All-American Girl?

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SOURCE: Fielding, Ellen Wilson. “All-American Girl?” National Review (2 June 1997): 54–56.

[In the following review, Fielding offers an unfavorable assessment of Promiscuities.]

You remember Naomi Wolf. She was the author of a much discussed article in The New Republic titled “Our Bodies, Our Souls.” In it she coaxed her fellow pro-choicers to admit that abortion does kill a human being and is usually undertaken for reasons of convenience and therefore could be, may be, might be wrong. She got in some sharp jabs at the self-serving obfuscations of her allies on the Left, but ultimately her efforts petered out into suggestions on how to establish mourning rituals for abortion, while she continued to defend its legality.

That publishing event, and the extensive media reaction to it, happened more than a year ago. Since then Miss Wolf has completed a new project—a kind of autobiographical account of the sexual coming of age of the author and those she grew up with in those promiscuous, post-Pill pre-AIDS days following the sexual revolution. From this she intends to draw lessons about the role and meaning of women's sexuality, and the way in which girls should be inducted into womanhood today.

In her introduction, Miss Wolf tells us she thought of this collection of sexual anecdotes, recollections, and reflections as the story of “an ordinary American girlhood.” This astonishing statement highlights one of the central flaws of her scheme of exploring how girls became women in liberated 1970s America, for her upbringing was spectacularly untypical.

Naomi Wolf grew up in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the daughter of a leftist professor and a mother whose graduate studies would lead her to examine, among other topics, the dynamics of the San Francisco lesbian community. Promiscuities is dedicated to Miss Wolf's grandmother, “who was a pioneer champion of sex education in a course she taught at the University of the Pacific for many years beginning in the 1950s.”

Miss Wolf describes her childhood friends as coming from assorted Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic backgrounds, but there is no indication that any took religion seriously. When these women complain about being made to feel guilty for their sexual attitudes and desires, they are criticizing Society rather than parents or the local pastor or rabbi. Miss Wolf mentions that her parents were “ethnically Jewish,” and she went to a Zionist summer camp, but the closest she comes to dealing with God's demands is in describing a rabbi-chaperoned trip to an Israeli kibbutz, where she is rebuked for hanging out with the Irish hired laborers (she becomes sexually involved with one of them, mostly, she thinks, as an act of rebellion).

Though her own parents remain married, her friends' families seem ahead even of the late-Sixties and Seventies divorce curve, with all the attendant collapse of parental involvement and moral energy. What Naomi Wolf's girlhood has to tell us about normal or average girlhoods remains unclear.

But there is a deeper problem, a confusion in Miss Wolf's mind that never resolves itself. On the one hand, she is candid about the parental lapses encouraged by the sexual revolution's preoccupation with self-fulfillment: “Though tolerance, joy, and honesty were real legacies of the freedom of that time, there is no doubt in the minds of my friends and myself that children and parenting fell in value as the exploration of the self and the senses gained in value.” She can also see that girls and women were often used in the name of the sexual liberation that was supposed to place them on an equal footing with men. Yet Miss Wolf's focus remains obstinately on the question of whether social mores celebrate and enhance the satisfaction of female sexual desires.

She and the women she interviews talk endlessly about how the “sluts” were differentiated from the “good girls,” and how awful it was that girls were made to feel worried or bad about being or appearing sexually advanced. Miss Wolf wistfully describes the temple prostitutes of ancient Babylonia, and the world of the Kama Sutra and of older Chinese erotica that paid tribute to the power of female sexuality and fertility.

But Miss Wolf should seriously consider whether the absorption of herself and her friends in the fulfilling of sexual desires is so very similar to the recognition of ancient societies that fertility and human sexuality are powerful in a sacred, cosmic sense. Those restrictive, patriarchal societies she so dislikes—the Romans with their Vestal Virgins, the Christians with their emphasis on chastity—at least had this in common with the fertility religions: they took sex seriously, as something important and powerful, which had enormous repercussions beyond individual itches or self-absorbed fantasies. For all those multicultural references, Miss Wolf's understanding of the nature and purpose and scope of sexuality is in the end depressingly thin, incurably late-twentieth-century secular American. (She attributes the high divorce rate in part to sexually frustrated wives whose husbands pay insufficient attention to their need for orgasms.)

So it is not surprising that in her concluding chapters she tackles sex education in the same old bankrupt secular-liberal manner. Teens can be restrained from early sexual intercourse, with its attendant health dangers, by the Joycelyn Elders method of teaching them all the fun ways of achieving sexual bliss short of intercourse. That Miss Wolf can convince herself that this will postpone the onset of sexual intercourse in teenagers is a kind of tribute, I suppose, to the power of Haight-Ashbury and her grandmother and the romantic dreams they peddled.

In a move that seems borrowed straight from Robert Bly, Miss Wolf and some friends fashion their own female initiation rite, the modern counterpart of African and Indian tribal rituals, suggesting that pubescent girls go on retreats in the wilderness with trusted older women, who can “pass on to the younger everything they have learned about womanhood, and answer every single question the girls want to ask.”

However she may imagine that hers was an “ordinary American girlhood,” Naomi Wolf's coming of age in the heart of the counterculture was anything but. She hopes that something like her experience will become the norm for other, truly ordinary American girls, but we must cross our fingers and hope that her plans and prognostications never come to pass.

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