reviewed by Elaine DiRico

This book was my major Christmas present to friends this past year. How did we manage before Amazon dot Com? A friend had given it to me, and when I finally picked it up, I was enraptured. The universal response seemed to be: "Finally! Someone is telling the truth!"

Perhaps Bonheim's background gave her a more accepting interface for spirituality and sexuality. Certainly one of the Western downfalls has been the desanctification of sex. The author interviewed women from an enormous range of backgrounds, whose commonality was a transcendental experience through sexuality. The Occidental tradition has forever attached women more emotionally to lovemaking, and here is some substantiation. Women of all ages and histories coming together to say that this is important stuff, it runs deep, and it can be transformative. It calls to mind the ancient tradition that when one opens to a lover, one invites the Goddess, and be warned!

"We are all engaged in peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our cultures, our religions. It is an enormous task because the history of women has been as incompletely told as the history of blacks."
--Anais Nin

In essence, this is the transformation that Bonheim explores -- how women have been defined, even self-defining over the centuries as non-sexual. In the cliched but pervasive "Madonna-Whore" paradigm, there is little room for personal freedom or choice. One either is or isn't. In this book, and in this view of the world, the women who acknowledge their sexuality and who go into Jung's "shadow-side" are rewarded with the affirmation and with the journey of sexual integrity. We have so few ways to explore ourselves any more in a quantitative world. Bonheim offers a roadmap and a pattern of our sisters before us getting out on that limb, and risking and finding themselves there, often because they had no alternative.

One of the most striking stories is about a nun, at mid-life, committed to the community, who suddenly finds herself passionately swept away by a woman. Having had no prior clues that anyone, much less a woman, might be a sexual destiny for her, and with a lifetime of spiritual commitment to celibacy, her struggle was more daunting than most. Her spiritual advisor suggested she needed to explore the opportunity, and over several years, she did, eventually ending up re-committed to her convent. But the self-affirmation that she could trust her own intuitions and impulses on the path to her spiritual growth was transformative.

There is a disorder and messiness inherent in sex, that both spirituality and psychology gloss over. The closeness and the intimacy, the breath and the fluids and the vitality are all rather ignored in our lives and certainly in the media. Yet this is where we may connect with ourselves on many levels -- emotionally and spiritually, sex can be equally messy and unpredictable, and thus a source we squelch or ignore. As though we move into intimacy with an agenda and an expected outcome (how's that for performance anxiety?), like something to check off our "To Do" list. Bonheim's stories tell of a different side, of the surrender, not just to sensuality but the merging.

"I drink water from your spring, and feel myself taken by the current."
--Rumi

Many of the women compromised marriages in order to explore their sexuality, and all were drawn irresistibly. One wonders that, integrity being such a fashionable buzzword, there is not more support for sexual integrity. While the Inquisition demonized women's sexuality in the 13th century, perhaps Masters and Johnson in our century did such a glorious job of sexual hygiene that much of the anxiety and guilt, and hence the intensity, disappeared in this century. One of the great things about this book: it is not about Erica Jong's Zipless Fuck, however noble a place that may have in the 20th century sexual pantheon, but about those few and life enhancing encounters we have that change our view of ourselves and our partners and our lives. Certainly, in my life there is room for both.