Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the Twenty-First Century. - book reviews

National Review, Nov 29, 1993 by Maggie Gallagher

FEMINISM has come to a peculiar pass: Feminist ideas are everywhere; feminists, however, are hard to find. How did this happen?

That is the question Naomi Wolf-- whose first book, The Beauty Myth, was a national best-seller--takes up in Fire with Fire, a feminist's critique of feminism. This is what she has come up with: Why did feminism fail? Because it isn't any fun. Holding her first large royalty check in hand, Miss Wolf has had an epiphany: Money is good! Power is good! Success is good! Why doesn't feminism, she asks, drop its "trouble talk" and concentrate on the good stuff?

Miss Wolf offers one of the most cogent and penetrating descriptions of why movement feminism is so profoundly unattractive, including: "hangover habits of the revolutionary Left," "the common perception that feminism and lesbianism are synonymous," "a clubhouse mentality," and "rigid proscriptions."

A Yale grad herself, Miss Wolf has tumbled to the fact that ambitious young women who get into Ivy League universities want primarily to "make it," and not to engage in class warfare to overthrow running-dog capitalist institutions.

Everyone knows that feminism isn't much fun, but the inside dope shows that things are worse than any of us suspected. At one campus, a coterie of feminists confronted Miss Wolf: "One woman charged that I was too elitist-- I had used compound sentences .... Isn't the act of writing a book, asked [another] young woman accusingly, in itself exclusionary to women who cannot read?"

Miss Wolf argues against such "victim feminism" in favor of what she calls "power feminism," which encourages women to go for it: to make love and money and political coalitions with equal abandon.

This is a book I wanted to like. If it encourages feminists to re-evaluate their reflexive (i.e., stupid) anti-capitalism, it will have performed a valuable service. Nonetheless, it is a silly book, and a profoundly unserious one. What do women really want? "Women like to dress up and hate being required to; women want the right to go to war and don't want to kill." There, you silly men, don't you understand?

What, then, should women do? "Make diaries, novels, plays, and paintings from our erotic lives: 'come out' unabashedly, every one of us, as sexual beings... it's up to us to saturate the airwaves with our millions of erotic truths." It seems to me the airwaves are pretty saturated already.

And what does Miss Wolf, personally, want? "I want to be a serious thinker and not have to hide the fact that I have breasts." With all due respect, Miss Wolf, I'm not convinced it's your bosom that's holding you back. If this is power feminism, it is power feminism of a most unthreatening kind: a feminism so inclusive it has no specific content, all psychofluff and no meat and bones--feminism lite.

Having the courage to say the obvious (millions of men don't rape; millions of women aren't lesbians) has so exhausted her that she has no energy left to address actual issues: How do we reconcile individual choice and social obligation, love and achievement, capitalism and the family? Will that feminist

panacea, federally funded day care, really help the 50 per cent of working mothers who want more time with their family? Can American women and children ever be secure while marriage remains so unstable? How do we actually stop rape, not to mention murder, assault, and theft? Are the political interests of

women who lecture and women who wash for a living really one and the same?

Miss Wolf wants to Think Big and ends up doing no more than tip-toe close to common sense. Yes, money is good; yes, power can be fun; yes, a woman (like all human beings) often wants everything all at once: a high-status job and the time and energy to make deep emotional connections; passionate adventures and emotional commitment; the right to leave her husband and the right not to be dumped for a younger woman; even, by Miss Wolfs own testimony, the right to be a soldier and the right not to kill. Life is full of hard choices, isn't it?

As an aspiring serious thinker, Naomi Wolf has been done in by her own Dragons of Niceness, which make her unable to admit that any woman anywhere at any time has been wrong, at least without prefacing her remarks with a great deal of smarmy flattery: Radical feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon are really great theorists. The only problem comes when other feminists start acting as if their theories were true, and repeating them in public, a kind of backhanded defense these more valiant (or foolhardy) writers must reject with scorn.

We are all feminists now, Naomi Wolf reassures us: Republicans and Democrats, socialists and capitalists. Feminism is the nice warm bath of feminine approval for whatever choices women make, a feminism that prides itself on its ability to distinguish (incomprehensibly)"between the right to have an opinion about a woman's choices and the right to judge her." It is a feminism so warm and fuzzy, it practically disappears.