Word: feministic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...reviewing Naomi Wolf's latest treatise, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood (Random House; 286 pages; $24), a number of critics have complained that the feminist author writes as a pop-culture illiterate. This is not entirely so, for surely no one else has ever found so much significance in the work of Tony Orlando and Dawn. Early in her book about the ways in which American society still fails to indoctrinate girls into a sexually confident adulthood, Wolf uses the singing group's Knock Three Times--a song about a guy who has a crush on a cute neighbor...
...some comfort to learn that Wolf, 35, grew up far away from any decent record stores, but alas, that is not the case. The author of The Beauty Myth and Fire with Fire came of age in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, smack in the middle of the feminist and sexual revolutions. She draws on her experiences there, as well as those of her childhood friends, to make the drawn-out point that female longing is dangerously suppressed in our allegedly liberated culture...
Along with Katie Roiphe's 1993 book, The Morning After, and Nancy Friday's 1996 The Power of Beauty, Promiscuities represents a tendency among contemporary feminist writers to emphasize reminiscence over research. This can make for lively reading, but not here, because Wolf fails to take her anecdotes to any useful end. The banal stories in Promiscuities are of young women who dated the wrong guys, who wish they hadn't lost their virginity so early, who were forced to deal with unplanned pregnancies...
...tapestry of early 20th century America, with historical figures (Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman) mingling with fictional ones like Coalhouse Walker Jr., the ragtime pianist turned antiracism firebrand. Composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens supply a score alternately catchy (the ragtime numbers) and affecting (a wife's proto-feminist lament, Back to Before). And director Frank Galati and choreographer Graciela Daniele have created stage pictures that are both lovely and thematically apt, from the exquisite opening dance in which three groups--blacks, immigrants and parasol-toting white society--circle one another warily, to J.P. Morgan on a walkway that slowly...
...success, Mohajer's attitude (the vinyl cover of her appointment book reads F___ IT!) is distinctly Gen X, light-years from boomers' idealized image of their own youth, forged in the crucibles of the civil rights, antiwar and feminist movements. Is there a generation gap? "Oh, my God, I'd have to say yeah!" she answers. Before Hard Candy, she wanted to be a plastic surgeon, a goal her father, a cancer researcher, opposed. "My dad does not believe medicine should be used for high-class fashion--it puts patients at risk," she explains. "But I think...