SOURCE: Elshtain, Jean Bethke. “Danger in Paradise.” Times Literary Supplement (6 June 1997): 12.

In the following excerpt, Elshtain offers a mixed assessment of Promiscuities.

Naomi Wolf is another child of the revolution. She grew up in its Mecca, the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. She watched her parents shed the garments of what had become a despised conformism and take on new personae: Mom in mini-skirts, hair flying, wearing dark kohl eyeliner, the sexual object with whom her daughter fell into a weird competition; Dad as renewed adolescent, taking up vampires as his hobby. Wolf, too, must stamp out “repressive hypocrisy” wherever she finds it; but her own narrative is in many ways a harrowing tale. What haunts the reader is a sense of massive adult abdication of responsibility for the world in which their children are growing up. There is a yearning in Wolf's account for a few adults...