Fire with Fire by Naomi Wolf
Fawcett Press, $12 paper
Having been born on the far side of the Summer of Love, I suppose it was inevitable that I should grow up to be a rebel looking for a cause. But while women were marching for rights in the Seventies, I was busy amassing a priceless collection of Shaun Cassidy pinups. By the time I entered college, it seemed that all the major feminist battles had been fought without me. I found myself involved in the civilian equivalent of military equipment maintenance: polishing my feminist credentials as a survivor of rape and practicing at being able to lock and load and blow the enemy away with a well-aimed "You wouldn't understand."
I imagine that many GenX would-be feminists felt the same disillusionment that I eventually did. The watered-down version of feminism that we were handed in college was hardly galvanizing. It gave us neither sisterhood, nor great issues, nor even the opportunity to air our doubts: Isn't abortion, even though a necessary legal right, still somewhat a moral wrong? Isn't date rape a shadowy concept? Shouldn't women take responsibility for their choices? Does it really matter who opens the damn door if everyone gets through? In the nearly absolute absence of older women who might have been able to lend the perspective of their history, the end result seemed an either/or universe: Either women were helpless in the face of an uncaring, ruthless world, in which case feminism was futile, or everything was fine and dandy, in which case feminism was obsolete.
Thankfully, the world is much more complicated than that. I am a feminist because that is where my sympathies most readily lie. But that is nothing to be proud of - I didn't ask to be a woman. What I am proud of, what seems so simply clear, is that feminism is a way to fight for justice, always in short supply. I am often disappointed and confused by the failure of current feminists to live up to that ideal of just action on behalf of justice. Naomi Wolf's controversial critique of twentieth-century feminism sweeps away much of that confusion and disappointment. Fire with Fire is stirring, reasoned, inclusive discourse. Wolf's earthy analysis poses a challenge to both the current voices of feminism and to my generation to rethink and revitalize feminism.
Wolf issues not only a call to arms, but a call to responsibility; women, she says, have achieved more power than they realize. She begins by considering what she calls the "genderquake," the year of Anita Hill, when women took their anger to the polls. The result was an impressive shift in the political and social paradigm, which proved that to disappoint women voters was to commit political suicide. Wolf points out "what politicians and advertisers already know, but what women are still slow to grasp": women are not a minority. According to the Census Bureau, American women, were they to use their entire voting power, could cast seven million more votes than the male population. Crunch that number for a second - seven million. Modern women not only have more economic power than preceding generations ever dreamed of, they are the present voting majority.
Feminism made the genderquake possible. Feminism achieved the vote, achieved legal and economic freedom, achieved power for women. And yet feminism currently stands in low regard, seen as intellectual whining that has "betrayed" women. Wolf attempts to understand what has happened to separate women from their movement. She discusses insider revolts, the effects of Susan Faludi's backlash, and women's own negative feelings about power. But Fire with Fire's most rewarding accomplishment is Wolf's differentiation between two strands of feminism, "victim feminism," and "power feminism." Victim feminism is what most of us see today as Feminism: marginalized fatalism that encourages women to remain lodged in their past or present state as victims. To be a victim is to be in a constant state of need; victim feminism sanctions such acts as Brown University students writing the names of their alleged date rapists on bathroom walls.
This act offends my sense of fairness. It's little better than ugly gossip. Worst of all, it's just plain ineffective, focusing criticism on feminists and by unfortunate association feminism instead of the institution. Wolf writes that Brown students are not "political prisoners in a gulag... they are the educated, affluent elite of a superpower. A better use of their considerable resources would be to put their tuition in escrow, call a press conference, and demand a revised sexual assault grievance procedure." In other words, kick 'em where it really hurts. Wolf's power feminism holds the moral high ground while still acting with strength - the strength of the voting booth, the pocketbook, or the press kit. Holding that moral high ground, however, involves applying those same standards to our own conduct. Wolf examines several criminal cases in which female defendants were treated lightly, mostly on grounds of being somehow helpless. Her analysis points out that the hidden meaning of this public non-accountability reinforces the stereotypes that women have worked so hard to overcome.
Fire with Fire provides simple methods, that almost anyone can use, with which to support a just feminism. This is a book written for Jill Blow, not Gloria Steinem. Wolf encourages feminists to live fruitfully and responsibly in the mainstream. In a voice remarkably free of backbiting or jargon, she speaks compassionately of the problems that women still face, encouraging women to be successful as individuals; the more economic clout and personal satisfaction you have, the more resources and energy you have to give to your cause. Wolf recognizes what historians have known for centuries: You can't have a really happening revolution without inviting the masses, all of them.
And as if all that weren't enough, Naomi Wolf is simply a wonderful, down-to-earth writer. Nowhere in Fire with Fire is the gospel-from-on-high style polemic that occasionally hampered her previous book, The Beauty Myth. Wolf writes with a passion for ideas, taking on Steinem, Paglia, Tannen, and Roiphe. She is unafraid to write, "Male sexual attention is the sun in which I bloom," or to describe her own misgivings as a feminist and a woman. There is courage in this book that I have not seen in a long time, if ever; the courage to think independently, to embrace contradiction, even to occasionally say, "I don't know."
The singular flaw in Fire with Fire is what may be seen as Naomi Wolf's failure to concretely address the problems of third-wave feminism. But it isn't Wolf's job to solve those problems - it's ours. Where generations before us could only march blindly up the mountain, hoping that they were going in the right direction, this generation stands high enough at least to see where we are going and where we have been. And maybe that's part of the problem; to paraphrase Michael Stipe, standing on the shoulders of giants leaves me cold, too. I have something that my mother and grandmother had only in small measure or not at all, a sense of possibility unlimited by law or circumstance. That's a powerful light, one that blinds as much as it illuminates, that occasionally makes it difficult to see that the initial goal of feminism was self-determination. If you are female, and childless by choice; if you voted in the last election; if you have a bank account under your name; if you attended college, or even high school - then you and I are walking evidence that feminism, no matter what mistakes have been committed in its name, has succeeded. Sisterhood is powerful. And if feminism has in fact "betrayed" us, then ours is the challenge of forging our own, new definitions of feminism. Fire with Fire provides a place to begin. n