whether we like it or not, means something to them. (My stepdaughter and I joke that while we happily wear faux Uggs bought from Costco, what we we get her daughter Emily are the real ones. Why? Because she wouldn’t be caught dead in ours.) Does a man who hasn’t bought a shirt for himself since the Vietnam war know what a nice dress shirt costs?  (I tear off tags when I buy my husband clothes, even on final sale, financially unfaithul wretch that I am. Otherwise he wouldn’t wear them. And we wouldn’t be able to return them. And he’d wear nothing other than the Michigan sweatshirt our grandson Adam gave him when he went off to college, the one that’s now permanently stained with coffee, red wine, and chicken grease.

 I mean look, I’m all for codifying emotional problems—like Grief, for instance—the newest prospective disorder on the DSM’s to-do list. Yes, let’s give more support and counseling to those who feel they’re supposed to be up-and-at- ‘em after that one-year mark we traditionally allow for mourning! But private spending is not a disorder, unless of course you’re Bernie Madoff..  If it’s not hurting anybody, back off and pay for it and stop naming names. And just for fun, ask any cosmetics, jewelry, clothing or bedding store salesperson the number of ways women divide their purchases among credit cards, cash, debit cards and gift certificates. I’ve done that before, and it’s a field of its own, this Byzantine divvying process: As one saleswoman at Bed Bath and Beyond told me, “Hey, it’s the only way to get decent towels and sheets.” Who wants to report back on one’s genius cost-cutting savvy every time she purchases soaps and books? Being discreet, in retail as in love, isn’t deceit. It’s called privacy.  If we decide to call it infidelity, then most every woman I know is a harlot. 

The post “Financial Infidelity” Isn’t Cheating appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

Right after the new year and just before Valentine’s Day, I always like to get the feel of what’s going on with love and marriage across the nation,  and to make a few predictions for the coming year.  Here they are: Love in 2012.

1. Everyone of all ages will be dating like mad.  An unprecedented 110-million singles in America means that they—not married people–now make up the majority of households. And they’re dating! Millions of adults of all ages—30s through 70s–are  between marriages, against marrying, or on the way to remarriages.

 2. We will become increasinglystarry-eyed about marriage, even as we become increasingly disenchanted, skittish and cynical about it. It is a psychological fact that we long for, and idealize,institutions that promise safety and security. The military. The church. Marriage. Anything that was once reliable but is now increasingly fragile, and even endangered, is a prime target for our nostalgia.  I predict that, even as we divorce more often. sooner and more bitterly, we will increasingly  long for the “good old days” when marriage lasted forever. Because it so rarely does.

3. We will see online dating sites scrambling to nail down love’s chemistry. Although attraction cannot be predicted, we will continue to try to predict it. Dating sites, already promising characterological  compatibility, will scramble to try to promise sexual compatibility. When a computerized program can guarantee great chemistry, I’ll be the first to let you know.

 4. Men will accuse women of acting increasingly the way women have always accused men of acting: Reluctant to commit; eager for more “space,” less eager for sexual exclusivity.  As women become increasingly self-sufficient financially—and less needy of men for purely financial reasons– their demand for emotionally fulfilling relationships will increase. Men, not used to not being needed, and not always skilled at intimacy, will feel increasingly  overwhelmed by women’s demands, and increasingly baffled that women are willing to walk when their demands aren’t met.      

 5.  More couples will cite social media as the reason for their breakup. Already, Facebook and Twitter are implicated in 20 percent of divorce petitions. (More, in England: A recent study puts it at 30 percent.) In 2009, Facebook was cited in one out of every five divorces in the US, and the number 1 online source of  divorce evidence, according to the American Academy of Divorce Lawyers.  A combination of inappropriate messages to the opposite sex, nasty comments posted about separated spouses, and Facebook “friends” reporting spouses’ behavior, is causing a great deal of havoc…and there’s no let-up in sight. 

The post Watch Out For Love’s Changing Landscape! appeared first on Dalma Heyn.