Naomi Wolf: Confessions of a Feminist

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: Smith, Wendy. “Naomi Wolf: Confessions of a Feminist.” Publishers Weekly (30 June 1997): 56–57.

[In the following essay, Smith provides an overview of Wolf's life, career, and critical reception upon the publication of Promiscuities.]

Discussing the books that have made her a prominent figure in the feminist generation she has dubbed the “Third Wave,” Naomi Wolf is articulate and forceful. When she feels something she wrote has been misinterpreted, she can be emphatically (albeit politely) combative. But she reveals another side after a fan approaches her in the Gramercy Tavern, praises her books, and urges, “Keep up the good work!” Wolf thanks the woman, then upon her departure flashes a wry smile and confides, “That doesn't happen to me very often out in the suburbs where I'm wiping poop.”

Wolf's daughter, Rosa (named for civil rights activist Rosa Parks), recently turned two, and the author has experienced the feelings of loneliness and isolation that afflict virtually every first-time mother. In her case, it's exacerbated by what she hopes is a temporary exile in Chevy Chase, Md. She moved there from New York City with her husband, former New Republic executive editor David Shipley, when he became a speechwriter for President Clinton and the First Lady, but she is by upbringing and inclination a city person. “New York mothers seem so connected,” she says wistfully. “In the 'burbs you have to get in the car to do everything.”

Career issues and dirty diapers can loom equally large in contemporary women's lives, and the resulting complexities and ambivalences have increasingly preoccupied Wolf as a writer. Her first book, The Beauty Myth argued that unrealistic mass media images of beauty were part of a backlash against feminism aimed at undermining women's self-esteem just as they began to gain political, economic and social power. The controversial Fire with Fire criticized “second wave” feminism for falling into bad habits, in particular, ideological rigidity and hostility toward compromise, that alienated many women.

While second wave writers like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan spoke to women who were outside the power structure banging on the door, third wavers tend to be younger women grappling with “the ambiguities of assimilation,” as Wolf puts it in The Beauty Myth. That book and Fire with Fire were relatively conventional works of analysis and advocacy. Wolf's new work, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood, just published by Random House, is more intimate and personal, chronicling her own and her friends' sexual coming of age in San Francisco during the 1970s. Her aim is “to elucidate the emotional truths that emerge from a particular generation's erotic memory,” Wolf writes in the introduction, dubbing Promiscuities “not a polemic, but a set of confessions.”

Among the charged topics Wolf addresses are her experiences with a physically abusive boyfriend; feelings of emptiness and alienation she and her friends felt when losing their virginity proved to be a non-event; the treacherous line they negotiated between being properly “liberated” and being a “slut,” a term the author believes still has tremendous power to regulate girls' behavior; and the painful confusions prompted in children by the sexual and social revolutions of the 1960s, as families fell apart and parents abdicated adult responsibilities.

Now that she's a parent herself, was it difficult to write frankly about such matters?

“I think that, if anything, being a mom made me want to be that much more honest,” she replies. “Because only real honesty from adult women can change the sexual culture that we have for girls. I feel that as a mother it's my responsibility to write, say and do what I can to create an alternate culture for my daughter's generation so they have more positive images of female sexuality to grow up in”

As examples of images of female sexuality that are more positive than the demeaning stereotypes of Western popular culture, Promiscuities offers the erotic literature of ancient China, the sacred texts of Hinduism and the teachings of Mohammed. Wolf bristles when it's noted that China, India and Islamic nations have been, if anything, even more repressive of women's liberty than the West. “I think you need to go back to the text,” she suggests firmly, “because I say very clearly in the introduction that these are not ideal societies for women.

“I'm using their ideology about sex to dislodge our ideology about sex. Think of the words young girls growing up hear used to describe their bodies—‘pussy,’ ‘cunt.’ They don't even know that there was a place and a time [Han Dynasty China] where those same body parts were called ‘precious cinnabar cleft.’ Now, you can laugh and think that's a frivolous piece of information, but it's also quite life-saving.”

Her combination of first-person recollections with historical and theoretical material has seemed maladroit to some critics, but Wolf believes it's an essential aspect of Promiscuities. “This is a new genre that I'm creating as I go along,” she comments, apparently forgetting for the moment the mountains of second wave literature linking the personal and the political. “I understand that readers sometimes feel, ‘This isn't either a memoir or a history, this is a combination I've never encountered before; and there's some initial resistance. But I know from the internal pressures that lead me to keep trying to develop this genre, and the effect it has on my readers, that this is exactly the right way to do it.

“Our sex life doesn't unfold only personally and intimately, it unfolds within historical and cultural assumptions. The deepest truth I'm trying to get at is that it's one dimension to write personally, one dimension to write theoretically, but when I merge the two, each illuminates the other and adds more than the sum of the parts.”

As these remarks indicate, Wolf has a habit of claiming as her own insights that are hardly new to anyone familiar with feminist history and literature. This has prompted sharply divided opinion of Promiscuities. In the Sunday New York Times Book Review, Salon columnist Courtney Weaver, like the young women who flock to Wolf's readings and talks on college campuses, felt personally engaged by the author's story of her sexual experiences and enlightened by her once-over-lightly history of other cultures' sexual attitudes. New York Times daily critic Michiko Kakutani echoed many older, better-informed readers who have found fault with Wolf in the past; she judged Promiscuities to be sloppily researched, pompously written and staggeringly ignorant of other material that covered the same ground.

Wolf is more than capable of defending herself against such charges; she is confident of her ideas' importance and is polished in defending them. Today, dressed in a business-like pale green suit and fashionably chunky shoes, she looks and acts the part of the media-seasoned social commentator she's become in the six years since The Beauty Myth became an international bestseller. Her emergence as a media figure, however, was somewhat startling to a graduate student who viewed her first book as a temporary diversion from her doctoral dissertation on views of female beauty in 19th- and early 20th-century literature.

THE BEAUTY MYTH

Academia seemed the likely destination for the daughter of an English professor at San Francisco State University and an anthropologist specializing in women's studies. Born in 1962, Wolf majored in English literature at Yale and went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. Her research there, combined with personal experiences, sparked The Beauty Myth. “I was looking at how, in the 19th century, as women got more power, ideals of beauty were becoming more passive, death-like and rigid. Then I had this insight that the same thing was going on all around me: we were ten years into the surge of second wave feminism, and all the most brilliant, ambitious young women I knew were starving half to death or vomiting in bathrooms, consumed with self-loathing just at the time when they could have been positioned to completely transform society”

To sell her manuscript, Wolf turned to a family friend, John Brockman, and his associate, Katinka Matson; they have agented all three of her books. Jim Landis at Morrow published The Beauty Myth in the States. “I wasn't surprised that it resonated with readers, because I knew it was true and I knew it was a deep preoccupation of women of my generation,” comments Wolf, whose own bout with anorexia is chillingly described in the book. “It certainly astonished me that I went from being a graduate student to leading a very different kind of life.

“Jim Landis took a gamble on this graduate student out of nowhere and really mentored me,” she continues. “The first draft of The Beauty Myth was not what it should have been, and I remember Jim sitting me down at a table with like 11 other editors and explaining to me, ‘You can't do it this way; you have to do it that way: The seriousness of what I needed to do was really borne out by that; I could not have been happier in my work with him.”

Wolf subsequently signed a contract for Promiscuities with Ann Godoff of Random House. “There are things that immediately resonate between us just because we're both women and of similar generations,” she explains.

Godoff stuck with Wolf when she set aside Promiscuities in the wake of the Anita Hill hearings, which the writer felt signaled the beginning of a crucial new phase for feminism. “In light of the hearings and the spontaneous voter uprising that followed by women, it became clear to me that we were now positioned to dismantle the patriarchy. That required a massive shift in our mind-set and a crash course in realpolitik.”

In place of what she termed “victim feminism” Wolf proposed “power feminism,” which would eschew setting a party line on divisive subjects like abortion and pornography in favor of meat-and-potatoes organizing to get women fairer treatment, better jobs and more political clout. She expected the “howls of outrage” from second wave feminists that greeted the book. “I think it was necessary. I was critiquing my own movement, pointing out—I hope lovingly and constructively—that some psychologies we were trapped in were not appropriate for a time when we were about to set the national agenda. In fact, our victories have far outstripped anything I foresaw in Fire with Fire, especially in the last presidential election. To have both conventions kowtowing to women and falling all over themselves to create some sort of family policy: that's power feminism”

Asked if she regrets the term “victim feminism,” she replies with a trace of irritation, “I was so scrupulous when defining it to acknowledge that women are victimized. But people like Katie Roiphe and Camille Paglia came up with the term simultaneously—sometimes the zeitgeist does funny things—and they were throwing it around in a way that I couldn't control. There were a lot of stupid things said about victim feminism which were not germane to the critique I was making, but on college campuses my analysis is the one young women cling to, because it lets them clear a way through the thicket of what they found unpalatable in 1980s feminism and direct their energies.”

Despite her role in popularizing the terms, Wolf is reluctant to make too much of the differences between second and third wave feminism. “Women always face the same basic issues—work-family conflict, sexual violence, domestic violence, poverty—and third wavers will battle in their own way the forms those hydras take for their generation”

In the long run, says this young mother whose earnest reformulations have done so much to make feminism appealing to a new generation, “My most fervent hope is that feminism will become obsolete, that someday I can tell my granddaughters about that hilarious, strange and quaint belief that women were not entitled to 52٪ of everything. I'd like to imagine them laughing.”

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

First Person Sexual

Next

Hot and Bothered