The Virgin Myth
[In the following review, Pollard offers a mixed assessment of Promiscuities, finding fault in Wolf's focus on the loss of virginity as the defining point of a woman's maturation.]
Just before the feminist movement seriously got under way, a rash of Hollywood films explored the sleep-over teenage sisterhood of America. Dazzlingly acne-free, Sandra Dee, Connie Francis and the rest would stay overnight at one another's houses, or in each other's hotel rooms and spend innocent hours wondering where the boys were. As lightweight as an asexual version of the TV series Friends, these movies were a definable group of West Coast offerings that said women could and should be pals.
Naomi Wolf must have seen them, too, because her book [Promiscuities] has several of the same qualities. Described by her publishers as the most outspoken feminist of her generation, she has written her third book on the basis that, unlike men, women hide their erotic autobiographies because even in this post-feminist age any woman who has a sexual past can find it used against her. Ask any rape victim.
She goes through the history of how our male-dominated world has always feared the unleashing of women's desire. She starts with the abomination of female circumcision, and goes on to medieval European laws which decreed that a widow who had sex could lose her property. She ends with O. J. Simpson's attorney in the civil trial, defending his client by describing Nicole Brown Simpson thus: “Nicole was exercising her wings. She had many boyfriends … she was the pursuer.”
Wolf's response is to ask the tribe of white, middle-class women who were born in the 1960s and lived in the San Francisco area for their early sexual histories. These show how these girls were affected by the collapse of the traditional family. Fathers stopped being dull, square and there. They grew trendy and sometimes vanished, possibly to return with a new wife and eventually a new family. The mothers refused to age because they found the way to be was young, fresh and slim—like their daughters.
Dolls, previously cuddlesome baby substitutes, turned into the vampish Barbie which, for millions of girls, embodied the vital importance of a pair of pert breasts, a tiny waist and a life lived on perpetual tiptoe so that she could wear spindly high heels.
Wolf was more sure-footed when she wrote the best-selling The Beauty Myth, which described the problems of modern, independent women still caught in the vortex of lookism. By pinpointing the time when girls “become women” as the moment they lose their virginity, she enters an unreal world. That may have been how it was in Haight-Ashbury but she doesn't pause to consider that this transition could well be very different and somewhat earlier for a girl who lives in poverty, squalor or hunger—or suffers inadequate or absentee parenting.
I asked around my friends, very few of whom had told me how their virginity had been lost. Were we ashamed? Were we worried that, as Wolf avers, we are all “bad” girls? The response was that this was not a defining moment. They all felt becoming a woman was more subtle and complex and did not necessarily have to be sexual.
This book simply feeds the curiosity we have for private behaviour. The most dangerous part is in the title: even now “promiscuous” is used to describe the behaviour only of women and gay men. When it is applied to straight men, too, we may have reached true sexual equality.
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