This book is gonna make you squirm--perhaps with uncorked erotic intrigue or nose-flaring outrage. But this type of squirming leads to the tangled bed sheets that cling to you after a life-changing dream...or life-altering sex.
Whether or not you were ready for either.
It might not be comfortable, but the provocative issues this memoir erects thrust to the heart of a culture that may have mistaken "eating" (normal, human and primal sexual needs) for "cheating" (our ideas about betrayal, monogamy, and affairs).
Pamela Madsen, author (with Anne Adams) of the newly released Shameless: How I ditched the diet, got naked, found true pleasure, and somehow got home in time to make dinner, is one hell of a gutsy gal. Pamela watched as friends and family succumbed to affairs after decades of marriage; knowing as she watched that her circle of confidants was desperately trying to make it all work--the good-enough marriages; the stark emotional lives; the pure devotion to their families; the pallid sex.
As a bystander, she intuitively understood that the only option left to her friends as they tried to meet some of their most urgent, emotional, and sexual needs, was to have an affair. She never judged them because she, too, knew the challenges of a successful lifelong marriage. She, too, felt an undeniable urge to grow, to claim a part of herself she didn't even know existed--a fallow place in her spirit that had sucked her true nature into it like a black hole. She'd spent much of her life feeding that barren desert with dessert ... but that had left her feeling worse about herself and her body, and ever more bewildered about her own deepest needs.
Was comfort food really the answer?
As she watched her friends, she realized she had to do something different. Something really, really different. She had to explore this side of herself in order to stay married. But she resolved she would not have an affair. She loved her husband too much for that (and to be fair, she is freakishly brave). But what she did do will take your jaw on a nosedive.
Drop your pants, oops, I mean drop everything and go buy this book. Strip off the sexy risqué cover if you must--I did as an armchair voyeur, a lady in waiting at my sons' karate lessons, absorbed in a rather, ahem, different kind of martial art. Let your spouse have at it, too, if you can stand the suspense as he or she rips through it--you can't put it down once past the first few pages of names and explanations. My busy, book-minimalist husband dropped everything for two days, barely glancing up as he tore through page after page.
Suffice it to say, Pamela figured out a way to vigorously explore and grow as a sexual, spiritual being that she and her husband have agreed is on the up-and-up. It's true; her husband is fully aware and supportive of her radical journey. He refused to fall prey to the temptation to judge, belittle, or criticize her for living up to her own full potential. He refused to be angry or hurt or confused enough to leave her. Hell, their marriage is better and deeper than before, it seems. This man deserves a purple heart for bucking the all-too-common lure of "poor me" or "she must not love me if she's feeling this way," or "what the hell is happening to my life, this is not what I signed up for."
Pamela's story is likely to rouse a dazed jumble of awe, questions, and stupefaction in many readers--How could she do that? She must not love her husband! What the bloody hell was she thinking?
But it seems to me that Pam's story begs a suite of bigger, harder, cockier questions: Is there a tragedy here? Is a culture that ostracizes affairs, "betrayal," open marriage, and sexual exploration while in a committed partnership, healthy for human beings? Can we love our partners and still have sexual experiences or feelings for other people, and be okay with that? Is it possible that our culture of monogamy--handed down to us through the twists and turns of relatively recent human history--is deeply out of whack with the innate nature of human beings and the evolutionary basis of our sexuality?
Is monogamous marriage a cultural construct crumbling under the weight of who we really are?
What if human beings are not, and never were, innately monogamous? Most of us don't really believe that's true anyway, but we live in a culture that acts as if it were. And we have whole industries that proffer methods, tools, support, and therapy to help couples "work on their marriages." Why do so many of us have to work so hard at these good marriages?
What if, evolutionarily speaking, sex and erotic social relationship are just as primal, normal and urgent for Homo sapiens as eating food? ...But our culture fails to recognize this? And worse, perverts and blacklists such drives?
What if the wolf should come out of the forest?
What then?
I think of all the families and children--thousands upon thousands--ripped apart because of affairs, betrayal, undeniable needs for sexual exploration, or feelings of love outside the marriage (mine included). Would those families have imploded if, instead, we had known and accepted that humans are made this way--to have powerfully erotic, social relationship needs that may stretch far beyond a primary pair-bond?
To Pamela: one hell of an ovation... and a candlelit king-sized bed laden with roses, kudos, a sexy man, and sweet, syrupy raspberries all swirled together with beloved husband and family.
Keep it coming...
More of this kind of squirming might just be really good--maybe even oh-god-that-was-so-good--for us all.
