DO WE NEED MORE OPRAHS?

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

In 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 he doesn't know--as an example of how teenage girls in the 1960s and '70s were taught to be blank images rather than real people. Never mind that the era gave rise to a slew of empowering female singer-songwriters; in Wolf's distorted algebra Tony Orlando cancels out the cultural weight of, say, Joni Mitchell.

It 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 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.

The 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 of a man who had one). And it seems to have eluded her that in many ways life for women in the '90s could be worse.

--By Ginia Bellafante