Book Review

The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter Spring 1997, Vol. 4, No. 3. Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood by Naomi Wolf Reviewed by Kate Fillion

Non-fiction books about sex tend to be either turgid (viz., anything written by Masters and Johnson) or deeply silly (witness the plethora of peppy how-to-guides). Women writers, in particular, have difficulty making sex sound lively. Many still feel compelled to observe ladylike rules of decorum, which dictate, among other things, absolute silence on the question of female desire. Some are ideologues who equate gender and sexuality, and insist that any discussion of sex is predicated on male villainy and female victimization. Others adopt the brisk, businesslike tones of professional Madams - how to satisfy a man every time - or lab-coated technicians: studies show that x technique is highly effective in y percent of cases.

The introduction to Promiscuities, then, is refreshing. There's the in-your-face title and the promise that the "normatively shocking" truth about teenage girls' sexuality is at last going to be revealed: they're not just victims but also "sexual marauders and adventurers, cultural analysts and subversives, fantasists and sapphists, egoists and conquistadors." Moreover, Naomi Wolf declares she'll do all this in "the first person sexual," writing about her own experiences and those of her white, middle-class girlhood friends. Since this "tribe," as she calls them, came of age post-Pill and preAIDS in the epicenter of the sexual revolution - the Haight-Ashbury - the prospect of reading their confessions is especially thrilling.

Unfortunately, this auspicious blueprint bears little relation to the memoir/sermon that follows. By the age of eleven, Wolf writes, she and her friends had deduced that for all the talk about free love, sex for girls still has a great deal to do with passivity: looking alluring and acting submissive. By twelve, they were clumsily experimenting with sexy clothing, developing mad crushes on boys and on one another, and leaming that their bodies were something to be ashamed of - a lesson taught most effectively by other girls who, Wolf's friends remember, punished both those who "flaunted themselves," and those who hadn't grown out of their 28AAA training bras. All of this is evocative, as is Wolf's recounting of their growing fear of being labeled sluts - and their intense fascination with the girls who had already been so labeled.

But it soon becomes apparent that the sexual marauders and adventurers will not be putting in an appearance after all. Instead, Wolf reveals with great fanfare that she lost her virginity to a sweet boy at fifteen (oddly, for an author exhorting women to get in touch with their "shadow sluts," she describes the room in great detail but says next to nothing about the actual physical experience), and that she did everything-but with an Irish laborer when she was sixteen. But her real focus is victimization: her near-brush with a molester at eight, her dalliance with a violent boy at fourteen, the unwanted advances of a favorite professor when she was at university, her work at a rape crisis center, and several friends: unhappy first sexual experiences, teenage pregnancies, and abortions.

Thus, although Wolf set out to chart her generation's sexual voyage because young girls "have inherited a sexual script, derived from both the feminist and the sexual revolutions, that is by now out of date," little that she has to say is new at all. She states repeatedly that female sexual desire is a forbidden topic, but delicately refrains from mentioning masturbation and only alludes to sexual fantasies, both of which are surely key to any honest discussion of female sexuality. She ably recounts her friends' excitement about exploring boys' bodies for the first time, but there is little about the excitement they felt when it was the boys' turn to explore. She asserts that women are afraid to tell their sexual stories because they include elements of "greed, danger and narcissism, insecurity and bad behavior" - but leaves those same elements out of the stories she chooses to tell.

Throughout, there are mini-essays reminding readers that much of the current accepted wisdom about sex e.g., men want it more than women, would have been considered ludicrously wrong-headed in the not so distant past. Initially, these historical forays are jarring since they interrupt what one assumes to be the build-up to the promised revelation of a generation's "secret struggle for womanhood." But mid-way through Promiscuities, when it is clear that the secret struggle is going to remain secret, the historical punctuations are more welcome, if only because they provide some comic relief. Wolf notices a marked "affection for women's genitals" in a few ancient Chinese texts, apparently assumes that the literacy rate was 100 percent, that the culture was committed to egalitarianism, and thus declares the Han Dynasty an erotic paradise for women.

Wolf's point, apparently - it's not entirely clear, even after a third reading - is that girls' fear of being thought promiscuous restricts the freedom not just of their bodies, but their minds. But her suggestions for change, which involve putting a New Age gloss on native rituals that formalize a girl's transition to womanhood, seem unlikely to inspire a grass roots movement that overturns the sexual double standard. In fact, her prose, which runs the gamut from sententious to selfrighteous, inspired little more than irritation in this reader. Perhaps if she had bothered to interview any real live teenage girls, rather than consulting her own thirty-something friends, she would have had something new to say that would have made her preachiness less insufferable. As it is, however, the only normatively shocking thing about Promiscuities is its author's conviction that her work is in any way ground breaking.