Word: wolfs
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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...
...would be of 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...
...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 he decided to escape the muggy Memphis heat with a quick plunge into the Wolf River, singer Jeff Buckley had every reason to feel buoyed by good fortune. At 30 he was signed to Columbia Records--the home of Bob Dylan and Miles Davis--and had just settled into a cozy old house in town to begin recording a follow-up to Grace, his powerful 1994 debut. That album, a darkly romantic and stunningly original blend of folk, blues and alternative rock, had earned Buckley a reputation as a superstar in the making, much as Greetings from Asbury Park...