About Women
A Girl's Coming of Age
Feminist author Naomi Wolf presents a talk about her 1997 nonfiction book, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood. Wolf explores women’s sexual coming-of-age, with a focus on how adolescent girls have been socially sexualized during and after the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Drawing on both her own and other women’s experiences, she points out the contradictory messages young women receive, such as the cultural pressure to be sexually liberated while simultaneously shaming and labeling women as promiscuous. Wolf states that these cultural pressures are not the same for young men. She expands upon this idea by examining how sexual coming-of-age stories in men’s literature, such as the memoirs of Henry Miller and Norman Mailer, are widely praised, while similar stories from their female contemporaries are critiqued. She goes on to argue that, though the American sexual revolution made sex more accessible for women, it did not change society’s valuation of female desire. The talk is followed by audience questions.
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