What a Girl Wants.(Review)

Her Way: Young Women Remake the Sexual Revolution, by Paula Kamen (New York University, 280 pp., $25.95)

Paula Kamen is no academic. She is a "Chicago-based journalist, lecturer, playwright, and the author of what is widely regarded as the first postboomer feminist book, Feminist Fatale." None of which has kept her from occupying a position since 1994 as a "visiting research scholar" with Northwestern University's gender-studies program.

Kamen interviewed 72 young women in an unscientific but eclectic sample, and hopes to emerge with Her Way as the voice of her generation, loosely defined as those too young to remember a time when sexual coupling was even tangentially assumed to relate to social coupling, in or out of wedlock. Kamen bravely celebrates this state of affairs as a new frontier in women's liberation, a.k.a. the expansion of sexual choice and the destruction of double standards. Her thesis? "Young women's sexual power has grown slowly and widely" in what she calls a new "sexual evolution."

This "evolution," according to Kamen, was centered on women "getting what they need, such as Susie Bright's Herotica series, women-centered porn films by Annie Sprinkle and Candida Royalle, Our Bodies, Ourselves (which was first widely published in the 1970s), the former sitcom Ellen, Madonna, the Lilith Fair, the Hitachi Magic Wand vibrator with the 'G spot' attachment, sex-information websites, Judy Blume's Forever, Joycelyn Elders, rape hotlines, and Take Back the Night demonstrations." I kid you not.

This is a book that would be easy to ridicule, with its touching, adolescent faith that sexual power lies where vibrators can touch, in mastering the sexual uses of sushi, seeking tips from prostitutes, or browsing women's magazines that report on oral sex "from every conceivable angle." Kamen even tries to transform Monica Lewinsky, "whose sexuality was powerful and puzzling enough to cause a constitutional crisis," into a new archetype of female independence and power. Monica was "brazen, relentless, and self-centered in her quest for sex and power; in other words, she acted like a man."

Huh? Monica, as readers may recall, was a young woman who snapped her thong at a powerful, married, older man for reasons she did not fully understand and ended up falling in love, waiting by the phone, fantasizing about the wedding, obsessing about his neckties, and generally acting about as un-masculine in the conduct of her sexual affairs as humanly possible. The persistent tendency of feminist "thinkers" to pretend otherwise can be explained only by their increasingly desperate powers of sexual denial.

The pretense that men's sexuality and women's sexuality are identical produces, as its inevitable corollary, enormous female rage when men fail to act like women or when women find acting like men less satisfying than they expect. How to make this pent-up anger sexually attractive to men occupies a surprisingly large part of the Gen-X feminist project. Thus Kamen's idea of a feminist ...