Detailed item info | Synopsis | Fresh from the success of "The Beauty Myth", cultural muckraker Naomi Wolf here trains her sights upon women's sexual rites of passage. For her research she relies upon her own memories, and those of her friends, of coming into womanhood during the 1970s and early 1980s--after The Pill and before AIDS. Wolf concentrates on the physical and psychological changes that girls experience between 10 and 21, and the resulting limitations brought on by these changes. Her broad exploration of adolescent female eros includes not only the games, erotic dreams, and fantasies of first love, but the accompanying rites of initiation, virginity (and what its loss means), birth control, abortion, pornography, and sexual violence.
| | Size | | Length: | 286 pages | | Height: | 10.0 in. | | Width: | 6.5 in. | | Thickness: | 1.2 in. | | Weight: | 20.8 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | "There are no good girls; we are all bad girls, in the best sense of the word." --Naomi WolfIn this provocative and highly personal new book, Naomi Wolf speaks to women with searing honesty about a subject that has long been taboo: our sexual coming of age. Today, teenage girls sexuality is everywhere put on display. Erotic messages aimed at them are intense and conflicting; yet in a society without rites of passage to guide girls to adulthood, the signposts pointing out how to grow into a self-respecting and healthy sexual womanhood are few.Promiscuities follows a group of adolescent girls as they gradually become aware of themselves as sexual beings and discover what our culture tells them being female means. Drawing on her own experiences as well those of her contemporaries, Naomi Wolf reveals the secrets of our coming of age: the sexual games, forbidden crushes, losses of virginity, and rites of initiation. She also uncompromisingly examines the darker territories of abortion, the influences of the sex industry, and sexual violence that underlie contemporary girls struggle for womanhood. By bringing into light our relationship to the "shadow s***" that conditions our sexual development, Promiscuities explores how the sexual experiences of the adolescent years determine womens sense of their own value as adults, and envisions how we could better guide girls through the "normatively shocking" landscape they now inhabit. Finally, Wolf looks at the popular culture of the recent past, as well as at the history and mythology of female desire, to show how our "liberated" culture still fears and distorts female passion.Bold and candid, funny and revelatory, Wolfs stories illustrate the fear and excitement, the fantasies and sometimes crippling realities, that make up a young contemporary womans journey of erotic and emotional discovery.This is Naomi Wolf's bravest, most engaging, most thoroughly argued, and most important book to date. If The Beauty Myth, which helped to change what women see when they look in the mirror, was a benchmark, Promiscuities will be a landmark: an exceptionally frank sexual memoir of an individual as well as of a generation that will help change the way women perceive and talk about their own sexuality. An invitation to a better way of teaching girls the value of being female, Promiscuities is also a call to women of all ages not only to claim but also to celebrate the extraordinary nature of their sexuality.
In her bravest, best-written, most thoroughly argued, and most important book to date, the bestselling author of "The Beauty Myth" provides a provocative, honest account of growing up female in post-sexual-revolution America.
| | Industry reviews | "At last, a new generation of women writers is addressing the powerful issue of female sexuality. I gulped this wonderful book down in one sitting, like a novel. Brava, Naomi Wolf, for you courage, your intelligence, your lucid prose."
publisher's ad copy - Erica Jong
"Naomi Wolf gives the ultimate gift to every American Woman: she helps us understand ourselves. In 'Promiscuities', she unmasks our sexual faces by unmasking her own, showing what can be treasured beneath that mask in all of us. She reclaims what we had to shove aside in girlhood, encouraging all of us to be our total selves."
publisher's ad copy - Marianne Williamson
"I wish I'd had Naomi Wolf's sincere and honest approach to this subject ten years earlier. Growing up would be a different experience for younger girls if they weren't perpetually navigating the strait between virgin and s***. For that matter, young men should read this book too."
publisher's ad copy - Tabitha Soren
"Wolf writes in the 'first person sexual,' using her own coming-of-age as the starting point of her analysis. No doubt, many of her memories will resonate with female readers who will welcome Wolf's ability to make meaningful even seemingly trivial teenage incidents by putting them into a larger cultural context. 'Promiscuities' is a gold mine of observations, facts, anecdotes and ideas about the making of female sexuality."
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review - Christine Schoefer (06/08/1996)
"[Her] memoir returns us to William Carlos Williams's dictum, 'No ideas but in things.' Wolf's best ideas in 'Promiscuities' are the small, sharp ones that leap right out of the 'things' she is considering" her own and her friends' experiences as young girls trying to claim their sexual selves in the lurid hothouse of seventies San Francisco....As long as her thinking stays close to those memories....as much about betrayal, class and competition as innocence and yearning, she hits the nail on the head...[harkening] back to the best of second-wave feminism, those early consciousness-raising sessions, before the stunning authority of simple storytelling got drowned in a wave of bloated theory. Before she succumbs to that wave herself, Wolf manages to give us a girl's-eye view of two 'revolutions'--the sexual and feminist--that promised to set young women free, only to spawn new ways of disempowering them."
Nation - Annie Gottlieb (06/06/1997)
"Profoundly aware of the psychic dangers a libertine society poses for inexperienced girls, Wolf still likes sex, men, and her own body; she brings a sane combination of openness and skepticism to a very thorny subject."
Voice Literary Supplement - Ann Powers
"Anyone--particularly anyone who, like Ms. Wolf, was born in the 1960's--will have a very hard time putting down 'Promiscuities.' Told through a series of 'confessions,' her book is a searing and thoroughly fascinating exploration of the complex wildlife of female sexuality and desire....Blasting away myths is one of Ms. Wolf's great strengths; she firebombs with knowledge and authority citing cultural reference after cultural reference that counters the Western notion....that 'boys want it more.'
New York Times Book Review - Courtney Weaver (06/08/1997)
"While Wolf refuses to professes straightforward gratitude for childhood exposure to glorious West Coast wackiness, she whines less than is the custom among modern, self-aware American adults. There is a warmth and wit in her childhood recollections, despite her darkly convincing insistence that it was during the late 1960s that children were left behind and kids were born as parents selfishly rewrote the emotional contract. Although the best part of 'Promiscuities' deals with childhood, it is about how girls learn to become women in general."
Literary Review - Claudia Fitzherbert (05/19/1997)
" 'Promiscuities' is a daring, startlingly brilliant book. Naomi Wolf tells it her way, joining a beautifully written story of coming of age during the sexual and feminist revolutions with a history that reveals the 'ever-vanishing nature of information' on women's bodies and women's desires. This book encourages every woman to tell it her way--to resist the accusation of promiscuity and create a new philosophy of desire."
Gilligan
"This luminous personal memoir of a young girl's discovery and embrace of her own sexual desire is somewhat dimmed by the author's intrusive, familiar analysis of this culture's misrepresentation of female sexuality. Wolf sets up her third book of feminist social commentary as an ethnography of a subculture--specifically, white, middle-class girls who crossed the threshold of adolescence in the 1970s....Wolf highlights the consequences for girls of our consumer society's emphasis on the exchange value of sex and its reduction of womanhood to rituals of diet, seduction, and the accumulation of possessions."
Myhrvold
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