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
This article appears in June 30 • 1995 and June 30 • 1995 (Cover).