Hot and Bothered

Naomi Wolf, either through brilliance or luck, captured the gold ring of feminist punditry with the publication of her first book, “The Beauty Myth” in 1991. Her denunciation of the cosmetic industry in her discussion of beauty, health and feminism resonated with a new generation of young women, many of whom had never read a feminist text. Her second book, “Fire With Fire” (1994), shifted gears. In her new role as public feminist, she suggested that feminism itself was partially to blame for so many women rejecting the movement. Power was in reach, if women would but seize it.

Distinguishing between what she called “victim” and “power” feminisms, Wolf became an outspoken proponent of the powerful approach, charting out a program of power networks and fund-raising that, she argued would ultimately reach all classes of women.

In “Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood,” her chaotic and frustrating new book, Wolf moves from the political to the personal, from power feminist to “bad girl.” Here, she will write in “the first person sexual,” to boldly map out the terrain of female sexual desire; through her own sexual history and those of her childhood girlfriends, she will analyze how girls become women and offer guide posts to help them along that peril-filled path.

Her expertise, such as it is, derives from the joint accidents of birth and geography. Born in the early ‘60s, she was a member of the first generation to come of age in the wake of the sexual revolution. Her neighborhood, just blocks from San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury, was for many the epicenter of the transformations of the late ‘60s and ‘70s, and Wolf considers herself uniquely equipped to understand the world that today’s young women must negotiate. Drawing not only on her own recollections, she returns to San Francisco from Washington, D.C., where she lives today and interviews the women she knew as girls; she will capture their collective “erotic memory” to clarify the present.

The project brims with possibilities. With 20 years’ perspective and a commitment to collective excavation, perhaps she will see clearly through that hormone-muddled adolescent fog. But it is exactly here that her project falters. Wolf remains trapped on a cusp of theory and memory. When she plunges into her own memories, the reader gets a glimpse of the turmoil and contradictions of those years, but these glimpses are soon obscured by the mass of data and theory with which she surrounds them.

In addition to her own narrative and the fragmented memories of her friends, Wolf drags in armies of experts: anthropologists, historians, and social theorists. But none of this coheres. The voices of the women she interviews are indistinct, their recollections remain undigested and unmediated; their thoughts, pulled forth in late night conversations, illuminate little. Her research is flung together with so many random thoughts and dangling insights that it’s hard to know exactly what she thinks. The initial promise of a memoir is abandoned. Wolf doesn’t have faith either in the specificity or significance of the erotic memories she has unearthed. Rather than a set of confessions, the book reads like several projects pasted together: a memoir, a polemic, a random assortment of readings on female sexuality.

As children, Wolf and her friends watched their parents transform from suited and hair-sprayed paragons of middle-class domesticity into men and women of the counterculture. “Time was marked by our parents becoming brighter and brighter and furrier and furrier,” Wolf writes, describing her own household, where Dad interviews aspiring vampires for a book on the subject, and Mom is working on a dissertation on the San Francisco lesbian scene.

The fathers of many of her friends and neighbors have departed for the front lines of the sexual revolution, leaving the mothers at home with the kids. The adults, in the throes of cultural upheaval, have little time for their children. Wolf emphasizes that it was the absence of the fathers that was particularly damaging: “The fathers’ departure created in many women my age a feeling of cynicism about the durability of the bonds of commitment and love and an almost blind religious faith in the strength of the bond of sex.”

Wolf evokes some vivid moments in this sexual searching, but despite all sorts of sexual details, the book is curiously vague and a-historical. Wolf came of age at a moment when many people thought everything might be possible in all zones, erogenous and not. But she barely touches on the astounding shifts in the sexual zeitgeist of the past 20 years. The book’s organization doesn’t help. The chapters, vaguely chronological and loosely tracing the girls’ progression from Barbies to womanhood, often read like pastiches of memory, history and afterthoughts. Even the more carefully argued chapters fall short.

In her polemic, Wolf sets herself up as a champion of female desire, a “bad girl,” who reminds her readers that teenage girls--”the same ones who are so often genuinely victimized--are also, at other times, sexual marauders and adventurers, cultural analysts and subversives, fantasists and Sapphists, egoists and conquistadors.” But despite this declaration and a veneer of free-wheeling sexuality, many of Wolf’s tales are permeated with a sense of loss and foreboding. Wolf’s point might lie exactly in these contradictions, but it is not always clear.

Take the slut. Not exactly new terrain, but Wolf declares it one of the leitmotifs of her work and devotes a chapter to the subject, drawing on both personal and historical material. Wolf emphasizes that as girls experiment with sex or live sexual lives as women, they are always in danger of crossing the ever-shifting line that separates good girls from bad.

In one of the book’s most vividly written sections, she presents the story of 13-year-old Tia, the star of Wolf’s summer camp. Perfectly coifed and tanned, she holds the girls in thrall with tales of her romance with her mother’s 25-year-old boyfriend. Her young admirers thrill as Tia tells them of making out during commercials, while her mother is working late. But by mid-summer, the campers have learned that Tia is pregnant. She is now a slut. The girls are sobered. But the reader is bewildered. What exactly have they learned? That it is wrong to have sex? That it is wrong to have sex with your mother’s boyfriend? That you shouldn’t get pregnant? In any case, Tia disappears into the oblivion of Slutdom and vanishes from the narrative.

At some point, Wolf and her friends realize that the sluts are rarely middle-class girls--class and race play their inevitable role--but these insights are blurred over, buried in the barrage of facts and observations. Wolf reprises this slut theme again and again, but aside from age-old cliches of good girls and bad, her message is never quite clear.

Although she takes some broad swipes at the “toxic” culture, a culture she indicts as sending ambivalent messages to young girls, Wolf directs most of her criticisms toward inadequacies in the teachings of the woman’s movement. Sure, she admits, “Our Bodies, Ourselves” by the Boston Women’s Health Collective, a basic early feminist text, with its explicit information, was certainly on the right track regarding sexual knowledge and autonomy. But Wolf complains that it left out so very much and that the authors acted as if they had discovered female sexuality, when in fact it had been around a very long time.

If that is indeed the problem, Wolf will ameliorate it. She includes within her text several mini-history lessons: One is “The Story of the Clitoris,” which she offers as a substitute for the “History of Menstruation” she received in health class. Another offers a quick survey of sexual practices, with an emphasis on women’s sexual desires through the ages, as recognized by the world’s major religions and cultures. Like an eager undergraduate, she has amassed piles of data and is bursting with information about China’s Han dynasty or Zuni culture before the 19th century.

But, as Wolf admits, the reason she and her friends knew so little of sexual history and culture was that they were just girls. The pressures to have sex at such an early age guaranteed disappointment. Although Wolf offers a range of coming of age rituals--including a system of mentoring and an obligatory trip to the woods with women and girls, followed by a large party, she also suggests that once girls are taught to understand their sexuality, they will not feel the same pressure for early intercourse that teenage girls feel today. Instead, they will turn to time-tested activities like heavy petting, which, she claims, was once the widely accepted social norm. (Talk about the good old days!)

Leaping from subject to subject, from expert opinion to ancient text, the book often reads as if Wolf has already begun the question and answer period on her book tour. And there will always be a talk show where she could clarify the details of her first person sexual odyssey.

Despite its confusions, “Promiscuities” raises issues and concerns about girls and sex, that while not exactly taboo, are still not easily discussed in most homes and classrooms. Wolf and her girlfriends remember evenings as baby sitters, when they would scour the houses for books with explicit sexual information. Perhaps some 14-year-old baby sitter, girl or boy, in an empty house, once the children are asleep, will pick up “Promiscuities” (certainly the title would attract), and seek out the Tao instructions on how to kiss, appreciate, and arouse one’s female partner. It couldn’t do much harm.