Promiscuities (Ome): A Secret History of Female Desire [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Wolf's purported discussion of the sexual maturation in young women deals with little more than her own experience and that of her circle of friends. Which is also a shame, because a seriously written book on this topic would also be interesting.

But Wolf treds a painfully dull and over-hyped path with this book, which manages to hide her considerable intellect almost completely under trite melancholy reminisces. Utterly failing to provide any insight into adolescence's turbulence, Wolf laments her psuedo-tragic past and suggests ill-thought-out "solutions" for preventing such pain.

This autobiography is not really an autobiography at all, as it only covers a few years of her life, and doesn't delve into her psyche or experience at all, except with regard to her (huge) virgin/whore complex. It might be a very compelling book about her adult life as she struggles with her feminist beliefs and the backlash to "The Beauty Myth," but it's not. So if you are interested in Wolf as a thinker, you're out of luck.

But if you're interested in the complex social navigations of young women in our society and how those interactions have affected our culture's view of women, you're out of luck too. Any discussion about this issue is about as deep as a puddle.

The real shame of this is how much I like Naomi Wolf, and how much "The Beauty Myth" meant to me. And if one looks hard enough in this text, you may take something out of it. However, something went horribly wrong with this sophomoric, pseudo-intellectual book from a very smart author.

The book's flaw is the author's naivete about desire, carnality, and the dark side of human nature. She doesn't seem to appreciate the extent to which her she is a product of her place and time. San Francisco and California have always been exceptions and trend setters. A whole generation grew up there believing that sexual restraint and boundaries were merely manifestations of outdated "hang-ups". She fails to see that her life story gives the lie to her parents' academic idealism, and to the ideology underlying the sex education her grandmother advocated in the 50s. The author also does not seem to appreciate the extent to which her thinking and her emotions are products of her secular Jewish upbringing.

Wolf's generation has imperfectly relearned via bitter experience the wisdom of the ages, namely that human sexual urges are potentially destructive of health, happiness and sanity. That women and children need the protection of marriage and the criminal law. That adolescents should be shielded from deliberate sexual arousal. (She does see that erotica and sex toys should be marketed in ways that limit the ability of under 18s to encounter such stuff.) That girls must be protected from peer pressures to become sexual. That the sad fruits of the sexual hedonism of the past 30-40 years proves that intellectual and moral conservatives have a strong case.

I doubt that Wolf's suggested answer to the problems posed by teen lust, amely allowing teens to engage in mutual masturbation and oral sex, while insisting properly that they refrain from intercourse, will work. My generation (the 60s in Midwestern industrial cities) tried that, and the sexual free-for-all that was the 70s still occurred there, with much heartbreak.

I would like to read what Christine Hoff Sommers or Camille Paglia would do with Wolf's material.

I first read Promiscuities at the age of 15 while in the south of France on my first "summer program" experience...bought the book as something to read on the plane but wound up completely engrossed over and over again. I was away from home for an extended period of time for the first time in my life...confronted with sexuality from all angles. Wolfe's words, her stories and anecdotes, made SENSE of the "rites of passage" I was unconsciously experiencing.

Heartfelt thanks to the author, a woman who is not afraid to "tell it like it is" and who offers sincere advice to young women in the world today.