About the Author

Naomi Wolf's first book, The Beauty Myth, was published in 14 countries (over 70,000 copies in paperback sold in Canada to date) and is an international bestseller. Her second book, Fire with Fire, was also well received by critics and readers alike. Wolf has appeared on many national talk shows and speaks to college audiences across Canada and the United States on the topic of young women and feminism.

Reviews

"At last, a new generation of women writers is addressing the powerful issues of female sexuality. I gulped this wonderful book down in one sitting, like a novel. Brava Naomi Wolf for your courage, your intelligence, your lucid prose." - Erica Jong "Refreshing ... highly evocative ... Wolf does two important things very well: reminding readers her own age what it felt like to be a teenage girl, and providing a crash course on the wildly varying cultural meanings attached to female sexuality throughout history." - The Ottawa Citizen "Naomi Wolf [is] the best writer about women and sexuality that we have." - Toronto Sun "Fascinating ... Wolf celebrates the ancient concept, heavily suppressed in the 20th century, that women are the more carnal sex." - Vancouver Courier

In this first-person account of growing up female in post-sexual revolution America‘"not a polemic but a set of confessions, a subjective exploration"‘Wolf (Fire with Fire) examines the "shadow slut" who trails "girls" in a culture that demands they be sexual even as it dismisses and devalues female desire. The result is an at times awkward mélange of memoir, reportage and academic anthropology. Contrary to our enduring Victorian myth of sexually rapacious men and passive women, Wolf argues, women‘with their capacity for multiple orgasms‘are the more carnal sex. However, the sexual experiences recounted here offer few glimmers of pleasure. Still, there are nuggets, as when a young woman relating a lesbian experience discovers, "God, this is sort of like kissing a boy‘except that she knows how to kiss!" While Wolf is at her best when evoking the anything-goes ethic of her hippie upbringing in 1970s San Francisco, her account grows oddly skittish as she gets older. Whether describing the fumbling process of losing her virginity or her desire to wear a "technically white dress" on her wedding day, Wolf tends to cut away too quickly to sociological boilerplate, as though she doesn't trust her own story to speak for itself. Still, it's hard to quarrel with Wolf's basic contention: that girls need more accurate information about their own bodies and better rites of passage than wrestling matches in the backseats of cars. (June)

"At last, a new generation of women writers is addressing the powerful issues of female sexuality. I gulped this wonderful book down in one sitting, like a novel. Brava Naomi Wolf for your courage, your intelligence, your lucid prose." - Erica Jong

"Refreshing ... highly evocative ... Wolf does two important things very well: reminding readers her own age what it felt like to be a teenage girl, and providing a crash course on the wildly varying cultural meanings attached to female sexuality throughout history." - The Ottawa Citizen "Naomi Wolf [is] the best writer about women and sexuality that we have." - Toronto Sun "Fascinating ... Wolf celebrates the ancient concept, heavily suppressed in the 20th century, that women are the more carnal sex." - Vancouver Courier