Promiscuities by Naomi Wolf

Eleven years after Naomi Wolf’s groundbreaking “Promiscuities” (Random House, 286 pages) was first published it still resonates today.

Wolf’s message is that female sexuality and coming of age has been taken hostage by our society and culture. This way, out of women’s own hands, it has been distorted into something that is usually only beneficial for men, and that tends to cause confusion and pain in women.

The novel explores Wolf’s own sexuality and coming of age, along with the friends she grew up with in San Francisco. She admits from the beginning of the book that her experience and that of her friends paint a picture of only white-middle class experiences, yet I’m sure many of their thoughts and sexual episodes will resonate with many women regardless of race and income level.

For example, I’m sure many girls in this time and age have experienced a diminishment of the importance of their virginity, in the same way that Wolf’s friends have. And, also like Wolf, many girls thought, “that was it?” after it was all said and done.

Or the fact that girls, growing up and even once they are at the workplace, tread a blurred line between being good girls and being sluts. And wherever the woman falls in this spectrum, it’s her own fault she got there in the first place, or so society says. “One thing was certain: if you were targeted, […] whether you had moved not fast enough or had moved too fast […] in some way your exclusion was your own fault.”

Through the pages Wolf also explores how female sexuality was seen and treated throughout history. She explores the history of the slut, for example, and how it happened that women’s sexuality in American is at the point at which it is.

What she found is that through history, and in different cultures even today, female sexuality is revered, respected and uplifted. “It is neither natural nor inevitable that women’s lust should be punished,” Wolf declares.

As a memoir “Promiscuities” ranges from touching to enraging, and may even be surprising to some people. She analyzes moments of women’s lives and analyzes the culture that made this moments happen.

Through the cultural and historical references that she cites we, the reader, see that things don’t necessarily have to be as they are, that women have been truly liberated, sexuality and all, and that that was a betterment for the society as a whole.