Non-Fiction

One of the greatest victories of the feminism of the 1970s and 1980s was to show the world that the personal was political. The intimate underpinnings of human existence, from sex and romance to child-rearing, drudgery and domestic violence, were not just private, irrelevant women's issues: they were essential to political and public life. Unfortunately, over the past two decades, the trajectory of women's liberation in public discourse has undergone something of a reversal: instead of making the personal political, the political has, slowly but surely, been permitted to collapse into the personal.

In a culture where debates about cupcakes and pubic grooming are still top priority in fashionable feminist circles, Naomi Wolf's new book, Vagina, seems to represent the apotheosis of that philosophy. Going by the extensive interviews and extracts being serialised this week, Vagina focuses on the author's recent difficulties achieving satisfying orgasm and subsequent treatment for a trapped nerve in her back, and attempts to extend the lessons of this minor surgery, beyond "private doctors are wonderful if you can afford them", to the entire female experience. In this case, the entire female experience seems to apply only to wealthy, straight, successful, cisgendered white women living in New York City. One extract centres quite seriously on a dinner-party incident where the host served uncomfortably yonic handmade pasta. I wish I were making this up ...

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/laurie-penny-we-deserve-better-than-this-claptrap-8102756.html