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June is a reporter for medical magazines, Paula is a compulsive shopper, Amanda is an actress "with eyes like ... the model Tatiana's" and Dalma Heyn is an author with a sure sense of how to get herself on every talk show in the land. All but the author bare their souls in Heyn's new book The Erotic Silence of the American Wife (304 pages. Turtle Bay. $22), a study of married women who have affairs and don't regret them one bit. In fact, meeting their lovers in charming New York hotel rooms and going out for lunch afterward makes them feel just great, almost as if they were young and single again. With this not-very-stunning revelation, Heyn makes a contribution to pop psychology that a handful of feminists including Gloria Steinem have hailed as revolutionary ("Neither women nor marriage will ever be the same"). Is feminism so starved for fresh insights that nearly two decades after "Fear of Flying," the notion that women like sex qualifies as an intellectual breakthrough? Let's hope not, but simply by conjoining women and sex--and titling her book as she does-Heyn may end up with a best seller.
In the course of interviewing "hundreds" of women, Heyn found that marriage had a strange effect on them. Raised to believe they would live happily ever after, these women said it wasn't like that at all. Lively, liberated and thoroughly delightful before walking down the aisle, at least by their own accounts, the women became dull and mopey afterward. They loved their husbands and children, but something was missing. They were strugglings so hard to fit the mold of the perfect wife-Heyn calls it the Donna Reed syndrome-that their true selves had gotten lost. If this sounds familiar, it should: several zillion authors got there before Heyn. Betty Friedan is the best-known, and her solution was the women's movement--a concept that seems to have mysteriously bypassed Heyn's women, who range in age from their 20's to their 60's. Either they never heard of conscious-raising, or the local c-r group met on their canasta nights, but these women suffered in lonely silence. Until they met Mr. Right, or, more accurately, Mr. Better Than They've Got at Home. Their love affairs were dazzling not only as sexual escapades but as personal awakenings. No longer trying to be impossibly perfect wives, the women once more became lively, liberated and delightful (again, by their own accounts). Some got divorced, others returned to their husbands and fidelity, but all of them reported feeling loads better. "I got my brain back," one woman told Heyn. Readers will just have to take that on faith.
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A lot of repetition and numerous literary allusions stretch these findings until they're book-length. "Another silence broken, " marvels author Gail Sheehy in praise of Heyn's work. "It's about time women gave voice to all their dimensions, including the erotic, without shrinking in guilt." Silence? The clamor from women talking and writing about their sex lives hasn't let up since feminists started trading orgasm stories back in the '60s. But that's not the only misleading notion in this book. Heyn's interviewees may be obsessed with their love affairs, but their real problems-and the unacknowledged subject of this book--are their marriages. Each woman says she loves her husband, but each woman goes on to describe a relationship in which she can't talk to her husband, takes no pleasure in him, doesn't even find him very interesting. Maybe the erotic repression endemic to the imagery of a conventional wife is to blame, as Heyn endlessly asserts; or maybe it's possible to draw a more traditional conclusion. Marry a jerk, repent at leisure.
One of the most provocative facts in the book comes from a 1985 survey of 60,000 women, conducted by Woman's Day magazine, which found that only half the women would choose the same husbands if they could start all over again. Other studies show that, contrary to stereotype, men thrive in marriage more than women do.
"I will be asked whether I am advocating affairs," writes Heyn; the answer is, "Certainly not." "I will be asked, too, whether an affair can benefit a marriage," she writes; and here the answer is a firm "It depends." It's hard to know whether this little Q&A is included to save Oprah the time it takes to make up her own questions, or whether Heyn is simply shying away from the obvious messages waiting to be extracted from her research. But if, as she seems to be suggesting, married women just wanna have fun, why on earth didn't they choose husbands who are fun? Her interviewees told Heyn the best part of their affairs was the laughter, the conversation and the playfulness-hardly pastimes that need be confined to hotel rooms at lunch hour. As one woman described her lover, "He looks me straight in the eye when he talks and he lets me finish my sentences." Maybe it's as simple as that. But that insight would call for a whole other book-and more important, a whole other title.
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