Promiscuities

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 11, 1997 | by Michael Rust

In her graphic coming-of-age memoir, feminist and best-selling author Naomi Wolf examines the pitfalls of growing up female in a sex-drenched culture.

When Naomi Wolf was a 9-year-old growing up in San Francisco, sexual paraphernalia for sale in the city's Tenderloin district was hidden behind red velvet curtains. By the time she was 13, explicit sexual items and images were openly displayed. "They profoundly affected me and the women my age growing up," says Wolf. "They profoundly affect girls growing up today."

Just how girls deal with this kind of accelerated exposure to a sex-drenched culture is at the heart of Promiscuities (Random House, 286 pp), Wolf's latest book. Partly a coming-of-age memoir set in 1970s San Francisco, where the Summer of Love had faded but the winter of the AIDS epidemic had yet to arrive, Promiscuities also includes accounts of Wolf's contemporaries concerning their own sexuality and how that sexuality meshed with cultural expectations.

Despite the title, the mechanics of sex are not much on display in the book. "I certainly wanted to tell everything that mattered most about my own sexual development," Wolf says. "I'm aware that other 'confessional memoirs' coming out right now are in some ways much more sort of technically graphic. I think mine is more emotionally graphic."

Married to presidential speech-writer David Shipley, Wolf is the mother of a 3-year-old girl. Motherhood, she says, has "made me more radical. Before I had a child, I thought if things were better for women someday, that's good enough. Now, I feel things have to be okay by the year 2010" -- about about the time her daughter will be in her mid-teens.

One of the things that needs to be corrected: "We're giving girls the message that they should be sexually avail able but not sexually in charge of themselves." And that leads to disasters, she says, including unwanted pregnancies, rampant abortions and sexual violence.

"If America were a society where women's sexuality was associated with the spark of the divine in them," says Wolf, "things would be a lot healthier for girls growing up into women."

Mention of the divine can make some people nervous, of course. "I am aware that in the sexual revolution, the status of female sexuality was not raised, but lowered," she says. At the same time, "all of our sexuality's connection to God, basically, was severed."

As for her connection to God, Wolf describes herself as a "spiritual beginner," reading in her Jewish tradition, as well as Christian and Buddhist texts. The right has been comfortable connecting politics and spirituality, she says, but there's a vacuum on the left. "The more people on the left come out with their spiritual allegiances and spiritual questions, the better policy we're going to make."

Which is why Wolf has joined the "religious left," a nascent but growing movement that includes Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine; Cornel West, Harvard University professor and writer; and Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine. This, says Wolf, is where "the real ideas and real energy are going to be coming from for left-of-center politics."

Wolf is the source of several of those ideas herself. Her first book, The Beauty Myth, argued that women were sacrificing their self-esteem, money and health to live up to an unrealistic beauty standard imposed by a male-dominated culture. Named by the New York Times as one of the 70 most influential books of the century, the 1991 book also placed its 28-year-old author in the eye of controversy. Critics of modern feminism such as Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers disputed her use of statistics concerning the number of women who die from eating disorders. Others noted the irony of the strikingly attractive young author criticizing beauty standards. In the heat of battle, Paglia referred to Wolf as "Little Miss Pravda."

Her second book, Fire With Fire, angered some of her feminist allies with its argument that women, by failing to empower themselves, colluded with patriarchal oppression. "Wolf is a lot like her pal [Bill] Clinton," wrote one critic in the left-wing In These Times magazine, noting that "our sense of betrayal toward both is fierce."

But if Wolf encounters sniping from onetime cohorts. she seems unabashed. In fact, she welcomes the Nation magazine's description of her as "postliberal," which her latest book does nothing to dispel.

"Promiscuities isn't an unthinking endorsement of the traditional liberal assumption that any kind of sexual liberation is a good thing," Wolf says. "It's a critique of what didn't work in the sexual revolution--not because I want to roll us back to the old virgin/whore model, but precisely because I want to complete the sexual revolution in a way that's good for women and children as well as for men."

At the same time, some traditionalists may be taken aback by some of her recommendations. "I went back in American social history and found to my astonishment that, in fact, our grandparents and great-grandparents and mothers and fathers knew quite well that teens were not taught to abstain from sexual exploration; they were taught to abstain from sexual intercourse," she says. In fact, sex-instruction material from two to five decades ago "basically taught you how to pet correctly."