Docile 'feminism'Docile 'feminism'
Naomi Wolf's new book will be released in Australia this month. Promiscuities: A Secret History of Female Desire has generated much more of a stir in the US and Britain than it deserves.
Maybe it's the word "secret" in the title, or maybe it's just that Wolf has served up a book about sex (always a hot seller), spiced up by a dollop of "feminism" (women talking about sex) that has boosted it into the best sellers list within weeks of publication.
In fact, Promiscuities verges on boring, a "likeable pyjama-party of a book", as one British feminist put it, in which Wolf and a group of her high school friends talk about their adolescent experiences of sexuality, both positive and negative.
Not only is there nothing new or exceptional in Promiscuities — it has all been said many times before by other writers (feminist and otherwise) on women and sexuality — but Wolf's treatment of the experiences she records adds nothing to a feminist understanding of the subject.
Wolf began her career as the US's most high profile feminist with a book that documented, analysed and condemned the role of the multi-billion dollar beauty industry in the exploitation of women. The Beauty Myth, published in 1990, was an important contribution to a whole new generation of young women's understanding of how capitalist economics and ideology operate to keep women in their "proper place".
Just four years later, in Fire with Fire, Wolf was arguing that women are oppressed because they don't have access to the right networks at the centres of political and economic power. She appealed to millions of women to take "revolutionary" action for women's rights by donating to the election funds of females candidates for the major parties.
In so doing, Wolf threw out a fundamental tenet of feminism — that because all women are oppressed as women, the struggle for their liberation must, at every stage and in every sphere, advance the aim of equality for all women — not just those few who make it into the corridors of power.
With Promiscuities, Wolf takes the next step along that well-worn path from radical to tame-cat feminist. By reducing women's inequality to a question of sexuality — the book aims to unravel "how we become women, which is about what happens to us sexually" — and trying to locate "where [and] how women drew away from their natural state of being free, strong and sexual" (italics added), Wolf backs even further away from a critical social perspective into the realm of biological reductionism and pop-psychology.
Promiscuities is about as far from a threat to the institutions of sexist rule as you can get while still being labelled "feminist".
The dust jacket of The Beauty Myth billed Wolf as an "early heroine of woman's world, nineties style". Six years later, Wolf is the establishment's favourite (i.e. docile) feminist.
That acceptability no doubt guarantees Wolf extensive marketing, buckets of royalties and her own liberation from the harsh realities of everyday life. It in no way advances the struggle for women's liberation.
By Lisa Macdonald