After a lecture on a college campus, writes Naomi Wolf in her new book, Promiscuities (286 pages. Random House. $24), a woman in the audience tossed her a provocative question: " 'Okay,' she challenged me, 'Madonna: Feminist or Slut?' " Wolf doesn't give a quick answer; in a sense, the whole book is her response. It's an attempt to figure out what sex means to women by investigating how girls learn about it. Wolf also wants to break what she sees as one of the last sexual taboos. Despite the fact that American culture is overwhelmed with the imagery of women as sexual prey, it's still forbidden, she contends, for women to speak in their own voices about their own sex lives. "We are all bad girls," she writes—meaning, don't divvy us up into sexual or pure. Owning our sexuality, she suggests, is how we start to become feminists.
展开▼
