Promiscuities: A Secret History of Female Desire
By Naomi Wolf
Random House, 1997. 272 pp., $22.95
Review by Kath Gelber
With its sexualised cover (a picture of a naked, female, headless, almost hairless, skinny torso) and its sexualised title, this is a book marketed to sell.
In some ways it's reminiscent of Madonna's Sex book — a personal account of sex and sexuality, for all the world to see. Wolf may feel insulted at the comparison. Surely, she would argue, hers is a book about reality — academically defined, discussed, critiqued and analysed. Madonna's book, on the other hand, was about fantasy.
Wolf's book is about reality in only a very limited sense. It's a highly personalised account of her and a small group of her female friends' experiences of growing up in San Francisco in the midst of feminism's second wave. She and her friends were all born in the '60s and watched their parents go through the political and sexual revolution of that period, while they went through their own personal comings of age.
The book eloquently describes the process of socialisation these girls faced as they became women: how they learned to become "women" within the limited and externally defined parameters allowed them; how they initially learned to think of themselves as female; how they learned about the facts of life and how they learned that to act like "women" they were expected to become passive and demur; how, as women, they would face a continuous and unwinnable struggle between being perceived as sluts or virgins, good girls or bad girls; and how this identity was determined by arbitrary, often contradictory and ever changing social norms and expectations.
Such an account is not new, nor is it as far reaching and well researched as Wolf's The Beauty Myth.
Included, of course, are the how-I-lost-my-virginity stories. Surprisingly, although these women confessed the experience hadn't been earth shattering, none of their stories are particularly horrifying. Broader research into this experience in young women's lives would undoubtedly reveal many more appalling stories than these.
Wolf includes some material on the way in which women's sexuality has been viewed differently in other cultures and historical periods. These parts, although short, are some of the most interesting.
She documents the removal, both figuratively and in some societies physically, of the clitoris from an appreciation of women's pleasure. She recalls the frequency with which perceptions of women's sexuality have changed historically: from a negative view of women as sexually ravenous and lustful and therefore in need of church or state control in the eighth century, for example, to the mid-20th century view of women as frigid and sexless.
Similarly, she recalls periods and cultures in which women's sexuality has been highly regarded, especially cultures of eastern tradition. This demonstration of the possibility of a cultural acceptance of the need to respect and value women's sexuality is potentially liberating.
Wolf's general conclusion is that women's sexuality needs to be respected, even revered. This includes men taking the time to learn more about women's bodies, how their sexual organs work and how to become more patient, considerate and better lovers (Wolf's conclusions relate virtually exclusively to heterosexual sexuality).
She is unclear on how this is to be achieved. At one point she advocates that society begin to teach petting and "sexual gradualism" so that both men and women may learn more about women's bodies and how to please them.
Throughout this account, however, Wolf falls into occasional musings on the meaning of women's sexuality which have very little ground in feminist critiques and draw instead from a mixture of biological determinism and psychoanalysis.
For example, she raises the possibility that men's fear of the power of female sexuality may be understandable (although not justified) because "the anatomical nature of women's desire unconstrained" may be able to lead women into a heightened state of consciousness not attainable by men. She fails to develop this point, or its implications, further. She also has a tendency to use terms like "magic" when describing what she perceives as the real nature of women's sexuality.
But her account is, like Madonna's, fantastical, and for two reasons. First, it's unreal because it tells these girls' stories as though they are the stories of all young women of that era.
Secondly, based on these few girls' lives, it seeks to draw implications and conclusions which reach beyond them and into the lives of contemporary feminists and the contemporary socialisation of girls and women. This is the most searching criticism of Wolf's book.
Wolf central critique is the lack of reverence "society" affords to women's sexuality. But the context in which she makes this critique is that of the political turbulence and consciousness raising of the late 1960s and '70s, particularly feminism.
As a result, Wolf ends up blaming second wave feminism for not having achieved a turnaround in the public perception of women's sexuality.
Implicitly and explicitly, she criticises mothers of the second wave of feminism for two unrelated yet equally tragic — in her argument — failures: they didn't spend enough time with their kids; and they didn't achieve a monumental and historic about-face in western society's attitude towards women's sexuality.
And how does Wolf achieve this herculean task?
The first criticism is garnered from her and her friends' personal accounts, and a documentary she saw in which a naked four-year-old child tried "desperately to get his tripping, dancing mother's attention until he started to cry". This is the emotional background to her story. It's dishonest.
The second criticism is achieved by ignoring altogether any kind of systemic analysis of why women's sexuality is viewed the way it is. Wolf asks plenty of questions and includes much anecdotal evidence on the way in which women's sexuality is viewed and treated, but she doesn't really ask why. As a result, her critique is decontextualised and asystemic. It doesn't have answers because it doesn't ask the right questions.
An example of this is her criticism of feminism's "deconstruction" of masculinity without providing a counterbalancing reconstruction. Like some of the worst of the anti-feminist men's movement, Wolf implies that feminism is to blame for contemporary men's apparent lack of masculine identity.
More than this, she perceives both maleness and femaleness as having been codified and constrained, and then implies that males and females have therefore suffered equally from this codification.
This lack of an analysis inclusive of sexism as a system of discrimination and oppression, rather than just a set of attitudes, renders her critique decontextualised and potentially reactionary. She implies that masculinity and femininity both require a new, broader and less constrained codification (which is undoubtedly true), but she fails to include a cohesive argument against the system which perpetuates sexism.
In the end, this book is both annoying and frustrating. Annoying because right up to the last page it keeps asking questions instead of answering them and frustrating because it never asks the right questions.
As a result, it's another addition to Wolf's move to docile literary femininity that is getting harder to label "feminist". No wonder Wolf keeps getting book deals! The establishment has very little to fear from such an inward-looking and self-defeating "feminism".