Promiscuities Quotes

“We should be telling girls what they already know but rarely see affirmed: that the lives they lead inside their own self-contained bodies; the skills they attain through their own concentration and rigor, and the unique phase in their lives during which they may explore boys and eroticism at their own pace - these are magical. And they constitute the entrance point to a life cycle of a sexuality that should be held sacred.”
― Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood

“The anthropologist Margaret Mead concluded in 1948, after observing seven different ethnic groups in the Pacific Islands, that different cultures made different forms of female sexual experience seem normal and desirable. The capacity for orgasm in women, she found, is a learned response, which a given culture can help or can fail to help its women to develop. Mead believed that a woman's sexual fulfillment, and the positive meaning of her sexuality in her own mind, depend upon three factors:
1: She must live in a culture that recognizes female desire as being of value;
2: Her culture must allow her to understand her sexual anatomy;
3: And her culture must teach the various sexual skills that give women orgasms.”
― Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood

“It seemed to me, watching, that if you were dextrous enough to gift-wrap an independent-minded amphibian, you could just about manage a condom.”
― Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood

“I think that we who were small in the early sixties were perhaps the last generation of Americans who actually had a childhood, in the Victorian and post-Victorian sense of childhood as a space distinct in its roles and customs from the world of adults, oriented around children's own needs and culture rather than around the needs and culture of adults.”
― Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood

“The danger is that the culture often makes girls turn into women in ways they do not choose, before they are psychologically ready, and it defines their readiness as a passive biological development.”
― Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood

“a love at once so intimate and so charged; to be once more as teenage girls are when they are in love with each other.”
― Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood

“Barbie taught us a lot—sometimes more than we wanted to know. Her posture showed us that being sexual meant being immobile. It meant: walk on your toes, bust out, limbs rigid. Barbie would flash the white of her teeth, cock her head, swivel on her torso, half raise her smooth arm, but she could say nothing. For Barbie had no conceivable character or inner life. Barbie’s breasts and clothes seemed to blunt her personality. In Barbie’s life, events were merely excuses for ensembles. Her story could really go nowhere. Which meant, perhaps, that once we got over the excitement of getting provocatively dressed and then undressed, our story would go nowhere.
We were fixated on Barbie, but we also despised her. The secret game in countless American basements and playrooms involved (and still does, I am told) little girls doing bad things to Barbie. Sometimes we would make her take positions that were ludicrous or that looked painful. Other times, we would pop her head off the rounded stump of her neck. While this was a nice, French Revolution sort of vengeance, it also scared us. It was scary because even when you held her body in one hand and her head in the other, nothing seemed much changed. After all, she had been made up of parts to start with. Even when fully assembled, she wasn’t whole. Her hands didn’t grasp, her feet didn’t walk, her face had no expression.”
― Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood