Promiscuities:
The Secret Struggle for Womanhood
By Naomi Wolf
Random House, 286 pages, $24
Last Night in Paradise:
Sex and Morals at the Century’s End
By Katie Roiphe
Little, Brown, 193 pages, $21.95
The Lipstick Proviso:
Women, Sex and Power in the Real World
By Karen Lehrman
Doubleday, 228 pages, $23.95
Young women’s sexuality is far from a new and original media topic. In the gamut of high to low culture–from Nabokov’s “Lolita” to Playboy’s centerfold models draped beckoningly over wicker lawn furniture–it is routinely commercialized, romanticized and demonized.
For in this age, to really speak honestly and realistically of young women’s sexuality is to speak of the unsensational: of conflict, of contradiction and of ambivalence. Thirty years after the beginning of the sexual revolution and the re-emergence of feminism, and in the second decade of AIDS, this next generation of women is dealing with an often-confounding set of enhanced expectations and choices, along with bracing new limits.
That is why these critical and honest books by young female writers stand out. They provide rare, unadulterated, firsthand insights into their often-private struggles with sex and shifting gender roles.
The first, Naomi Wolf’s lushly detailed adolescent sexual memoir, “Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood,” explores, among other themes, the mixed influences of the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Wolf appeals in this latest book with the same energy and empathy that made her first, “The Beauty Myth,” a best seller. Here, she again reveals her talent for recognizing and describing the often-hidden yet consuming basic internal conflicts in young women’s lives.
And again, her often-seductive writing style is inconsistent in quality. Like her other books, this one is prone to some convoluted sentences, and some purple and precious prose (such as her often-mocked declaration that she is writing in the “first person sexual”).
In “Promiscuities,” she explores the cultural minefield that is teenage female sexuality, as experienced during the height of the sexual revolution, a “My So-Called Sex Life” set to a funky 1970s beat. Specifically, Wolf looks at the often-confounding experiences of trying to navigate sex in an era that is more permissive but that retains a double standard that denies and fears female desire. The book tells of hers and her friends’ adolescences, interlaced with passages of anthropological analysis of female sexuality from other cultures through the ages. The result: Judy Blume meets Margaret Mead.
Wolf’s own particular sexual story, rife with adventure, makes a good read. The locales are exotic enough for the most commercially appealing romance novel. During a summer trip to Israel while she was in her early teens, she had a secret affair–forbidden by her rabbi-chaperone–with Devin, an Irish Catholic laborer.
But the lengthy cultural analyses–filled with sermonizing tales from cultures as diverse as the ancient Chinese and New Mexico’s Zuni Indians–often interrupt the book’s flow. I felt I was reading two books cut and pasted together, one sexual memoir and one cultural analysis. These historical interludes–and other interwoven social commentaries–also signify an overly zealous attempt to give larger social meaning and relevance to every episode in Wolf’s life.
Yet, the universal themes of the subject matter are naturally relevant to middle-class readers. This is true even though its setting could not be further from the mainstream. Wolf, 35, grew up just above the famed Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco, the epicenter of 1970s counterculture and experimentation. In the most absorbing, original and striking parts of the book, Wolf describes a childhood that seems at times to have taken place in the middle of a Grateful Dead concert. She writes about a neighborhood friend and her mother processing marijuana plants together at the Formica-topped kitchen table, and the collective of overcharging lesbian house painters hired by her earnestly hippie mother.
As she states, some of these scenes from the fringe describe a greater and common tension for many children of her era: of adults letting them down in their own personal searches for fulfillment (she hauntingly describes a period in the early ’70s when some of her friends’ fathers started to disappear from their families as the men became preoccupied with ” `doing their own thing’ “). But Wolf concludes that she is grateful for growing up at that idiosyncratic time in history when the meaning of sexual freedom was newly explored and celebrated.
Katie Roiphe, almost a decade younger than Wolf, skillfully investigates beneath-the-surface cultural battles against this sexual revolution in “Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century’s End.” Roiphe’s premise is that societal anxiety about AIDS really reflects greater fears about sex and ambivalence about sexual freedom. She seamlessly analyzes media reports about AIDS and exposes their often-predictable scripts of transgression and punishment, as in the cases of NBA star Magic Johnson and privileged, Park Avenue-raised Alison Gertz.
This book also gives context to Roiphe’s first, notorious and undeniably overshadowing book, “The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism.” That one, about society’s “date-rape hysteria,” and this second, about “AIDS hysteria,” discuss what she sees as revealing deeper social fears of sexual freedom.
But “Last Night in Paradise” is monumentally more reasoned and meditative–and, hence, less sensational and, perhaps, less provocative. “The Morning After” attracted a flurry of media attention in 1993 by making the heavy-handed assertion that radical feminists had invented acquaintance rape as a political ploy. Like many others, I found this an unlikable book–not for ideological reasons, but mostly for its lack of research and its smug, mocking tone.
Refreshingly, “Last Night in Paradise” avoids these flaws while making the most of Roiphe’s maverick critical sensibilities. A central reason is that she doesn’t pretend to be doing investigative research and instead devotes herself to what she does best: literary and social criticism. (She holds a doctoral degree in English from Princeton University.)
Roiphe’s spare and elegant writing style is the strongest part of this book. Particularly captivating is the introduction, in which she tells the story of her older sister, a former drug addict who is HIV-positive. Here, Roiphe’s tone is more digestible than in her first book, and she understands other peoples’ conflicts about sex. She admits that while one side of her wants to follow her sister’s past life of adventure and risk-taking, she is also pulled to “what so many of us now seem to want, to be safe.”
Roiphe’s greatest contribution is forcing readers to question their own concepts of risk, about when it is warranted, and about when it has been influenced by society’s sometimes irrational fears about sex.
The mixed legacy of the 1970s is also the subject of Karen Lehrman’s “The Lipstick Proviso: Women, Sex and Power in the Real World.” It is a well-written book of theory–if sometimes dry and narrow in perspective–challenging white mainstream feminist thought (although its subtitle misleadingly suggests that it is more about sex). Its stated goal is to present a more practical feminism, free of outdated ideological restrictions, one that we can live with. Her criticism echoes the independent sensibility of her famous 1993 Mother Jones cover story attacking alleged orthodoxy in women’s-studies classes.
Lehrman interprets standard feminist issues–love, beauty, power, sisterhood and sex–according to a strict individualistic model. She says it isn’t necessarily the patriarchy that is causing women’s problems: If you want to know the source of your troubles, sister, just look in the mirror. While feminists issued manifestos in the 1970s proclaiming that “sisterhood is powerful,” she writes that sisterhood is “a crock.” In other words, this highly intellectualized tome celebrating women’s personal choices is feminist, but only for getting oneself ahead, and it is supportive, if not reverential, of the male status quo.
A reader’s affection for this book will likely depend on his or her political sensibilities. If you agree with Lehrman’s driving asssumption that women in America are no longer oppressed, you will find it brave and refreshing. If not, you will find it disturbing and selfish. But taken on its own terms, this rigorously reasoned book skillfully fulfills its mission as an argument for a liberal feminism that honors all women’s choices.
One of the book’s troubling aspects, however, is its limiting, elite perspective. While claiming to speak for the interests of many women, Lehrman has not researched beyond herself. Instead of being grounded in interviews and statistics about the more-common folk, she generalizes from her own privileged experiences and those of her Ivy League-educated friends. (Wolf’s and Roiphe’s books also deserve criticism for lacking research into “real women,” but those are more autobiographical essays, naturally more limited in focus and not sharing the same polemical task of addressing women as a whole.)
Yet, in the end, Lehrman does distinguish herself from other popular critics of the movement, such as the more-incendiary Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers, in calling for a civil and constructive feminist debate, not a media-courting catfight. Instead of just trying to tear down the women’s movement, she presents new models for those interested in exploring the broad spectrum of feminist thought.
