Naomi Wolf created a sensation with her first two books, The Beauty Myth and Fire with Fire, which drew plaudits and darts. The staunch feminist is back and her new book should create just as much controversy.
Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood (Random House, $24) examines how girls approach sexuality (coming of age ain't easy, Wolf opines) and suggests a different path for future blossoming into adulthood. While normally a compelling writer with fresh and challenging ideas, Wolf stumbles significantly in this turgid, obvious, and occasionally mindless muddle.
To examine how girls grow into womanhood, Wolf employs the device of investigating the lives of a group of girls who were her friends while Wolf was maturing in the 70s smack dab in the midst of the hippie Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. By projecting the activities and attitudes of this minuscule collection of young ladies, Wolf makes a major misstep. Many of Wolf's conclusions are obvious and hardly justify the five years of research that allegedly went into the writing of this clumsy, poorly written book.
"I'd like to propose that groups of friends with children sign one another up, upon the birth of a daughter, for the responsibility . . . for better rites of passage in our culture," she concludes this numbing treatise. "(S)omeone who signs on for such a task would join with a few other women, and a small cohort of girls, in the girls' thirteenth year, for a retreat if circumstances allow it, such as a hiking or camping trip, organized through the schools, church groups, or through family groups--or at least a series of all-female gatherings. . . (T)he older women would teach the younger skills and techniques, such as self-defense, contraception, sexual pleasure, and parenting, passing on to them an ethic of adulthood as well as an ethic of sexual responsibility -- helping them, too, to recognize when they are truly ready to become women."
For a writer purportedly on the cutting edge of feminism, Wolf's reporting and conclusions are clunky, obvious, and worrisome. Promiscuities promises much, delivers almost nothing.
To those who might accuse this reviewer of male bias, let me emphasize that my wife found this book worthless, too.
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