Word: wolfs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Russia. Astronaut Wendy Lawrence, who was to be the next American to live on Mir, the Russian space station, won't be going because, at 5 ft. 3 in., she's too short to fit into the Russian space suits. Her place will be taken by David Wolf, who's 5 ft. 10 in.--tailor-made for the bulky suits in case he's called upon to take a walk outside...
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...
...What Wolf really craves is a world devoid of youthful indiscretion. Yet she never spells out what grave long-term consequences her "characters" suffered as a result of their regrettable experiments. Indeed, she does not flesh out what their lives are like today. From the sketchy information she provides, we can only assume that most, like the author, are well-adjusted married young women with toddlers and patios...
...When adolescent narratives of desire are driven underground," Wolf vaguely explains in the grad-school-speak that characterizes her writing, "harm is done to the psyche." Wolf's solution is that women should be more vocal about their sexual histories and yearnings. However, she does not thoughtfully address what the sociological or cultural merit of such venting would be in a climate already teeming with daytime talk shows, hyped authors of best-selling incest memoirs, and Alanis Morissette...
...world would be a better place, Wolf contends, if we celebrated female sexuality the way so many ancient cultures did. This line of thinking leads to the book's occasional dabblings in scholarship, and the results are often ludicrous. "Confucius, in his Book of Rites," she writes, "held that...it was a husband's duty to take care of his wife or concubine sexually as well as financially and emotionally." It seems to have eluded Wolf that ancient Chinese women might have aspired to something better than life as a concubine (or as the wife...