Fire with fire: The new female power and how it will change the 21st century
By Naomi Wolf
Random House. 378 pp. $19.95
Reviewed by Karen Fredericks
Naomi Wolf says "power feminism" is the ultimate answer to women's problems and, to demonstrate, she has produced the ultimate "power feminism" product — a book guaranteed to make her plenty of money, garner endless media attention and secure for her a place at the bosom of her beloved system.
Establishment adulation of Wolf's Fire with fire has already begun. Here, the book's release was heralded on the front page of the Australian with a huge photograph of the author — so that no-one would be in any doubt that Naomi Wolf is the (young, attractive, smiling) face of modern feminism. The newspaper also serialised large chunks of the book over a week, and ran quarter-page ads promoting the serialisation. Considering the Australian's track record on feminism, suspicions were immediately aroused. Those who were suspicious were right.
Wolf's first book, The Beauty Myth, resonated deeply with young, predominantly middle class, campus feminists, and contributed to a healthy burst of discussion and activism. She observed that the possession of formally "equal" legal and political rights did not mean real equality in practice, even for relatively privileged and economically independent women.
She identified the "beauty myth" — an unattainable, prescribed template of female beauty — as a factor holding women back from full participation in society and, some of us extrapolated, from political activism. She documented the crimes of the cosmetics, diet, pornography and plastic surgery industries, and railed against the images of women presented in the establishment media. She armed feminist activists with a battery of scrupulously researched and footnoted data and, along with Susan Faludi, was hailed widely as one of the "new generation" of accessible, relevant, hip feminist commentators.
Fire with Fire also has the potential to ignite a very useful political discussion amongst feminists, but that is not its intention. This book is an outright attempt to re-route the energies of young, privileged, first world women inclined to fight for equal rights, into strategies which pose no threat to the current economic and political system. She wants to provide a theoretical framework to justify a new generation of coopted femocrats to themselves.
In order to appeal to a "new generation", Wolf refers constantly to the shortcomings of what she identifies as "victim feminism". She lumps together some valid criticisms of certain feminist theories, which have been caricatured by the establishment media (e.g., all men are the enemy) together with some invalid ones (e.g., rape crisis centres are ugly and under-resourced because "victim feminists" like to be martyrs) so as to retain her hip '90s image, and differentiate herself from the media's mythical and monolithic "hairy legged radical Marxist lesbian separatist" dinosaurs of the '60s and '70s.
Beneath this camouflage, Wolf's central thesis is that because women have obtained formal equality, and most importantly the right to vote, and because they are a majority in the first world (51% in the US, 51.3% in Europe), they are the "political ruling class", with the "historical distinction", as she puts it, "of being the only ruling class that is unaware of its status".
But, she says, the 1990s have seen a "genderquake" take place around the (first) world, and "the meaning of being a woman has been changed forever". We are now ready to use our power, she informs us, all we need to do is stop being "afraid" to do so.
Wolf's "genderquake" is posited on some extremely shaky evidence: the Anita Hill case (which Hill lost) ; the election of "the Clintons"; the election of the first female prime minister of Canada (whose conservative party has been decimated since Wolf's book went to press); and, unbelievably, the "re-election, on the women's vote, of socialist [sic] Prime Minister Paul Keating in Australia ... because he took women's issues seriously".
But it is Wolf's conception of "power" which most decisively proves this book a worthless confection of reactionary drivel.
Women are already "powerful", she says, because they hold over 50% of votes in the US, because "there are now 2.339 million US women with annual incomes of over $50,000", and because they account for over 80% of consumer spending in the US and "the advertiser/consumer relationship, like the media/consumer relationship, is dictated by the mobilised consumer". It is only "negative therapeutic reaction", or "the feminine fear of power" which holds us back from ruling the world.
That anyone but a committed propagandist could seriously posit that real power is exercised by ordinary US voters at the ballot box once every four years, that a handful of marginally higher-paid working women exercise decisive, or even marginal, economic power in the US economy and that "mobilised consumers" control the US media, is laughable.
But Wolf's prescription to women, in order that we may overcome our "negative therapeutic reaction" to our unconscious position as the "political ruling class", is beyond laughable. It's: "Power groups".
"The gathering is structured around ... a party. The women are well fed; there is wine and music. They meet, talk, drift through the room, happy to see the women they like personally ... Then, at some point in the gathering, each woman announces to the group what she is doing and what resources, contacts or information she has access to. She also tells the group what resources, contacts or information she needs. Every women gets a list of other women's numbers; anyone can contact anyone else to make a request, propose a project, exchange information or suggest a deal."
By this mechanism, she says, any woman can "dive right into that society of power — the men's clubs, the money — and open it up from within".
But what if you're not well fed, can't afford bottled wine, don't have the phone on and don't have any "useful" contacts anyway? Anticipating these questions, Wolf acknowledges that "much of the access we [her own "power group"] generated was a result of the fact that the group was disproportionately middle class and even more privileged". But, she assures us, "such a group can enlarge its members' access at many points on the economic scale". Perhaps they could admit the odd factory worker to contribute information on strike activities planned by her union, or get a Bangladeshi peasant to the gathering, via satellite, to swap recipes.
But Wolf is not writing for working class or Third World women. Her book is directed at the privileged few who, like herself, will be welcomed into the male establishment, even perhaps into the true ruling class, if they adapt their "feminism" to fit.
Wolf's "power feminism" fits perfectly. It's about learning to "feel good" about having plenty of money and wielding power "responsibly" within the system. It's about not rocking the boat, discarding old, disabling notions of "patriarchy" and "capitalism", and accepting that true equality with men will mean that there will inevitably be rich, powerful women and poor, powerless women, just like it is with men, and that's OK.
But even Wolf is aware that the position of "power feminists" is precarious. She quotes media consultant Nancy Woodhull as saying, "In the '60s we (feminists) could rock the boat because we weren't in it. Now we're in it, but on the edge." From this perilous position, "power feminists" have no option but to protect, even more vigilantly than their male counterparts, the system which oppresses the majority. Sexism will be everywhere until we get out of the boat and build a new one, with plenty of room for everybody.