Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

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SOURCE: Schaub, Diana. “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Public Interest, no. 129 (fall 1997): 116–24.

[In the following review of Promiscuities, Schaub commends the seriousness of Wolf's feminist concerns, but faults her “sloppy” eclecticism and contradictory aims.]

Clearly, it will not be supplied by Naomi Wolf, whose new book, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood, shows her to be still in quest of “a better time.” The book is an evocative recounting of the sexual coming of age of Wolf and her friends in the San Francisco of the 1960s and 1970s, interspersed with potted summaries of the sexual mores of other times and places. In “A Short History of the Slut,” for instance, we move from “the Great Mother, with her divine sexuality,” circa 20,000 B.C.E., to Nicole Brown Simpson, all in five pages. Much of the memoir portion of the book is actually quite frank about the costs of the sexual revolution. Wolf describes particularly well the various ways in which children were neglected, bereft, forgotten, or abandoned as adults increasingly put their own gratification foremost. Her comments about the effect of divorce on young girls are perceptive:

Just when the girls needed their fathers to be around to admire their emerging sexual identity from a safe distance—to be the dependable male figures upon whom they could innocently practice growing up—the fathers vanished. … To the female children on the block, then, there was a new kind of anxiety: How could one grow up to become, through sex, the kind of woman a dad would not want to go away from? … 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.

But Wolf wouldn't have had it otherwise: “In spite of all the wreckage, I am glad we lived through what we did, where we did.” (This makes about as much sense as Wolf's position on abortion, which consists of a frank acknowledgement that abortion is murder coupled with an intransigent endorsement of the practice.) Wolf continues to believe that as a result of the sexual revolution female desire was “freed in some critical ways.”

The problem, as she sees it, is that the revolution did not go far enough. Everybody learned the technical stuff about orgasms and g-spots, but did not really come to appreciate, nay “venerate,” the distinctiveness of female desire. This is Wolf's answer to the pretty much undeniable fact that the sexual revolution's version of sexual equality unleashed male wolfishness. What we need according to her is to complete the sexual revolution by reviving “female sexuality's sacred and religious aspects.” Thus will women affirm their superior and polymorphous carnality (“There are no good girls; we are all bad girls, in the best sense of the word”), and thus will men learn the delights of apprenticing themselves to such goddesses. Gallantry would return, not in the form of a man's throwing his coat over a mud puddle but in the form of hours of foreplay.

According to Wolf, history offers us plenty of examples of the enshrinement of female desire, from the Han Dynasty of ancient China and its Tao of Loving to the Zuni Indians of New Mexico. To her credit, Wolf is trying to rescue heterosexuality from “feminist commentators” who “equate heterosexuality with a set of assumptions that are innately degrading to women.” In turning to the Kama Sutra and other erotic literature, she is looking for works that “give the lie to the message in Penthouse, the primary teaching text for the teenage boys we know, that female nakedness and sexuality are cheap, as well as those of some second-wave feminists whose wish to restrict images of female nudity is argued on the grounds that they are inherently ‘objectifying.’”

But one suspects that her eclecticism is a bit sloppy. Wolf wants more respect for women without any sacrifice of promiscuous pleasures. Yet, from her own brief accounts of these other cultures, one notices that these elaborate sex manuals were used as marriage manuals by “inexperienced brides.” In other words, womanly pleasure meant wifely pleasure. That observation should at least cause one to wonder whether both maidenly virginity and matronly fidelity might be important components of teachings about the sacredness of female desire. But Wolf, no sexual economist, wants pleasure to be both precious and plentiful. Hence she prefers the Babylonians, with their ritual prostitution, to the Jews, who thought prostitution unholy. One can't help wondering what she'll find a good word for next: maybe the liberationist potential of polygamy.

Wolf doesn't go so far as to recommend ritual prostitution for us today, but she does want rituals: rites of passage for girls, “wisdom initiations,” “mentoring exchanges,” and all-female retreats at which “older women would teach the younger skills and techniques, such as self-defense, contraception, sexual pleasure, and parenting.” Again, she seems unaware that the things she wants don't necessarily cohere. It is difficult to combine real rituals with radical freedom. Peoples with rituals that matter are bound. They don't, as Carol Gilligan's blurb says of Promiscuities, “encourage every woman to tell it her way.”

It is exceedingly easy to mock this book, from its opening invocation of Margaret Mead to its closing call for a sort of updated version of the Eleusinian mysteries. Nonetheless, I do believe that the dissatisfaction fueling Wolf's inquiry is serious. To some extent, she overlaps Lasch, and even the late Allan Bloom, in her concern for the fate of eros in the modern world. Like them, she returns to the thought and practices of bygone times. In the end, however, San Francisco retains its hold on her. As she says early on, “our town made it hard to have ultimate faith in any belief system that made claims beyond the pleasures of the senses.” But a true education of the sentiments is not to be had in the City of Sybaris.

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