This luminous personal memoir of a young girl's discovery and
embrace of her own sexual desire is somewhat dimmed by the author's
intrusive, familiar analysis of this culture's misrepresentation of
female sexuality. Wolf sets up her third book of feminist social
commentary as an ethnography of a subculture - specifically, white,
middle-class girls who crossed the threshhold of adolescence in the
1970s. It is, she says, "the tribe I know best." Reprising themes
from her 1991 bestseller The Beauty Myth, Wolf highlights the
consequences for girls of our consumer society's emphasis on the
exchange value of sex and its reduction of womanhood to rituals of
diet, seduction, and the accumulation of possessions. She writes
vividly about her own experiences contending with these issues
while growing up in San Francisco in the era after the so-called
sexual revolution and before the scourge of AIDS. Set adrift by
their fragmenting families, Wolf's peers are prone to cynicism
about love and to confusion about the power of their own sexuality.
Wolf traces how externally imposed shame and silence systematically
separate young women from their own, freely chosen sexual pleasure,
effectively leaving intercourse as the only alternative to
abstinence and resulting in high teen pregnancy rates. She observes
the tragic casualties among her cohorts - spirited girls who pursue
their natural instincts but are too quickly awarded pariah status
as "bad girls," and she recounts her own near-misses with
molestation. And she celebrates her most transgressive act of
sexual expression - an extended, deeply erotic, and physically
satisfying (though ultimately unconsummated) affair with an Irish
Catholic boy who was among the paid workers on an Israeli kibbutz
where, at age 16, she spent her summer. American girls who
successfully manage the perilous journey to autonomous womanhood
should not be left to rely so much on their own luck and bravado.
But the author's alternative to such confusion, an adaptation of
Native American initiation rituals, seems unpersuasive and
insufficient. (Kirkus Reviews)
In this dynamic new book Naomi Wolf explores and celebrates the phenomenon of female sexuality - empirically, imaginatively, anatomically and personally. By following a group of four contemporary girls - including her younger self as they come of age in the seventies, Wolf shows how our culture tries to shape and confine women's desire. Embarking on a voyage of discovery, she illustrates how flawed and prescribed are the notions of what women want, and how these change through the ages - from Taoist techniques for giving women pleasure, to Victorian repression, and the so-called liberated nineties. Drawing on scholarly texts, secret diaries, real life and fantasy, she demonstrates that female sexuality is wilder, more demanding and more powerful than our culture dares to accept.
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