Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.708352
EAN: 9780449907641
ISBN: 0449907643
Label: Ballantine Books
Languages: Array
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: 1998-07-21
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Release Date: 1998-07-21
Studio: Ballantine Books

In this provocative and highly personal book, bestselling author Naomi Wolf explores a subject that has long been taboo in our society: women's sexual coming-of-age. Promiscuities brazenly exposes the truths behind the conflicting messages directed at young women during and after the sexual revolution. Drawing on surprising examples from the ancient and recent past, along with vivid recollections of her own youth, Wolf shows how our "liberated" culture still fears and distorts female passion. She also shares fascinating true stories that illustrate the fantasies and sometimes crippling realities women pass through on their way toward erotic and emotional discovery. A landmark book, Promiscuities is a call to women of all ages to reclaim and celebrate their sexuality.
Part memoir, part exposé, Promiscuities is Naomi Wolf's (author of The Beauty Myth and Fire with Fire) perspective on the confusion surrounding female sexuality. According to Wolf, promiscuous is "a word that holds within it the mixed message girls today are given about sex: 'You're promiscuous if you do anything, but you are a prude if you do nothing.'" Thus, still polarized on the spectrum between virgin and whore, adolescent girls are allowed little information and even fewer healthy outlets for their normal sexual desires. Wolf shatters the illusion that good girls and professional women are not sexual, and boldly embarks on redefining female sexuality outside of men's experience and assumptions. Wolf's own coming of age in the post-sexual revolution of Haight-Ashbury, serves as an evocative tool for revealing the naked and admirable truth of female sexuality.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Great writing, vague theories
Comment: The book is partly a memoir about growing up in San Francisco in the early 1970,s and partly a set of ideas about sexual liberation.
Wolf and her friends had no restrictions set by adults and yet imposed a rigid set of rules on each other. They respected parents who were more traditional. She suggests that women became victims of sexual permissiveness. The double standard persisted, she thinks, in ways that made life more difficult for girls.
The story is told so well that it is worth reading for its own sake as entertainment. Wolf is a superb writer but not in the first rank as a social theorist. She is a master of the ability to set a scene with a single memorable phrase, such as describing a shabby building with walls of "stucco the color of dirty erasers." Her theories may be valid but the evidence that she adduces to support them is very subjective. Primarily she relies upon her own intuition and the reports of a small group of friends she grew up with. She does quote from the literature but does so uncritically. Some of the anthropologists' reports she cites about coming of age rituals and so forth are of dubious authenticity. There are almost no reports of statistics or surveys

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not what I was expecting. Thank God.
Comment: The very things that others hate in this book is what makes it so overwhelmingly important to me.
I have so many feminist books on my shelf. They dominate my library. They remain largely unread. I bought them because I believe in everything inside them; I can't read them because I can't stand what they have to say. They are bogged down in factual statements that read like a laundry list of angry, mind-numbing statistics. They try so hard to *prove* their point in this defensive tone of voice (a tone they've earned.) And I just don't need anybody to tell me that I'm not in a privileged position in 50 billion different ways, I don't need anybody to argue me into it. I'm the choir; I'm a woman, I know exactly how I'm treated every day. I know, I get it, I'm doing what I can about it, shut up. But I buy these books because, although they are so morbid, sarcastic, dry, boring, and depressing, they are a bitter pill that I know is good for me. I'm supposed to read them as an educated, intelligent, outspoken feminist.
And so I expected what everyone else apparently wished this book was: another laundry list, more arguments, more facts, blah blah blah, all recited in a dutifully mean and nasty tone of voice (because we wouldn't want to show any empathy or emotion about these subjects, or the boys will call us weak, hysterical females!) I expected for it to hold my attention for all of two pages.
It's been so long since I haven't been able to put a book down, and I found it in this book. Yes, it's personal. It's also so incredibly relatable. The old cliche: it made me cry, it made me laugh. Mostly it did so because she essentially told me all of my own stories in that raw, honest, nostalgic, captivating way that I've always wanted to hear my voice speak. This is the story of every girl I've ever known. She didn't pick girls and their social behavior apart like some sort of lab rats, noting this and that hierarchy, that statistic on teen pregnancy, that one on number of girls who know how to use a condom.
No, she approached girls as what they are: us when we were younger. I understood so much more about my girlhood self after this book, and felt so understood for the first time in so many ways, that I simply cannot fathom anybody having a problem with the personal nature of "Promiscuities." Intimacy is the pinnacle, the crown jewel, of this book, NOT its flaw!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: She speaks for many, many women
Comment: First off the author makes it very clear that her book is part memoir, part exposé of sexual issues in the time period she grew up in. Period.

And having split my time between a small island in Washington state where I took the ferry to Seattle to attend an all girls school and here in Northern California not far from San Francisco I could 100% identify with a lot of what the author wrote about and shared.

Yes, she grew up in a middle class home with academia parents, as I did. Yes, she got the same mixed messages I and my peers did. But again this is about her life and her life experiences. If you dont want to hear about them, then dont read the book.

But her books appeal to me because of her views. And in reading this book I came to appreciate her other books, The Beauty Myth : How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women and Misconceptions : Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood and Promiscuities a Secret History of Female and The Treehouse : Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See even more.

In fact it is like viewing the evolutionary journey of a wonderful woman. In fact I think her book The Treehouse : Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See about her father Leonard who was a Professor at San Francisco State may well be a great eye opener for those who want to read this book.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Talk of the Town
Comment: It is an excellent conversation piece to share with your husband/boyfriend, friends, daughter and mother. It touches on so many issues that are too "weird" to say outloud. It really makes you think about your sexuality and your desires and your relationships with both women and men in a way that validates them for the first time ever. It is thought- provoking and informative. You will read it, love it, and pass it on.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: a very slight commentary:
Comment: Why do people care so much what other people think about them? This book is more of a whine and a moaning lament on what the author imagines other people think about this and that and so-and-so. I believe a true liberation of spirit would come from simply stating: Who cares what you think?

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