“Promiscuities” is Wolfs most successful book, more original than “The Beauty Myth” and more genuinely reflective than her political analysis in “Fire With Fire.” It does have weaknesses similar to theirs, especially a tendency to “celebrate” tough issues instead of grappling with them. She just isn’t an intellectual, though she plays one in public. But what she proves here, for the first time, is that she’s a writer.
Much of “Promiscuities” is devoted to Wolfs own sexual growing-up, and she evokes her past with charm and skill. Raised in San Francisco in the ’60s, she and her friends watched the city go hippie, and their parents, too. Enthralled by the times, many adults simply let their kids loose to grow up on their own. Her folks were more conservative–before her boyfriend could stay overnight, she writes, she had to clean up her room. One thoughtful passage describes how Wolf and her boyfriend went to a local clinic to get birth control. The staff was pleasant and efficient, and the event had no more moral content than a trip to the vet. “The message we got was, you can be adults without trying,” she writes.
Of course, they couldn’t. Wolf interviewed her childhood friends at length and quotes their painful memories of early sexuality. Today, as the parent of a girl herself, she would like to invent a ceremony for helping girls cross into womanhood–so they could learn women’s sexuality from women, not teenage boys and Calvin Klein. Her idea is an all-female retreat in the wilderness, similar to what’s been proposed for 50-year-old women by the various joy-of-menopause authors. (Can’t anyone think of a way to honor the feminine without going camping?) But Wolf’s breakthrough in “Promiscuities” isn’t ideological, it’s literary. In her best chapters here, she melts together personal and the political so gently we’re rarely aware of the difference.
Wolf doesn’t mention it, but there’s a major problem with dropping the taboo against women writing about sex: you encourage people like Tara McCarthy. Her Been There, Have’nt Done That (224 pages. Warner. $22) is also a sexual memoir, the gimmick being that at 25, she’s a virgin. To explain her way of life (which includes sex without Sex), she describes every date she ever had. The tedium is as excruciating as the grammar. Too bad she didn’t just tell her story to Wolf–it would have made a fine footnote in “Promiscuities.”
