The Erotic Silence of the American Wife

by Dalma Heyn

Book Overview

After interviewing several hundred women who had extramarital affairs, Heyn found that, within marriage, they experienced an inexplicable silencing of their inner and sexual selves-and so despite the moral codes against it, they committed adultery. "Heyn shows us a new reality and a tantalizing hint of the future-and neither women nor marriage will ever be the same."-Gloria Steinem. "Gives appealing voice to a growing and significant phenomenon in...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679413391
• ISBN13: 9780679413394
• Release Date: May 1992
• Publisher: Random House, Inc.
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 1.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

the erotic silence of the american wife

This book was life changing and challenging. It changed the way I live my life and the way I look at relationships. I am not pro-affairs but I can understand how men and women go outside of their marriages to find themselves. The analysis Heyn gives of our culture and what it means to be a wife and woman was mind blowing. Relationships can be more fullfilling and growth oriented if we start to value ourselves as much as our husbands and children- which is what the women did here through the act of infidelity which was a last resort to finding themselves.

A vital alternate view

Heyn's recitation of the straitjacket that contemporary marriage places women into is masterful. As the sex that is "not allowed" to have sexual drives, women suffer disproportionately from our marital mythology. Evolutionary biology is proving that women have urges for "extra-pair copulations" just as strong as any man's, though for different reasons. Heyn helps explode the comfortable mythology that undergirds the demand (mainly by men, but also by insecure women who have "gotten theirs") for sexual exclusivity in marriage. Her only shortcoming is in not going the next step - helping women to see the wisdom of working with their partners to remove the shame and guilt associated with "cheating" and achieve an honest, open peer marriage in which expressing sexuality and romantic love is seen as the natural right of both partners - both with each other and with others outside the pair-bond. The two are NOT mutally exclusive. I feel sorry for the bitter women and men who reviewed this book negatively - I know it frightens them badly. Women seizing control of their sexuality and their personhood is frightening to insecure men and women alike.I only wish they could be more objective and hear the truth being told in these women's stories. Forced by a rigid structure to transgress in order to feel alive, whole, and valued, these women are exposing the fallacies of our medieval institution of lifelong, sexually exclusive marriage. How much better for us all if we could mutually, carefully, but determinedly tear down the barriers and walls that imprison both men and women!

I loved this book

It's about time someone wrote a book that dealt with the obsession society has with punishing married women for displaying any sexual proclivities at all. The Donna Reed Syndrome is still alive and (un)well in America. It's no coincidence that adulterous women in literature are usually dead by the end of the book, but the men [who they are] with are not. Women are set to a much higher standard and punished more severely for any sort of sexual transgression. Anyone who is interested in an honest look at women's sexuality should read this book.

Better than all the feminist literature combined!

This is the best book, even better than her second title, Marriage Shock. There has never been such a courageous attempt to give women's sexuality a voice, exactly the way it is in reality. She backs up her conclusions with powerful scientific data, as scarce as it is concerning the truth about women's sexual silence. This is better than Nancy Friday's books about women's sexual fantasies because it focuses rather on the internal shut-down that nearly every woman meets after she gets married. Someone needs to address why 65% of marriages are ending in divorce, most of them ended by women. No one else is addressing it like Dalma Heyn is doing. Every woman needs to read it, whether single or married. It will bring back the empowerment, creativity, and vitality that most women lose spending their lives doing good but feeling bad. Women's depression statistics are skyrocketing. I'm ordering 10 copies today as X-mas gifts for all my women friends.

Monogamy is against human nature in BOTH sexes!

Woman enjoy sex with more than one partner just as much as men do. But whereas in males, society has always excused sex because "men, according to their nature, just need a change once in a while", women have always been denied the right to the same thing. If a woman did have an affair anyway, it was supposed that "there must have been something wrong in her marriage to make her do so." But Dalma Heyn shows, that most women just have affairs for no other reason but the joy of making love with more than only one partner. And, the number of women, who have a bad conscience while doing so is more and more diminishing. Another book to be recommended in this context is: "The ethical slut".