Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood

What I learned from this book: a heightened sensibility of how we honor or deny women’s desire. I’ve been taking Naomi Wolf’s thesis seriously, that in the last 40/50 years we’ve learned to dis a woman’s sexual desire.
Take the word “slut” for example; what is it really meant to connote? I was watching a YouTube video (Smosh Snatchers) recently, which has had over 1.5 million views. It’s one in a popular series by two young men. One girl hands another a screwdriver – “Because you like to screw.” “Are you calling me a slut?” The other responds, “It’s not an insult if it’s a fact.” And a brawl ensues because one clearly thinks it’s an insult.
We can’t, on the other hand, insult a man by calling him a show more slut, unless, interestingly enough, he is gay. Both genders can be promiscuous (“sleeping around”) but slut has its own loaded meaning quite apart from multiple partners. It means someone who ENJOYS it.
A movie like Caramel,on the other hand, which I watched last night with insight newly sharpened by this book, is a celebration of women’s desire in the midst of cultural confusion.
Ms. Wolf mourns the loss of ritual and community which honor a woman’s desire. I think she is yearning for what might be called a theology of the body. show less

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 show more says, storytelling is important. show less

To get the labels out of the way: this is the story of a white middle-class West-Coast girl's sexual coming of age in the 1960's and 70's. It's a document of the period after the sexual revolution but before the Internet, which mainstreamed porn and then fragmented the sexual mainstream entirely, shifting the Overton Window for better and for worse on what it is OK and not OK to say about sex. Dated as it is through no fault of its own, this still speaks to me as a younger child of the same period and roughly the same demographics.

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.

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.

I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/11215601