Fire with Fire Naomi Wolf
Collins, Clare
GENDERQUAKES & AFTERSHOCKS FIRE WITH FIRE The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century Naomi Wolf Random House, $21, 353 pp. Clare Collins I was apprehensive about...
...Or do we survive and have a good timeT [Emphasis mine.] And here is my personal favorite: "Remember and take possession of the girlhood will to power and fantasies of grandeur...
...A cursory reading of newspaper accounts...
...Wolf not only went to Yale but she became a Rhodes scholar...
...She must be referring to my childhood dream of becoming Miss America...
...At times, Wolf lapses into anecdotal, first-person accounts to illustrate a point...
...The same points are made over and over again, as if Wolf couldn' t resist the need to drive home her theories with yet one more example...
...In the end, Wolfs philosophy comes down to this: For women to enjoy true equality they must usurp the economic stranglehold of men...
...and the rape of a nun may even matter...
...This estrangement impedes women from attaining the equality that they desire...
...As it turns out, I am exactly the alienated audience for whom Wolf wrote her book...
...She adorably refers to the reaction among women to Anita Hill's accusation of sexual harassment against the Supreme Court nominee Thomas as a "genderquake," which blew the lid off years of stifled anger and resentment...
...Clare Collins I was apprehensive about reviewing Naomi Wolf's new feminist treatise...
...She hastens to add she would never judge anyone else's decision to have an abortion...
...But there is still much work to be done toward creating an equal powerbase for women, and unfortunately Wolf becomes bogged down in statistical description when trying to make her arguments...
...Yet, Wolf says, not once has she neglected to use birth control...
...the rape of a churchgoing housewife, more serious still...
...Does it destroy us...
...Besides, I'm not at all versed in feminist literature and have shied away from describing myself as a feminist because I am not adamantly prochoice...
...My friends will tell you that I am sometimes spacy beyond belief," she writes, providing an amusing list to back up that claim...
...These actually come as a welcome relief from the polemics, helping her writing to become what she might describe as "reader friendly...
...Because the feminist movement has lost touch with its constituency, in large part by casting women as victims as well as requiring a uniformity of opinion rather than by focusing on getting more of what's right for women...
...Take Wolf's assertion about rape: "The judicial system unofficially maintains a spectrum of female guilt that determines whose hurt matters and whose hurt does not...
...Wolf was inspired to write Fire with Fire after the Clarence Thomas hearings...
...At worst, they may be seriously misleading...
...The rape of a prostitute is fairly meaningless...
...Certainly this is true, at least in one sense...
...As she puts it, "While a strong majority of U.S...
...Rape, as women have long known, is a notoriously hard crime to prove in any adversarial court proceeding...
...Although the book jacket tells me Wolf was schooled in New Haven and Oxford and lectures frequently on women's issues, what informs her theories or what kind of solid research her conclusions are based on remains a mystery...
...The kind of debasement Anita Hill talked about was nothing new for women...
...And, "Visualize having the power we seek...
...women passionately endorse the goals of feminism, a large plurality avoids identifying with the movement itself...
...the rape of a divorced working mother who drinks is slightly more serious...
...In fact, several excerpts from Fire with Fire appeared in Glamour magazine...
...A study of actual cases...
...Now older and wiser at age thirty, she points the finger of blame not just at external forces but at women themselves who have failed to seize the kind of power that is rightly theirs...
...In a section titled "Psychological Strategies" for choosing the status of powerbroker over victim, she makes the following gratuitous recommendations: "Avoid generalizations about men that are totalizing: that is, that do not admit exceptions...
...The breezy writing style, rife with generalizations and catch-phrases (the terms "gender apartheid" and the tremulous "genderquake" come to mind) reads like an extended magazine article...
...Wolf even employs a favorite editorial device of women's magazines: the bulleted how-to piece, providing tips on how to implement her strategies...
...Rather, it was that male power eroded as the distribution of power into some women's hands reached critical mass," Wolf contends...
...then imagine the 22 very worst thing that will happen if we attain it...
...The unquestioning acceptance of abortion rights as the cornerstone of the women's rights movement seemed to count me out...
...At the very least, such unsubstantiated generalizations are aggravating...
...Just a few years ago in her best-selling The Beauty Myth, Wolf, who was a tender twenty-six years old at the time, argued that the major impediment to equality for women was society's obsession with female beauty...
...After slogging through 353 pages, I'm not sure her material merits a book-length treatment...
...This might be true, but upon what verifiable evidence is such a charge based...
...It feels as if some dark part of my brain is saying...
...However, I can't help but think that the very audience who needs this message the most, the poor and disenfranchised, is least likely to benefit from Wolf s brand of feminism with a smiling but still elitist face...
...I do appreciate what Wolf has to say, especially her mission to create a brand of feminism that embraces all women...
...Wolfs own tendency toward sweeping generalizations does little to strengthen her credibility...
...This is a matter of life and death...
...And I especially welcomed Wolfs willingness to talk about her decidedly unclear views on abortion, since that is the cause of my own estrangement from feminism...
...After all, Ms...
...Among other things—many other things—Wolf argues that creating the perception that one's feminist cachet rests on the abortion issue has been the movement's undoing...
...Outrage over the hearings led women to raise $6.2-million in campaign funds and elect an unprecedented twenty-five women to national political office...
...In this case, Wolf theorizes, timing was everything...
...Yet, "For me, the other side of having reproductive rights is taking reproductive responsibility...
Vol. 121 • February 1994 • No. 4
