Does this book reveal an existential crisis among women or merely tell us more than we wanted to know about its author, asks Jenny Turner
Jenny Turner
guardian.co.uk, Friday 7 September 2012 17.55 EDT
... I read this book in utter bafflement. What is this big news that Wolf has to impart? Vaginas feel stuff, so yes, of course they must be packed with nerves; and nerves, we know, join up with each other at the spine to link into the brain. That's why they call it the central nervous system; that's what being human is all about. Feet, too, join up with the CNS – thus reflexologists, and why bunions are so painful. And so do the intestines ...
The stuff about rape and sexual violence is just strange. Wolf's main argument – that rape is at least half-consciously a subordinating tactic deployed by men – has been feminist orthodoxy since 1975, when Susan Brownmiller published her canonical Against Our Will: Men and Women and Rape: "From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." And yet, Wolf says that Brownmiller, like others of her generation, writes about rape while following an "individualised reading of sexuality posited by Freud", which is surely just not so. Wolf's take on classic women's liberation in general is perverse ...
... Wolf, this book tells us, has also been looking at images of sexual awakening in Christina Rossetti and Kate Chopin, because she has recently gone "back to graduate school". And discussing orgasmic rats with "a group of brilliant young women" at "a cottage on an old farm". Chatting with Mike Lousada for "a London newspaper". And visiting, in 2004, a refugee centre for women raped during the civil war in Sierra Leone ... All of it really just connected by the life, the interests and the ego of Naomi Wolf herself ...
... why are we still letting one of the Anglophone world's most famous feminists waste everyone's time with all this burble about the "universal feminine" with its "Goddess-shaped" hole?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/07/vagina-new-biography-naomi-wolf-review?newsfeed=true
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