Promiscuities: An Opinionated History of Female Desire

by Naomi Wolf

By following a group of four contemporary girls - including her younger self - as they come of age in the seventies, Wolf shows how our culture tries to shape and confine women's desire. Embarking on a voyage of discovery, she illustrates how flawed and prescribed are the notions of what women want, and how these change through the ages - from Taoist techniques for giving women pleasure, to Victorian repression, and the so-called liberated nineties.

Drawing on scholarly texts, secret diaries, real life and fantasy, she demonstrates that female sexuality is wilder, more demanding and more powerful than our culture dares to accept.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Sexuality, Gender Studies, Gender, Sociology, Womens

244 pages, Paperback

First published April 17, 1997

About the author

Naomi Wolf is the author of seven books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Beauty Myth, The End of America and Give Me Liberty. She has toured the world speaking to audiences of all walks of life about gender equality, social justice, and, most recently, the defense of liberty in America and internationally. She is the cofounder of the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, which teaches ethics and empowerment to young women leaders, and is also a cofounder of the American Freedom Campaign, a grass roots democracy movement in the United States whose mission is the defense of the Constitution and the rule of law.

Reviews

[Mary Helene · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 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.

[Pamela Langhorne · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What would male adolescent sexual behavior look like if boys were taught to treat teenage girls neither like prudes nor sluts but like nascent sexual goddesses, and respect their sexuality and reproductive potential accordingly? What would our violent landscape look like if men believed that true masculinity meant becoming an extraordinary lover to a life partner? What would we get if we let women's passion truly enter and dwell in our social world? Above all else that would accrue us, we would have our girls enter into womanhood fully alive"

This quote, which appears at the end of Wolf's book Promiscuities, captures both the subject of the text as well as the perspective from which it is examined. This book is an exploration of how young girls learn about their sexuality throughout childhood, and the ramifications such leanings have on both individual adult women and society as a whole. The book is the result of interviews Wolf did with several women regarding their childhood memories of sexual development, along with Wolf's own recollections that are discussed in what she calls "first person sexual." She states that by analyzing her own "erotic history," along with those of other women, she can offer the reader stories and share feelings that many women can probably relate to and learn from.

Overall, Wolf does an excellent job of providing the reader with insights about emerging female sexuality, the social poisoning of female sexuality, and the shame, guilt, and subsequent constraints that are put on it as a result. This book deconstructs the cultural myths of female sexuality in such a way that it shows the reader how artificial these myths are and hence how unnecessary it is for women to draw upon them when defining themselves sexually. By telling stories of girlhood that will probably be familiar to most women, this book has the potential to facilitate emotional healing for the reader by articulating that which is often felt but rarely expressed, namely, the messages we receive as girls regarding the stigma that supposedly surrounds are bodies, our physical desires, and our very identities as women.

Specifically, Wolf examines such social constructs as the categorizing of women as virgins or whores and how adolescent girls are encouraged to do this to themselves and each other, the teaching of female desire (or, more importantly, lack thereof) in high school sex education classes, the myth that it was only because of feminism that the clitoris was "discovered," and the predatory nature of the sexuality that young boys are encouraged to identify with and emulate, and what shaming messages this sends to girls. By unearthing the ideologies behind constructs such as these, Wolf gives women a way to reclaim their sexuality by realizing that these conditions are not inherent to sexuality itself, but rather are the result of a society that does not recognize women as fully sexual, and thus fully human.

The only criticism I have of this book is that Wolf in a few places alludes to feminism as being part of the problem, as it supposedly is so overly concerned with women not being viewed as sex-objects that it alienates women from their sexuality. For example, in one chapter she states that because of feminism, women feel guilty about wanting to look sexy for their boyfriends or husbands, or enjoying knowing that their boyfriends/husband like to look at them. By making such claims, Wolf is falling for the anti-feminist rumors that feminists and feminism are anti-sex.

Nothing could be further from the truth. While it is true that their are many camps of feminism, most feminist theory regarding sexuality simple challenges the patriarchal framings of sexuality that underpin how we as a society define it; namely, that it is always about male dominance and female submission, that men should be promiscuous while women should be monogamous, that the sexual abuse of women is erotic, etc. Most feminist would fully embrace the woman-centered, emancipatory sexuality that Wolf sets up as the ideal in her book. I would urge her to look further into modern feminism before blaming it for ideologies it is not responsible for.

Overall, however, this book does a wonderful job of illuminating how female sexuality is so cloaked in mystery from the time we are young and first discovering our sexual wants and needs that by the time we reach adulthood, we have internalized the negative messages society has fed us. It is possible that through reading books such as these women can begin to see how contrived and artificial such messages are, which is the first step in rejecting them and creating a sexual identity that lies outside the boundaries of patriarchal needs and demands.

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every person raising a daughter should read this, and when she's old enough give it to her to read too. My daughter and I both read it when she was about 14 years old. It reminded me of some harsh realities of my own teenage years that the patina of nostalgia had rendered soft and hazy. It helped to open a dialogue with my daughter about some uncomfortable subjects that she might not have been so willing to discuss openly with me if I hadn't handed the book to her. It brought us a little closer and gave us a better understanding of ourselves and each other.

[Po Po · Rating 5 out of 5]

Naomi Wolf is my favorite ball bustin' ass kickin' renegade.

Promiscuities is so great I'd like to staple it to my arm -- to keep with me always.

The book is a collection of alarming real-life stories from Naomi's (and her friends and acquaintances) young girlhood and beginnings of womanhood living in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco.

In a nutshell:
-women are as sexual as men.
-phallocentric sex is patriarchal bullshit.
-men need to learn how to please women.
-we need rituals to demarcate the passage of girl to woman.

[Cooper Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Naomi Wolf, author of the best-selling The Beauty Myth, describes the joys, agonies and uncertainties of growing up female in the United States. Drawing on her own experience and that of her friends, raised in San Francisco in the late 60s and early 70s, she highlights the ambivalence in contemporary culture—and the mixed messages given to girls—about female sexuality and what it means to become a woman. On the one hand, a girl is encultured to deny her sexuality and become a mother and a solid middle-class citizen (who is then sexually discounted), and on the other hand she is encouraged to be a sexy Barbie doll or Penthouse centerfold whose purpose it is to attract men and who is always on the verge of falling into slutdom. Madonna, or whore? In resolving this dilemma she has no help: the grown-ups, pursuing their own adolescent fantasies, have long since abdicated their parental responsibilities. There is no instruction; there are no coming-of-age rituals. She has to find her own way through the sexual minefield.
Wolf describes with some heat the trials and tribulations of this journey; it would be interesting to know how the experiences of the current generation of girls, and those of country and small-town girls even of her own generation, compare with those of Wolf and her big-city cohort. After all, San Francisco was at the leading edge of the 1960s political/sexual/psychedelic revolution—it was not exactly typical mid-America. On the other hand, there may be/have been few generational or regional differences in the female dilemma.
Though the themes in Promiscuities are well known, I found many of the details and anecdotes illuminating. The book is well worth reading. My only quibble: while ex-feminist Wolf generally presents a fairly balanced view, occasionally she slips into feminist excess, as when she brags that women are actually more sexual than men (mine is better than yours!), and when she later proposes (wistfully, to be sure) that female sexuality be not merely acknowledged and respected but actually worshipped.

With the elevation of the Barbie ideal came the demotion of our mothers’ status in terms of what they did when they cared for us. If Barbies didn’t have much power, moms—who had no TV show we would want to go on—had none at all. According to the sitcoms of the early to mid-sixties—Julia and Bewitched—mothers dressed modestly. There were, we all knew, two kinds of women: sexy girls and moms. Sexy girls were essentially Barbies; Barbies were in James Bond movies and Millie the Model comics. The comic-book character Veronica, as someone has observed, was a Barbie; Betty, her lesser rival and sidekick, was a future mom. Barbies went on yachts, wore chiffon, and had high-coiled hair and interesting accents. Moms didn’t.

But then in the wild sixties moms changed: For now, suddenly, our mothers were becoming sexy girls. Who, then, would be our mothers? Who would our mothers be?
Early on, you could ask a mother, anyone’s mother, to do anything: get you a drink of apple juice or a place at dinner, provide a ride home. As time progressed, though, many of the mothers, certainly mine, would shut the door to an improvised study made out of a breakfast nook or a dining room, and for a few hours every afternoon we would have to play quietly and not disturb.

There were many separations and divorces, with the fathers usually leaving home: But girls’ experience of the absence or abdication of their fathers marked them…. The fathers’ departure led directly to the girls’ often shaky sense of sexual self-esteem…. Just when the girls needed their fathers to be around to admire their emerging sexual identity from a safe distance—to be the dependable male figures upon whom they could innocently practice growing up—the fathers vanished… The fathers’ departure created in many women my age a feeling of cynicism about the durability of the bonds of commitment and love and an almost blind religious faith in the strength of the bond of sex.

From this moment a historical shift obtains, the effects of which we still feel today: adults, in an affluent country that had been premised on the notion of delaying gratification for the sake of one’s children, began to put their own gratification first, and the children were left to accommodate the grown-ups’ second infancy. Often, we became our parents’ parents.

Early adolescence—which for us meant the ages of about ten to thirteen—involved a twofold alteration of our identities in relation to sexuality. One aspect had to do with abandoning the activity of our erotic imaginations to become at least overtly more passive. The other had to do with relinquishing our excitement about physical space—which had been a sexual dimension for us—and accepting that, because of our sex, we would not be free to plunge headlong into the open world. This twofold change being worked upon us felt like preparation. Our unruly child’s consciousness of eroticism was being smoothed over…so that the more socially acceptable, constrained, and yielding young-lady sexual consciousness could be applied to the surface.

…girls go from being distinct personalities at ten to amorphous, uncertain creatures at thirteen. An analogous process, I am convinced, takes place in relation to girls’ loss of the ‘voice’ of their own desire. The culture that surrounds girls signals them that they must, sexually, forget themselves. They must become passive in relation to the energy of desire, or detached from owning it, even in the face of its increasingly active pressure.

Why is it a cliché that a powerful car gets a teenage boy dates with the most desirable girls? Because the boy and his car have become the stand-in for the girl’s relationship to the vistas now forbidden to her. She learns to project onto love relationships all the drama, discovery, and meaning that she would otherwise find on the open road…We needed space so badly. When we discovered that, if we went with boys, space would open up for us, we found, to our surprise, that we needed boys. And yet boys were part of the danger.

…our regret at the separation was wrenching as we began to move away from our infatuations with girls, whom we saw as captivating, civilized beings, into the world of sex with boys, those ill-spoken, skateboard-wielding Visigoths. It was like moving a love life from a Henry James novel into a Spiderman comic.

If we were out of line sexually, we could become sluts; if we became sluts, we would die several deaths. This equation was so much a part of the air we breathed that we could scarcely examine it. The impulse to equate women’s being sexual with their suffering a swift, sure punishment is reflexive.

Naomi spends three days with her teenage boyfriend in a San Francisco hotel: For the first time, I felt that apotheosis that is the aim of adolescence: total freedom from familiar social pressures; from the identity imposed on me by family, school, friends; the humiliations of peer judgments; the frustrations and limitations of youth itself…the weight of these clashing systems of control and expectation around female sexuality was just too much. In my mind, under the burden of all those dictates competing to stereotype rather than support me, the legitimacy of the notion of such control simply collapsed. If, no matter what step I took, I outraged some of those dictates, then I might as well please myself.

But what if women’s innate sexual wildness is always, by definition, in a state of low-level rebellion against the very domesticity and commitment it is incumbent on women to seek out? The demon lover’s tendency toward chaos and escape and risk and selfishness may be seen as a projection of inadmissible female longings onto the male—a way of safely handling and vicariously experiencing the release of women’s own wish sometimes to be “out of control.”

In our culture, a girl’s passage through tests and rigors into womanhood is marked in the realm of body control such as dieting, but also in the realm of sex acts and the accumulation of material possessions. Our girls move toward womanhood through the demarcations of what they can buy and own or of who wants to sleep with them.

On many high school and college campuses I’ve visited, girls explain that you aren’t called promiscuous if you have sex when you are drunk or overpowered or “swept away.” You are called promiscuous if you have sex when you are aware of what’s going on and are able to talk about it. It’s not the sex but the consciousness of what you are doing of your own volition that makes you a slut.

The rites of passage that girls create for themselves in contemporary Western culture out of this frustrated drive to know themselves and prove themselves women in turn produce many of the social ills that concern our communities. E.g., pregnancy and abortion.

We were untaught or mistaught culturally; we also were untaught or mistaught physiologically. Though the experience of losing our virginity was not what most of us had hoped it would be, we went right on into physically adult sexual relationships. And the first “womanly” phase of our lives was infinitely complicated because we were given neither the time nor the information even to begin to understand our physical selves.

[Boys’:] sex drive was considered normative, but ours, if it paralleled theirs, was deviant; we did not know what a big cultural fib that premise was. We did not know when we felt wild and danced to Patti Smith’s Horses with our hair flying and could not stand ourselves for one more minute and wanted to tear the world open, we were not incipient sluts, but normal girls becoming women.

We as a society would be in a better moral state if we handed fifteen-year-old girls a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves and gave them a detailed discussion of how safely to explore their sexuality than we are when we maintain a hypocritical silence about teenage girls’ natural desire, and tolerate the highest teen pregnancy and abortion rate in the industrialized world. So many girls should not have to suffer this trauma or else lose their young hopes—even risk their lives—in simply trying to find who they are, and what a sensible Nature has granted them.

The most difficult aspect of what I had learned in Martin’s fraternity house was the way in which the brothers’ view of women and their sexuality was a more accurate reflection of “the real world”—the adult world—than Martin’s and my experience was. We were made to feel that we were wrong and childish and that “they”—with their Penthouse magazines, their Budweiser girlie posters, and their adversarial attitude toward the women they courted in the evening and derided the following noon—were sophisticated and in sync with the world. Their certainty made me doubt myself. If “sex” is Penthouse, I thought, well then, Penthouse must be the measure of my life. If I am to have love and admiration, I must pay attention to its rules.

After an attempted seduction by an admired English professor: Once we could be sexualized by older men, it seemed as if that fact was permitted to corrupt any responsibility they had for our development. At any moment the groping hand could come through the greenhouse pane. We girls and young women seemed to be valuable to these grown-ups not because we were our growing selves but because they could use us to teach them to play and to stanch their own middle-aged insecurities. Touching our youth like a fetish, they could convince themselves that it was okay that they wanted so much to do so.

Before [AIDS:], when mainstream culture was saying to us, “Go for it,” we had worked hard to imagine the punishments of the slut as aberrations left over from a bad old world that was, we hoped, passing away. But now it seemed that nature itself was out to confirm the inevitability of the punishment our sexuality could elicit. It wasn’t true, what they’d promised us—that we could go where we wanted to go and lie down and yield our bodies to strangers, take our pleasure and put on our lipstick in the morning and call a cab. It was not true. It had been one long, inveigling dream. The sluts got nailed, just as they’d always been; just as we’d always, beneath our bravado, feared.

Many modern women who marry, it seems, no matter how independent and how politically self-aware they are, still harbor strong feelings about the dress they wear on their wedding day.

Can we imagine for our own daughters still better information that can shape a better sexual culture? Yes. We can encourage them to believe that the notion that female sexuality participates in the divine image should not remain a curiosity in history books but should be a presumption underpinning their daily lives. We can teach our daughters that shame belongs to the act of abusing or devaluing female sexuality, not to that sexuality itself.

Obviously, girls need better rites of passage in our culture…. I’d like to propose that groups of friends with children sign one another up, upon the birth of a daughter [to:] join with a few other women, and a small cohort of girls, in the girls’ thirteenth year, for a retreat…such as a hiking or camping trip…. There, the older women would pass on to the younger everything they have learned about womanhood, and answer every single question the girls want to ask. According to their culture and religion, the older women would teach the younger skills and techniques, such as self-defense, contraception, sexual pleasure, and parenting, passing on to them an ethic of adulthood as well as an ethic of sexual responsibility—helping them, too, to recognize when they are truly ready to become women.

I think we in our culture became women when we made the gradual decision that, even if we didn’t know what womanhood meant or when we had arrived there for sure, all the markers imposed on us were flawed; and we were somehow going to find a way, through whatever struggle it would take, to determine for ourselves the meaning of “becoming women.”

[Courtney Stirrat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok, so I am not finished reading - ah, the night is young, but I am shocked by how, well, out of date this feels. I bought it when it first came out, but somehow never got to it, even though I am a pretty big fan of the Wolf (she's a cutie, too!). What is most astonishing is not '60s through late '70s, Bay area teen perspective, but how, well, second wave it feels, or maybe 2.5 wave. But it doesn't examine or embrace the contradictions inherent in so many heterosexual sexual relationships or discussions thereof (and don't even get me started about the lesbians, who apparently only merit mention when discussing who would have the appropriate reaction to the example of a sex crime. We, apparently, have no promiscuities to promise the cuties. But, fine, its hetero, I'm down.). It doesn't even really account for empowered female sexuality within the confines of the second generation of the sexual revolution, which rings a bit stilted.

I am on sort of a "should I go back to Grad school, independent feminista reading fest" and I am really shocked at all that (what one former acquaintance nicknamed the book) "Promise Cuties, Promiscuities" lacks. If I push myself to think back to the Clinton days, I still feel kind of retro-fied. Mayhaps it is me? Have I been listening to too much Bikini Kill?

More thoughts after I give the book and the ensuing chapters the attention they deserve.

Ach! The chapters on violence and AIDS make me want to put on my docs and go stomp. Apart from a subtle insinuation that HIV opens one up to risk from all of her partners, partners = women are slutty, these are really well done, from both the personal and the political movement perspective. Still feeling a bit dated, but very very powerful stuff.

In the end, its a mixed bag. I think, however, beginning the book with the notion that it is part memoir - Wolf is the one who secretly struggled for Womanhood - helps the read. Also remembering that the third wave (and its pop culture foes and icons) have done a lot of work on female sexuality in the 12 years since Wolf wrote Promiscuities. At several points in the concluding chapter, I wanted to write in my book, "I couldn't help but wonder . . . 'Are we sluts?'"

Odd that Carrie Bradshaw should be the voice I hear following Wolf, no?

[Syd Markle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sexuality, my own in particular, is not an easy subject for me to discuss. No doubt, I am not alone in my shyness when it comes to talking about how I feel about sex. There is a lingering fear that surrounds the word “sexuality” and even more so around the world “promiscuity.”

Naomi Wolf has taken and anecdotal approach to evaluating the secret history of female desire with her book, Promiscuities. Through conversation with her friends and by tell her own coming of age story Wolf reveals the winding history of female sexuality through time. The bulk of anecdotal experience is centered in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, circa 1969. However, she does cover many historical references to female sexuality and the prevailing social standards regarding women and sex.

I found, even though I grew up more than 20 years later, that some of her experiences were still true to my own. Feminism. AIDS. Media. All these things have impacted they way we look at sex. And in effect, for most (at least for myself), has left huge gaps of confusion when it comes to morality and spirituality. How far is too far? Is it wrong to be sexual advanced? Will something bad happen to me (illness for example) if I enjoy it too much? Will I be punished, shunned, unloved and unwanted if I am a sexual female? Am I weak and co-dependent if I want a man?

‘Emma Goldman: Feminist or Slut?’ one might ask, just as she was mortally afraid that people would; and just as one might ask the question of the discarded but adoring Wollstonecraft, and note the attacks directed at Gloria Steinem for acknowledging passionate feelings for a man. A curious hostility is directed by women against ‘feminist who love too much.’ It is a projection of own failure to integrate the urgency and even neediness of female sexual passion into the strength of female character that creates in us this reflex of animosity. Goldman was in this way no different from so many women; a feminist with genuine ideals waging an internal war with the ‘promiscuity’ of her sexual and emotional feelings for a man. Or, one might also say, keeping in mind what we’ve seen of the fierceness of female desire: a woman with a living mind and living body. Can we make room for so much vitality in ourselves, in the world, in other women? –page 230

There is sharp contrast between the two extremes. The stereotypical slut just doesn’t really do justice to the complexity of female desire. Neither does the virgin. There is a balance there between the two where pride replaces shame–and respect replaces degradation.

[Jeannie Miller]

This is one of the books that helped form my feminism in high school, and reading it again 20 years on was interesting. Wolf remains in my view a strong memoirist - her pictures of adolescent sexual curiosity, exploration, pleasure, repression, shame, and trauma among straight, white, middle-class girls in the 1970s Bay Area are still compelling, however narrowly focused. Her analysis, at times less so. She strikes me here as coming a bit close to blaming swinging parents, less sexual stigma, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show for the bewilderment, abuse, and lack of support she and her young peers often faced, and don't get me started on her Orientalist rhapsodizing about ancient Eastern traditions regarding sexuality. She has a point of course about needing to recognize the sacredness of sexuality and the centrality of pleasure in talking to young people about sex, and the need for young people to be supported in experiencing meaningful coming-of-age rituals, but man is her pitch tedious. Glad I reread it, but not going on the feminist for young people in my life.

[Asma Khadraoui · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aside from how irrelevant and outdated this felt, the author has some interesting experiences that she talks about. Not outstanding, but still, I think it's worth checking.

[jo]

Wolf’s observations are best when she talks about the specific experiences of herself and her friends, where it reads like an examination of her life and memories that the reader can link to her extrapolations - therefore, even if the reader disagrees with her logical reasoning, we can sympathise with the emotional reasoning behind her conclusions.

The same generosity is not so easily applied when Wolf discusses historical events and records, and it’s on those parts that these essays fall down. Still, an interesting glimpse into 90s-style feminism.

[Shannon Wyss · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent exploration of what it was like to grow up and come of age sexually as a white, heterosexual, middle-class, Jewish girl in the late 1960s and early 1970s in San Francisco. As someone who is about 10 years younger than Wolf and also queer, i was fascinated by how her experiences were both similar to and also markedly different from my own, growing up in the Midwest in the mid-1970s and early 1980s.

Wolf does a great job of describing where the feminist movement had failed girls at that time (and likely still does) and how the sexual revolution, far from being a positive thing for girls and women, actually caused significant harm in their lives. Her combination of qualitative interviews with historical fact is well-done. And i found her cross-cultural, cross-historical, and cross-religious examples really interesting.

Her description of time periods could have been improved. The first chapter details the years 1968-1971. But it's totally unclear what age Wolf was at that time, which makes placing her experiences throughout the rest of the book difficult. I certainly didn't need to know what age she was at every year. But a simple "I was born in..." or "In 1968, when I was..." would have cleared up the confusion. (And perhaps a brief mention such as those existed and i just missed it.)

All in all, a great book. I would love to see what a similar study written today about girls growing up in the early 2000s would be like. Their lives would likely be found to have been improved somewhat but with significant room still for improvement.

[Lisa Louie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This memoir-cum-analysis of female sexual desire and coming of age is an astounding book. Wolf narrates her own history growing up in the Haight in SF during the free-love Sixties and Seventies. She simultaneously analyzes the way in which her sexual desire was discovered and shaped during those culturally chaotic years and draws conclusions about what girls in Western society lack given the absence of meaningful coming-of-age rituals/rites of passage within our current context. Her arguments are compelling. She explodes the notion that boys' sexual appetite is stronger and more primal than girls and points out the cultural hypocrisy that would threaten girls with degraded status through sexual objectification while simultaneously holding out the golden carrot of status through sexiness and sexual availability. Wolf made me see how fundamental sexual desire is to human identity, and how our society--and some feminists--stunt healthy, whole humane development in girls when they fail to celebrate a girl's sexual desire without demonizing it, pathologizing it, or portraying it as evidence of victimization.

Reading this book has made me more determined to honor adolescent girls' sexuality by looking for appropriate and even reverent ways to validate it.

[Moog · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting unpacking of female desire and the way it is perceived by society. Wolf includes personal stories of her and her friends’ introduction to sex during the sexual and feminist revolutions of the 60s and 70s in the US. Although sexuality became more free and open, Wolf shows that this did not equal the valuing of female sexuality. Women were still not given permission to become sexual on their own terms. This continues to be an issue today, with many negative consequences (such as unwanted pregnancy, rape culture, slut shaming etc.).

Wolf provides alternative historical and cultural ideology around female sexuality. This includes the patterns of identification and erasure, celebration and demonisation, of the clitoris in Western anatomy textbooks. It is useful to hear about other cultures, such as the ancient Chinese Taoists, who viewed female sexuality as sacred and precious, to question its often damaging portrayals in our society.

[Ruthiella · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the thing to keep in mind when reading Promiscuities is that it is essentially a memoir and not a polemic; it is a very personal exploration of 20th century female sexuality. As Wolf writes in the concluding chapter, "I am conscious that an inquiry such as this ends by raising more questions than it can answer; sexuality is so personal, and the creation of a sexual culture such a subtle, collective undertaking, that any simple prescriptions are too crude a response." There were times when I was nodding my head with understanding, but also occasions where could not relate to Wolf's experiences or her conclusions. However, I am definitley glad I read this thought provoking book.

[Heather O'Neill · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is Wolf examination with how girls/women are taught about being sexual beings as they are transitioning from being girls to women. She references many sources about how people thought about women's bodies throughout the history of people. She reflects back on her life and her friend's as they were growing up and how they felt. This book was published in the late 90s and the time when she grew-up was in the 70s. I thought that some of the stuff she talked about was outdated or didn't apply to me, but I felt that the majority of it was still true, especially sex ed in school (granted I don't know how it is taught now, but for me it was the same). The writing was easy to read and get through and I didn't feel like it was a textbook. I would actually give the book 3.5 stars.

[okyrhoe · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book has been published with 2 variant subtitles, Promiscuities: A Secret History of Female Desire and Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood.
As a cultural critique Promiscuities may seem limited by the narrow focus on Wolf's personal experiences. As a memoir, or an ethnological study, of growing up female in the liberal/radical social milieu of San Francisco in the 1970's, it is a worthwhile read.
It is interesting to note that Wolf makes a case for the reintegration of coming-of-age ritual(s) in the life of teenagers, something which Steve Biddulph also proposes in Manhood.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book bothered me and I couldn't finish it. The message wasn't completely terrible, but it was extremely limited in scope: white, straight, middle-class, cis-gendered women making their sexual debut in the decade after the sexual revolution. I know it is an older book now but I think she could have done way better. Also way too biographical, I know lots of people can relate to her story and I'm not saying that to invalidate her story or say what she and the other people interviewed in this book experienced are not important and real, but it was limiting. Ultimately just not the kind of book I was hoping to read, pretty disappointing.

[Celina · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Noelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Naomi Wolfs books resonate with me in part because we are the same age and grew up in the SF bay area.

While my mother was a little more suburban hippy and she actually lived in the haight, the cultural references and attitudes are always exactly my experience.

This book triggered many charged memories and gave an interesting perspective on them. I think this book is particularly relevant to girls today who are dealing with issues around owning (and not) owning their sexuality.

N

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first "women's studies" book that I explored on my own. I actually bought it on a family vacation in high school, far different than a trashy beach read but incredible. It's so interesting to explore both sexuality and the idea of being a "woman" without the feeling of negative judgment.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ahh Naomi Wolf...Sometimes I love thee, sometimes I wonder what kind of feminism you are expounding to me. I felt a great generation gap when I read this. But I appreciate her poing of view nonetheless.

[Kenny Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my mind, one of the most influential third wave feminist books. I'm a little sorry that Wolf has changed gears and is now writing more political analysis. Her take on growing up female in America was incredibly insightful.

[boat_tiger · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I had read this book sooner. I recommend this book to every woman, not just those from my generation (born during the 60's and 70's). I found that, though published in 1997, this book still rings true today. It definitely defined with frightening accuracy my experiences growing up as a female. I could relate to every word. I experienced many of the same things experienced by the women in the book. One of the most important books I've ever read and very well written. A more accurate telling of what it's like to grow up a female I haven't yet found nor read.

[Millie Leather · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intricate delve into “becoming a women” - I want to read this again and again.

[Amelia · Rating 4 out of 5]

super interesting book. looks at Naomi’s subjective experience of sexuality which ties in a sociological critique. a little outdated but super interesting perspective !

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

100% agree

[Rachele Maria · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not about the 90s riot grrrl like I thought it would be. This gave me more insight to my parents generation. It reads more like a college essay than I thought it would. It just wasn’t the book of relatable stories that I thought it would be.

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though not for the casual reader or the anti feminist, Promiscuities would make a great book club read, and the comprehensive index is reason enough to keep it on the shelf. I liked the mix of personal and analytical, but I don't completely agree with Newsweek's review on the back cover: "... more original than The Beauty Myth... She melts together the personal and the political so gently we're barely aware of the difference." Yes, she does do this well, but for me the book felt a bit fragmented, at least in comparison to The Beauty Myth.

Still, it has a lot to offer. Because of the personal in it, I relate to this almost memoir/not quite polemic about growing up girl in middle-class California in the 70s, though she is a few years older than I am, and so experienced certain social nuances at different formative stages than I did. But she brought them to life for me... made me think of my mother, my step-mothers, my grandmas, my best friends from lives past.

Here are some of my highlights and dog ears:

"White middle-class girls are members of a tribe, just like any other subculture, with certain clothing, language patterns, and belief systems... I write about this tribe because it is the one I know best."

"I have no feelings about this contradictory epoch that are not ambivalent; delight and mourning are so closely intertwined that they seem part of one another."

"The fathers' departure created in many women my age a feeling of cynicism about the durability of the bonds of commitment and love and an almost blind religious faith in the strength of the bond of sex."

"The fear of being out of control--in relation to food and money as well as sex--is characteristic of contemporary women."

"... girls need better rites of passage in our culture."

"What would our culture--and our divorce rate--look like if we dared to teach men the skills that could keep women's promiscuously responsive bodies happy in monogamous lives... if boys were taught to treat teenage girls neither like prudes nor sluts but like nascent sexual goddesses, and respect their sexuality and reproductive potential accordingly... if men believed that true masculinity meant becoming an extraordinary lover to a life partner?"

I'm surprised that I like that last one so much, seeing as how I'm considering starting/joining an underground movement to ban marriage as a legally binding institution ;)

As with The Beauty Myth, I find this book increasingly--and so, frighteningly--relevant today.

[Nicole Field · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book...

This book has some incredibly astute thoughts relating to women and the way they view their own sexuality. What struck me particularly was how many things I identified with regardless of the 20-30 ish year age gap between Naomi's experiences and my own.

I had heard a lot of not great stuff about Naomi Wolf, run of the mill stuff that a whole bunch of feminist writers get, but I didn't think any of it was founded in this case. I knew that I hadn't read a Naomi Wolf book in the past and that I wanted to, and now I'm happy that I did.

Now onto the stuff that made this not a five-star rating.

The introduction is dry and doesn't correctly represent the book you're about to read. What you're about to read, if you pick up Promiscuities is a very memoir-based book, including transcripts of other experiences from the same generation, interspersed with dates and facts to do with such things as the existence and denial of the clitoris. The book can be read without looking at the introduction at all, I just tend to be curious, when opening an academic text, what nature of thought went into the book I'm about to read. In the end, it turned out to be more of a narrative than an academic text.

To be truthful, I found some of those educational dates and facts went for too long and deviated from the cohesion of the larger piece. I found myself skipping some of them but, being as these extended passages are only in three or four of the many chapters that make up this book, it's not all that terrible. And, being as someone else might read this book particularly for those segments, it's hardly unforgivable.

All in all, I'm very happy that I sat down and gave this book a try. I will definitely be reading more books from Naomi Wolf in the future.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A DISCUSSION OF ‘HOW DO WE TURN GIRLS INTO WOMEN?’

Author and journalist Naomi Wolf wrote in the Introduction to this 1997 book, “How do we turn girls into women?... It has been difficult to discuss this aspect of girlhood because the years of female adolescence that so determine girls’ confidence … [are] very different, a much more intense sexual drama, than it has ever been before. I wanted to retrieve this secret struggle for womanhood that now characterizes female coming of age… girls’ sexuality is everywhere on display… But the question of what to make of girls’ sexual experience is usually taken out of girls’ own hands.” (Pg. xv)

She continues, “So the following is not a polemic but a series of confessions, a subjective exploration based on a collection of real life stories…. I also wanted to write the book this way because the teenage girl… is understood more clearly as a victim of culture and sexuality than as a sexual and cultural creator…. This book’s title is about just this tension between the said and the unsaid. ‘Promiscuous’ … is one of the harsh epithets with which the culture concerns a woman who has any kind of sexual past. It is a word that holds within it mixed messages girls today are given about sex… The fear of being labeled promiscuous accompanies contemporary girls on each stage of their erotic exploration… Another reason I felt the need to tell these stories … [is because] Women my age and younger have inherited a sexual script, derived from both the feminist and sexual revolutions, that is by now out-of-date---or, rather, that requires a new ending.” (Pg. xvi-xvii)

She adds, “Women… rightly fear that they, in many more ways than men, will be defined by the sexual experience, and defined negatively.” (Pg. xxi)

Later, she goes on, “This book is also an inquiry into the nature of female passion, into the ways our culture values and devalues it, and into how cultures other than our own have understood it… one aim of this book is to look at just how the scripts and images we have of female sexuality came to be what they are and how we can change them to reclaim for women that sexual ‘good place.’ For while the female erotic DRIVE has been a steady force, assumptions about female sexual pleasure---and hence women’s experience of their own pleasure---have varied wildly from era to era.” (Pg. xxiii)

She recounts a frightening experience with an older boy at a day camp in the summer: “The feeling I had in the grove---that I must think, hard and fast, to escape mortal danger, counting on no one else for rescue---is the loneliest feeling for a child. An extraordinary number of girls… experience it young, whether or not they have actually been abused. It is an existential crisis. Many girls then associate that encounter with being sexual women. I think few boys who have not been abused associate the risk of sexual terror with becoming men.” (Pg. 33)

She says, “If we were out of line sexually, we could become sluts. If we became sluts, we could die several deaths. This equation was so much a part of the air we breathed that we could scarcely examine it. The impulse to equate women’s being sexual with their suffering a swift, sure punishment is reflexive.” (Pg. 64)

She recounts an experience with a ‘boyfriend’ of sorts, who was physically abusive to her. “When I told my parents that Ben had struck me---I lied, and said it was just the once---they immediately made me stop seeing him. I was allowed to say goodbye in their presence, and that was it. I have no doubt that the fact that the women’s community was ‘raising consciousness’ about domestic violence at the time helped them to be so quick to intervene and so uncharacteristically firm… I was glad they made me. At that point, I could not have made myself. (I would like to describe that intervention to everyone who has ever dared to assert that ‘feminism failed.’ For all I know, it saved me from real harm.”) (Pg. 95)

She observes, “Sex itself is too easy to be a rite of passage; it is indiscriminate. Just about anyone can do it. But rites of passage are, by definition, discriminative. They are meant to weed out the boys from the men---and we females are just as intent on distinguishing the girls from the women. Where else in our culture but in girls’ accepting and even colluding in the fact that the passage to womanhood is painful and dangerous is the necessary trial by fire or water to be found?” (Pg. 134)

A young women told her, “Sex ed revolved around boys’ pleasure… The message was pretty much: you have to be careful with what you do with boys ‘cause they’ll get excited and want to have sex with you…' they’re the enemy that I have to beware of. Female sexual pleasure was not even on the agenda. It was assumed we would want to be with boys because that would give us status---not because we wanted to know what sex was like or that it would give us satisfaction… It was presumed that girls would want to have sex with boys basically because boys pressured them into having sex.” (Pg. 140)

She suggests, “Obviously, girls need better rites of passage in our culture. Such rituals… require rigor, separation from males and from the daily environment, and the exchange of privileged information. It is important, in such rituals, for grown women outside the family to be part of that initiation. I’d like to propose that groups of friends with children sign one another up, upon the birth of a daughter, for the responsibility.” (Pg. 230)

She wonders, “What would happen to our divorce rate if we accepted that, when women long to be attentively touched, gazed at, caressed, deeply kissed, and surrounded with sensuality---when they long to be given a kind of sexual adoration or devotion, and an ‘extreme’ abundance of pleasure---it is … because … that is how women are made, and their erotic nature brought into balance? What would our culture---and our divorce rate---look like if we dared to teach men the skills that could keep women’s promiscuously responsive bodies happy in monogamous lives? What would male adolescent sexual behavior look like if boys were taught to treat teenage girls neither like prudes nor sluts but like nascent sexual goddesses, and respect their sexuality and reproductive potential accordingly? What would our violent landscape look like if men believed that true masculinity meant becoming an extraordinary lover to a live partner? What would we get if we let women’s passion truly enter and dwell in our social world? Above all else that would accrue to us, we would have our girls enter into womanhood fully alive.” (Pg. 232-233)

This book will be of keen interest to those studying the development of girls into women, and beyond.