The centre of her universe

For those familiar with Wolf’s career as a polemicist and memoirist, it will not come as a complete surprise to find her attributing occult properties to the female anatomy.

No they won't. The Wolf in question here is Naomi, just in case you haven't guessed.

The quote above comes from the New York Review of Books which is pretty much the ne plus ultra of conventional, unthinking, knee-jerk liberalism.

I'll be honest, Naomi Wolf strikes me as, to quote Zoe Heller writing in the New York Review of Books, a bit of a snowflake. The difference between Heller and me being that I have a certain amount of fondness for snowflakes.

There is a lot of legitimate criticism to be directed at Wolf and Heller gets at most of it in her review, but there is also something fundamentally right about what Wolf says and that something is something so scary that .... well, let me point out something rather funny about the Heller article. Heller starts off by quoting Germaine Greer:

Lady, love your c___.

And goes on to say,

Forty-one years after Germaine Greer issued her infamous directive, the ladies seem to have complied.

And you might think then, that the problem with recent cultural phenomena such as Naomi Wolf's book is that it's all about loving your c___. Let me humbly suggest that you have that wrong. What has serious feminists and others worked up is that Wolf, like so many other women these days, believes three things that the high priestesses and priests of modern liberalism don't want them to believe.

1. She believes that the key to happiness is not so much to love your c___ but to find someone else to love it for you. And not just any someone else but, gasp, a man! Really. She writes: “A happy heterosexual vagina requires, to state the obvious, a virile man.”
2. And she believes that the way to make this happen is a certain emotional context for the sex that follows (think emotional intimacy, trust, bubble baths, silk et cetera) that works for women as women. 
3. Finally, she believes that the fundamental solution here is physical not emotional. Yes, sex that is going to work for women is different from what works for men in some familiar girly ways, but ultimately it is the sex that matters. You can't just have the sense of womanly satisfaction by itself and that means that women, the vast majority of them anyway, need a good time in bed to be happy.

So although there is a lot of flakiness in Naomi Wolf's pastry, there is also something that shakes modern liberal thought to it's very foundations here as well. Just imagine how different feminism would be if it accepted those three propositions as true.

Wolf gets to the point of believing those three radical propositions by drawing on the controversial field of evolutionary biology. And it should be controversial. However controversial evolutionary biology might be in some aspects, it's important to remember that the most solid aspect of the field is this: only those who have offspring pass on their traits. That means that sexual traits are the place where the otherwise controversial field is most likely to be on the solidest ground. And it shouldn't come as a surprise, although it apparently does, that the field is going to tend to confirm the things that are most conventional about human attitudes about sex roles. This, obviously, is going to be a be a big problem for people who believe that everyone should be allowed to reinvent their sexuality.

(Lady Gaga may take great comfort in saying she was "born this way" but with that comes the inescapable truth that the overwhelming majority of human beings were and will continue to be born as marriage-seeking heterosexuals. Same-sex attraction and no-sex attraction are contingent byproducts of the main current of evolution.)

And the thought that conventional sex roles have biological foundations is one that conventional liberalism must dismiss and that conventional liberals therefore invest a lot of effort in dismissing the possibility (this, even though the vast majority of them live out utterly conventional sex roles in their own lives). A while ago, for example, there was a study that suggested that semen might have a positive effect on women's state of mind. The study didn't conclude this as a proved, it only suggested that it might be the case. The rush to keyboards to decry this was deafening. And that is always the response to science that appears to support conventional woman-man sexual roles, it must be immediately dismissed as not significant or important. Thus we get Heller saying things such as the following:

The discovery that vaginal sensations—or the lack of them—are capable of producing states of mind does not seem by itself a very startling one.

As Tom Wolfe once coyly observed, when people make an effort to establish that something isn't important, the net effect of their efforts is always just the opposite of what they intended. If they really didn't think it was important, they'd be able to just ignore it.

In conclusion, let me tell you of one of my favourite terribly incorrect moments from my college days. There was a Czech girl whose name I can't remember anymore, which is a pity because I remember that it was a beautiful name. For a while, she was famous for her beautiful name and her distinctly not beautiful temperament. She was unpleasant and then some for the first three months that I knew her. And then she suddenly turned sweetness and light.

The deliciously incorrect moment came when someone asked her roommate Christine why she thought this was so. Christine said that the reason was that this formerly unpleasant girl now had a boyfriend and that, "She was really getting it good". When the snickering calmed down, Christine added, "Most women just need it sometimes and if they don't get it they turn into nasty little bitches and then no one wants to f___ them then because they are such nasty little bitches."

Christine got away with saying that in a very public way because she is a lesbian but that year all sorts of women told me privately that they agreed with her.

I have to say, though, that I don't think that Christine's claim is quite right. No matter how bad she gets, there will always be some guy ready to have sex with a woman. What happens is rather that when women don't get good sex, they turn sour in ways that lead them to sabotage their chances of having good sex. They get into a mood where they believe nothing can or will please them and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 When human beings get depressed, we often block the very thing that could help us get out of our depression. Not every single woman needs a satisfying sexual relationship with a man to be happy but the vast majority do. And, not being men, as Wolf notes in her snowflakey way, they need this within a particular emotional context. Yes, Wolf says a lot of crazy stuff along the way but her central points are as rock solid as can be.

As crazy as she sometimes gets, Wolf is right to remind us that we need to see the causal chain clearly. Women, although not just women, tend to get the causal chain exactly backwards when it comes to good sex. They tend to take the sex as a measure of the love and happiness. They tend to think, "The sex is good because I am happily in love." The exact reverse is usually the case: the love gets better when she puts more effort into making the sex good. When a woman is unhappy, one of the first things she should do is to make her sex life better. And that often means covering some pretty basic territory. You have to keep the physical plant in good running order and you have to make the effort to seduce the other person and to seduce yourself.