DATE: Sunday, July 6, 1997 TAG: 9706260551 SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL TYPE: Book Review SOURCE: BY LENORE HART LENGTH: 77 lines
PROMISCUITIES
The Secret Stuggle for Womanhood
NAOMI WOLF
Random House. 286 pp. $24.
Naomi Wolf's memoir, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood, may make parents consider locking up their daughters during the tumultuous passage from child to adult. I did, and mine's only 5.
Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, examines the epithet ``promiscuous.'' Why is it applied to girls only? One young interviewee says, ``You're promiscuous if you do anything, but you're a prude if you do nothing. . . You're betrayed either way.''
Wolf ponders how labels like ``slut'' affect personal development, using ``private histories'' of her self and her friends. They matured in 1970s Haight-Ashbury, as parents ``dropped out,'' leaving kids without emotional support or boundaries - or even sensible breakfasts - to fall back on:
```If it feels good, do it,' we would learn. . . ,'' she writes. ``If we had a question about sex. . . `It happens in nature,' generally signified the end of the conversation.''
Wolf illuminates the ``shadow slut who walks alongside us as we grow,'' intimidating women into denying sexual feelings. Alley lurkers, a divorced mother's predatory ``friend,'' the abusive boyfriend, all confronted her contemporaries. Yet girls were blamed. By parents, camp counselors, teachers, coaches, who tagged certain girls, by clothes or posture or speech, as promiscuous.
From the Latin, ``promiscuous'' can simply mean ``of various kinds mixed together.'' Wolf deems this the best description of the sexual experiences through which girls mature. ```Become a woman' in our culture, does not mean: show us you can weave, as it did in Melanesia, or even show us you can embroider samplers, direct the servants and play a harpsichord, as it did in. woman' means simply, `Take off your clothes.' '' Just do it!
Later generations inherited the ``technologies of freedom'': contraception, legal abortion, Our Bodies, Our Selves. But no real value, respect or reward for female sexuality. Culture encourages boys to be lustful predators and girls to assume blame, or ``blank out''; disavow willing participation (``I don't know how it happened''). Acknowledging volition can be dangerous.
In the 1970s, Wolf recounts, ``With some exceptions, adults were feckless, or they were buddies, or else they were suppliers of drugs, or else they were predators.'' Her crowd consumed Lolita, fearing it revealed the adult male attitude toward women (physical disgust) and girls (consuming lust). They pitied mute Lolita. Vladimir Nabokov's jacket photo looked ``ancient,'' Wolf recalls, like ``the older men who were continually trying to get at us. . . not the dreamy movie stars that Humbert sees himself as. . . ''
I'd like to denounce this memoir as trash, but it sparked recognition. The competitive digs from ``best'' friends, the reputation trashing, the backseat struggles, the parental abdication. And I grew up in a Southern town, not San Francisco.
Promiscuities isn't a laundry list of horrors. It's bold, candid, funny. Why not? Sexual awakening is expected as leitmotif in young men's ``coming of age'' stories, real or fictional.
Near book's end, Wolf preps for her wedding, browses ``Brideland'' finery, ``(needing) to recreate an image that had lodged in my head . . . when I was seven or eight,'' from an English ballad. In ``The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies'' an aristocratic woman leaves house, husband and feather bed to sleep in fields with her Gypsy lover.
Wolf flails through miles of satin and tulle, finally discovering a ``beat-up, yellowing gown with a vast skirt of netting. . . (it) looked as if it had. . . been worn by someone who'd been sleeping in a forest.'' Technically white, its age, imperfections and wear stood ``for my own coming of age. . . If my past had not yet made me a woman, whatever that was, it had at least helped provide me with the rudiments of a self to give.''
A damn good accounting of the strange refiner's fire through which women must pass. MEMO: Lenore Hart, the author of ``Black River,'' is a novelist who
lives on the Eastern Shore.
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