SOURCE: Gottlieb, Annie. “First Person Sexual.” Nation (9 June 1997): 25–28.

In the following review of Promiscuities, Gottlieb criticizes Wolf's “reverent rhetoric” and selective history of non-Western cultural practices.

I'll never say another bad word about the memoir. Reading Promiscuities, which aspires to be so much more—to vault from the “first person sexual” into cultural critique and change-the-world exhortation—I was at first exhilarated by the grandeur of its reach, a familiar yet oddly dated emotion I traced to the early seventies. Here was a throwback to an earlier, nervier genre, a feminist Big Book à la Beauvoir and Greer, vowing to break the silence shrouding a key piece of female experience—the sexual awakening of teenage girls—in a way that would fuse the personal and the political, the erotic and the intellectual. How strange to feel again, even for a moment, the extravagant expectation of a quarter-century ago: that...