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Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for…
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Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood

by Naomi Wolf

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612414,572 (3.52)3
Recently added bytthrall, nmele, Praj05, velvetink, private library, Lasairfhiona, skathic, ErinElliott, manmtn
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This is not always the best researched or best written book but Wolf is pointing out and exploring a number of provocative and important issues, like the lack of a definite, meaningful initiation into adulthood and the sexual imagination of our society. Well worth reading and discussing; my wife and I are still talking about it. ( )
  nmele | Apr 6, 2013 |
I read this as a teenager, and it was quite possibly the first explicitly feminist work of nonfiction I read. It was an easy read, not especially academic, and very valuable for me in noticing and evaluating the messages I was getting about female bodies, desires, and choices.

It's been a while since I read it, but I remember especially valuing the emphasis on storytelling: the lack of positive stories about female sexual awakening in our mainstream culture, the shift in stories about women's desire over the centuries. I also remember having trouble relating to some of the firsthand tales of girls growing up in the wilder 60's/70's -- I was a very staid (yes, even prudish) 90's teen. But perhaps the shock did me good, and as the book says, storytelling is important. ( )
1 vote eilonwy_anne | Sep 7, 2010 |
Part, if not most of this book is a memoir about growing up female in a culture that both idolizes and denigrates women when it comes to sex. Wolf has a keen bead when it comes to cultural studies, but like anyone who writes about Big Ideas, she misses as much as she hits. I am sure this was HER experience, but I didnt know many girls like her when I was growing up.

This might be read well hand in hand with [Reviving Ophelia] by Mary Pipher. ( )
1 vote Arctic-Stranger | Jan 8, 2008 |
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Once upon a time, a scattered group of girls undertook the passage from girlhood to womanhood in a city built around a bay.
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Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0449907643, Paperback)

Part memoir, part exposé, Promiscuities is Naomi Wolf's (author of The Beauty Myth and Fire with Fire) perspective on the confusion surrounding female sexuality. According to Wolf, promiscuous is "a word that holds within it the mixed message girls today are given about sex: 'You're promiscuous if you do anything, but you are a prude if you do nothing.'" Thus, still polarized on the spectrum between virgin and whore, adolescent girls are allowed little information and even fewer healthy outlets for their normal sexual desires. Wolf shatters the illusion that good girls and professional women are not sexual, and boldly embarks on redefining female sexuality outside of men's experience and assumptions. Wolf's own coming of age in the post-sexual revolution of Haight-Ashbury, serves as an evocative tool for revealing the naked and admirable truth of female sexuality.

(retrieved from Amazon Wed, 20 Apr 2011 07:13:51 -0400)

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