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Naomi Wolf knows all about your vagina

Naomi Wolf is a Rhodes Scholar, a best selling feminist writer and lauded cultural critic, yet my first thought as I sit down across from her is “This woman does not look 50. I must know her skin care regime.” Sadly, my momentary superficiality is perhaps the least shameful confession I’m about to make.

I’ve been a devoted Naomi Wolf reader since age 16, when her book The Beauty Myth provided a cultural context for what I thought were my personal flaws. Not so, said Wolf. Here’s what’s wrong in the wider world. Here’s why.

Yet as an adult reader, I’ve grappled with my feelings toward her chosen genre, one that stirs together personal experience, science or social science and theory. I’ve wondered why feminist writers gravitate toward personal writing while men seem to focus on cold facts to prove a point. Then I’ve wondered what my skepticism says about me. Am I tainted by a patriarchal culture in which traditionally male means of communication is privileged over female? By deeming one mode of discourse ‘female’ am I exhibiting sexism? Are the women writing in those modes less rigorous than male theorists?

These questions have slithered through my head for years, still I respected Wolf and her compatriots. Then came the internet, or at least my daily perusal of sites like Salon, Slate, Jezebel and of course Facebook.

It seems that everyone tightrope-walking the web has taken aim at Wolf’s latest book, Vagina: A New Biography – from the credible Zoe Heller to Katie Roiphe whose essays are the written equivalent of a little girl lifting her skirt over her head and running through her parent’s cocktail party – provocative yet easily dismissed.

But somehow I didn’t immediately dismiss Roiphe. Instead I experienced a reluctant half-agreement when secondary sources denounced Wolf’s earnest terminology, her allegedly reductive focus on the female body, all without examining the primary text. Now I’m wondering why I was so easily led.

Wolf herself admits to not “fully understand[ing] the critical response.” Wrapping both hands around her mug of tea, she seems understandably defensive. When she spoke last Tuesday night at a Chicago bookstore, she fielded questions from a diverse range of readers including a lesbian who tartly directed Wolf to rethink her book’s gendered language and a dirty old man who rambled inaudibly.

Listening to Tuesday’s lecture and discussing her book now, the complexity of Wolf’s mission hits me. How does one critique a flawed culture knowing elements of what you criticize will be used to invalidate your critique?

In Vagina, Wolf references porn culture, how male (and sometimes female) dependence on porn is affecting our ability to be intimate with one another. How a fleshy partner cannot compete with the frenzied pleasure of online toggling from image to increasingly graphic image. Porn is sapping our collective attention spans, Wolf said Tuesday, and straight sex seems often a race to orgasm. I’d argue that the instant gratification of internet culture is porn culture’s frontage road, running parallel, sending travelers in the same direction through a different channel. In other words, the demand for real-time opinions, the page-hit-positive feedback-loop, the speed of sharing, all contribute to a less nuanced cultural discourse. We’ve cranked the volume on conversation, but we’re saying less than ever before.

For my part, I’m ashamed to have allowed my natural intellectual rigor to be altered by the internet’s laser light shows and fog machines. I’m lucky enough to have seen Wolf lecture, to have spoken with her about the science behind her theories, the paucity of scientific research into LGBT desire, and her book’s true aim. But before you snatch an opinion from the internet’s ether, the least you can do is read Wolf’s actual book. Even if you disagree with every word, Wolf will have met her goal.

AfterEllen.com: What inspired your book?

Naomi Wolf: I grew up in San Francisco at the height and center of the gay/lesbian movement. My mom was writing a book about the lesbian community, so I saw firsthand a group of people who finally refused to have their sexuality used to demean and diminish them, instead stood firm and said, yes, we’re queer, yes we’re dykes, we’re going to embrace and talk about and define it for ourselves. I saw it empower and transform life after life and I think the same thing needs to happen for women in general. I wanted to write a book that could create a positive place that women of all ages could stand in relation to their sexuality in a culture that’s so negative about female sexuality.

AE: You specifically draw the reader’s attention to your book’s focus on heterosexual women rather than –

NW: The research is focused more on heterosexual women. It’s a very important distinction. I guess I grew up in such a gay and lesbian friendly environment that I’m surprised I have to say what I thought was obvious: this is a book for every woman. I do think it’s important to call attention to the fact that there’s missing data. Not only do more books need to be written, but more studies need to be done. For every study I talked about, there should be a study about LGBT women. There isn’t, so I don’t know the data. I don’t know what happens for example, in terms of women’s arousal when exposed to their female partner’s sweat. I was trying to be very transparent and say this is a flaw in the database.

AE: Right, but you specifically say that lesbians and bisexuals deserve a book of their own, that you don’t believe the “politically correct approach of lumping all female experience together with a nod to categories can do justice to these variations.” You made an important point, that LGBT women shouldn’t be presented as a side-note. But what specifically do you think queer women can draw from your book?

NW:When you say queer do you mean just lesbian?

AE: I’m a lesbian and I still don’t know quite what I mean – I’m basically trying to use language that’s as inclusive as possible.

NW: Well, yeah, I mean, I no longer believe in these categories. I don’t think there is any such thing as a heterosexual woman. I do believe that female sexuality is fluid and multiple. I think rigid categories are more about social realities. I believe any woman can fall in love with anyone and any woman can get pleasure from anyone. It feels artificial and retro for me to say, here are these strict categories. That’s what I grew up with in San Francisco, the whole idea of everyone is everything.

AE: Why question the existence of heterosexuality as a meaningful category for women?

NW: Women who identify themselves as heterosexual don’t just respond to sexual imagery involving a man and a woman. If they’re hooked up to something monitoring their arousal and vaginal responses, they will have sexual responses to lesbian imagery, gay male imagery, bonobo imagery, but they’ll self-report as heterosexual; they’ll tell researchers nothing is happening for them if it’s a sexual category they don’t think applies to them. To me, that says our sexuality is a lot more inclusive than we’re allowed to think. We’re a lot more complicated than society allows for.

AE: I actually was in one of those studies once – not hooked up to anything! But I had to watch porn and self-report on my arousal. I think I screwed up their whole study because I was turned off by a lot of the lesbian-geared imagery.

NW: You’re saying, I screwed up their study, but to me, that’s the point of my book; you’re why those definitions don’t work.

AE: You write that in order to achieve a transcendent orgasm, women need to feel safe and protected. You mention things like candlelight and drawn baths. Reading that, I had a mixed reaction and was trying to think about why. First, I’m wondering if you really mean that across the board women like baths or if when you use these sort of examples, you’re reaching for the most culturally relatable –

NW: Right, it’s a metaphor.

AE: But these are the things that when taken out of context, in our sound bite culture, might interfere with your book’s intended message.

NW: Interesting. I’m sure you’re right. That’s perceptive. So in that section, I’m literally just looking at what’s getting these great results in tantra and mapping it up against, is there anything that science has to say to confirm the reasons for these great results? In the section you’re referencing, the women had okay orgasms in a brightly lit, scientific environment, but when one woman insisted on going home to a comfortable, softer lit environment with her lover it quadrupled the intensity of her orgasm. That’s an interesting takeaway about comfort and beauty in your surroundings. Obviously it’s comfort and beauty as you define it. And the book is not prescriptive. I’m saying, here are the results that scientists have gotten, or tantric practitioners have gotten. I’m not recommending, I’m reporting.

AE: You say “comfort and beauty as you define it.” Certain women aren’t necessarily interested in a typically soothing romantic situation. What about women who draw sexual pleasure from more aggressive sexual behavior?

NW: My whole orientation toward women’s sexual choices and responses is that they should do what they want. I talk briefly (and in fact more directly than a lot of feminists have) about how a lot of women respond to S&M, bondage, submission, domination. I say at one point, you may want hot anonymous sex down a dark alley. It may vary according to the time of the month. Not only is women’s sexuality fluid, but what women want is fluid. When you’re ovulating, you may want to get fucked hard by your lover, when you’re not, you may want her to take you dancing – I don’t care. I’m just interested in exploring the mind/body connection. I do have to say that section on the Goddess Array – this is why I’m so pissed off about the absence of data for lesbian couples. The women who were complaining about not having that stroking, seduction, wooing in their lives, most of them were heterosexuals. These are things heterosexual men tend to not do enough of. Does that mean that lesbians do more of it, I don’t know.

AE: If it helps, that was the point at your lecture last night where a woman behind me whispered, “I think my girlfriend is a man.” Speaking of last night, I thought I understood you to say the fact that you reference your own experience in your book is part of what has drawn critic’s ire. Yet, feminist writing has a history of extrapolating from personal experience.

NW: Yeah, it’s a genre.

AE: I’m wondering if this became a problem because of people’s need to think in absolutes: Science is one thing, personal anecdotes are another, as if by referencing your own experience you undermine the objectivity of science.

NW: I truly don’t fully understand the critical response because it doesn’t seem aimed at the book I actually wrote. And as time goes on and there are more and more positive reviews and reports from various quarters, people are calming down enough to actually read the book I wrote. I do think some critics seem upset that I talk about my own personal sexual experience in six pages and I think that has to do about the general sexual silencing of women about desire – and that goes for women of all sexualities. I don’t think anyone said how dare she combine personal experience with science, because that’s something I’ve done for eight books.

AE: Another criticism I’ve heard is that the jump you make from the science you use to the conclusions you draw is far-fetched.

NW: In the book I do an analysis of dopamine. Some are saying, you can’t conclude that dopamine has feminist implications. Well, fuck that, I totally can conclude it. You don’t have to agree with me, but if I’ve cited the science accurately, which I have, then if I see that dopamine scientifically goes to motivation, focus, assertiveness, sociability, trust in one’s own judgement, goal orientedness; absolutely, as a cultural critic I’m allowed to say in my opinion this has a feminist implication in the world and this is theoretically why female sexuality, desire and pleasure have been targeted. That’s entirely appropriate. I did it in Misconceptions, I did it in The Beauty Myth. I don’t feel like a lot of the responses have been intellectually rigorous.

AE: So, what’s going on in this cultural moment that might be causing the negative reaction you’re receiving?

NW: I essentially wrote the same book in Misconceptions, but it’s about the brain/uterus connection, the brain/breast connection in relation to childbirth. No one peeped a word about it. I think it’s because motherhood is not transgressive and talking about female desire is highly, highly explosively transgressive, even now. I do acknowledge that the science in the book is tough to process from a conventional feminist orthodoxy of the last thirty years. I found it tough to process it too, but what do you do? Do you pretend it doesn’t exist or do you look at it and discuss it and debate it? If the feminist goal is to create a just world, it’s disorienting to find that there’s a sexual center at the mouth of the cervix. It’s true for lesbians, bisexuals and heterosexuals but it’s not politically correct.

AE: And what, it’s a fear for women of being reduced to our bodies?

NW: There are many fears. Certainly the fear is that data about the mind/body connection could be used against us, but my point is any data gets used against us. You can’t hide from new discoveries. You have to say, that’s new information about who we are, but we’re going to define who we are. Pretending the science doesn’t exist is not going to help us make sense of our world. I personally think it’s part of the feminist mission to empower women with knowledge about their bodies and their sexuality. I can’t believe there’s a question about that. To me, that goes back to the seventies when we were all about empowering women with sexual knowledge and information. My mission is to create a world in which everyone is valued, all of our differences acknowledged. We’re not scared of looking at anything, we’re not scared of learning about ourselves.

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