Book description
By following a group of four contemporary girls - including her
younger self - as they come of age in the seventies, Wolf shows how
our culture tries to shape and confine women's desire. Embarking on a
voyage of discovery, she illustrates how flawed and prescribed are the
notions of what women want, and how these change through the ages -
from Taoist techniques for giving women pleasure, to Victorian
repression, and the so-called liberated nineties.
Drawing on scholarly texts, secret diaries, real life and fantasy,
she demonstrates that female sexuality is wilder, more demanding and
more powerful than our culture dares to accept.
Naomi Wolf was born in 1962 in San Francisco, where she grew up. She
studied at Yale before becoming a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford,
and working in Edinburgh. She was catapulted to success in 1990 with the
publication of her first book,
The Beauty Myth
, which became an international bestseller, published in fourteen
countries. This was followed by another best-selling book,
Fire with Fire
, about women's relationship to power. She writes on women's issues and
lectures all over the world.
