Vagina: A New Biography [Hardcover]

Naomi Wolf (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 11, 2012

One of our bestselling and most respected cultural critics, Naomi Wolf, acclaimed author of The Beauty Myth and The End of America, brings us an astonishing work of cutting-edge science and cultural history that radically reframes how we understand the vagina—and, consequently, how we understand women.

A “New Biography,” Vagina is at once serious, provocative, and immensely entertaining—a radical and endlessly fascinating exploration of the gateway to female consciousness from a remarkable writer and thinker at the forefront of the new feminism.

Editorial Reviews

From Bookforum

In sizing up the alleged boons of vaginal liberation, Wolf refuses to acknowledge the actual levers of oppression that subjugate bona fide vagina owners in this country today. This might be more forgivable if Vagina was more of an autobiography ... but Vagina is instead dressed up like a serious political tract with all sorts of utopian notions of healing the world, and the psychic wounds of all the world's women. —Natasha Vargas-Cooper

Review

Naomi Wolf has tried hard to look at female sexuality as it really is, not as pop culture or political correctness would like it to be... The science of female arousal is complex and woefully neglected, and Wolf has done us all a favour by trying to drag it into the mainstream -- Jemima Lewis The Mail on Sunday Wolf's tome could not be better timed... at a time when Western women's bodies have never been more highly politicised, the one person who might be able to shine a ray of light... has to be Wolf. Perhaps this history will do for 21st century activism what The Beauty Myth did for 1990s feminists... Wolf is exploring territory we haven't heard about since Germaine Greer in the 1970 -- Viv Goskrup Independent on Sunday Worth respecting, even celebrating... there is [here] a very intriguing thesis about love... If you are one of those School of Cosmo feminists who has been arguing for decades that women should be more like men sexually... then Wolf's take is genuinely revolutionary -- Sarah Vine The Times Part memoir, part cultural history and part scientific journey around women's sexuality, the best elements of which illuminate how little women generally know about their own anatomy... -- Emma Brockes Guardian --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; First Edition edition (September 11, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780061989162
• ISBN-13: 978-0061989162
• ASIN: 0061989169
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (76 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #41,764 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Naomi Wolf was born in San Francisco in 1962. She was an undergraduate at Yale University and did her graduate work at New College, Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.

Her essays have appeared in various publications including: The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Glamour, Ms., Esquire, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. She also speaks widely to groups across the country.

The Beauty Myth, her first book, was an international bestseller. She followed that with Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change The 21st Century, published by Random House in 1993, and Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood, published in 1997. Misconceptions, released in 2001, is a powerful and passionate critique of pregnancy and birth in America.

In fall 2002, Harper Collins published a 10th anniversary commemorative edition of The Beauty Myth. In May of 2005, Ms. Wolf released The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from my Father on How to Live, Love and See. The End of America, published in September 2007 by Chelsea Green, is Naomi's latest book.

Naomi Wolf is co-founder of The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, an organization devoted to training young women in ethical leadership for the 21st century. The institute teaches professional development in the arts and media, politics and law, business and entrepreneurship as well as ethical decision making.

She lives with her family in New York City.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars yes, she overstates her case, BUT October 27, 2012

By Dale Thomas

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

most authors, even good scientists overstate their case these days. It seems to me like she struck a raw nerve with certain people and she's getting slammed, not just critically reviewed. Wolf is a journalist, not a scientist and she makes a typical layman's mistakes when looking at scientific data. she consulted scientists and clinicians whom she trusted, looked at the facts they gave her, and drew some conclusions based on those facts. She has constructed a convincing and plausible theory based on the information she was given. Her mistake was to promote a good theory as fact, rather than as speculation for further research. In my view (I'm a psychotherapist with an MS in psychology), she draws logical conclusions from her data, but, as most non-scientists do, she forgets that even logically consistant propositions still need to be proven true. I would guess that many of hers will be, if anybody cares enough to do the work. Assuming her conclusions are true, they have important consequences for many women and their partners as well.

Theories aside, the information she presents is vital in it's own right, and needs to be more widely disseminated. She presents compelling evidence from multiple sources on how trauma to the vagina impacts the brain far more than other kinds of non-sexual trauma do. She presents good evidence that this is because of the extensive neural connections between the vagina and the brain, with each one gives feedback to, and influencing the functioning of, the other.
Her personal, clinical and anecdotal evidence of the wide reaching negative effects of a disrupted connection between vagina(actually, genitals as a whole) and brain on women's moods, motivation and creaivity is also compelling, although, again, it needs to be backed up by more hard science, not stated as a proven fact.

Much of the book is about what can be done to improve the brain-vagina connection so women can benefit from it. This includes a chapter on what types of conditions and stimulation women need to fully take advantage of orgasms and the positive effects they can have on the brain. A lot of it is stuff I read in "marriage manuals" back in the 60's about what turns women on, but I guess the message hasn't gotten across to men of Naomi Wolf's generation and younger. More's the pity.

Read it with an open mind, look at it as theory, and see what resonates with you. I found a lot that was valuable, including her concept of the Goddess Array (I'm male).

32 of 42 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Timely and Informative October 1, 2012

By Ken Ellis

Format:Hardcover

I was thumbing through Naomi Wolf's newest book "Vagina: a New Biography" at a friend's house and started reading it. As a man, this is not the type of book I would normally be interested in. However, I found it quite interesting. The word Vagina has raised so much drama recently in the news and in government. The book provides a both a scientific background and fascinating historical perspective of how the vagina has been viewed at various times in history (revered to taboo) and how we got to point we are at today where simply saying the word vagina in public is controversial. I learned much from the book and as man; I think it helps me to better understand women and their perspective on the world.

68 of 93 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Good message, but many of the scientific claims are not true October 11, 2012

By Tevis Fen-Kortiay

Format:Hardcover

Naomi Wolf's new book embodies deep problems with pop science publishers and their relationship with the media: her work brings in the bucks, so Ecco Press (HarperCollins) publishes what they refer to in their marketing blurb as "rigorous science" without bothering to double-check her claims with any neuroscientists. The media largely takes Wolf's statements at face value, understandably assuming that no major publisher would gamble their reputation by putting this stuff into print without at least a cursory round of fact-checking. But the "science" in this book is largely misleading or just wrong.

To learn the details, Google for these articles:
- Neuroscientists take aim at Naomi Wolf's theory of the "conscious vagina"
- Naomi Wolf's "Vagina" is full of bad science about the brain
- Pride and Prejudice, by Zoë Heller (The New York Review of Books)
- Feminist Dopamine, Conscious Vaginas, and the Goddess Array
- Of Mice and Women: Animal Models of Desire, Dread, and Despair
- Upstairs, Downstairs; `Vagina: A New Biography,' by Naomi Wolf (The New York Times)

Wolf leapt to fame with her 1991 book The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, which argued that culture's idea of female beauty is entirely socially constructed, primarily by men, in order to keep women down. Following publication, research by Devendra Singh and others confirm that both men and women from a broad spectrum of cultures (even those who don't have magazines or television) uniformly agree that they find women with a waist-to-hip ratio of between 0.6-0.8 the most attractive -- which makes sense biologically, given that a 0.7 ratio appears to indicate optimum physical health and fertility. So while Wolf makes some valid points about the cultural disenfranchisement of women, her central thesis is provably wrong. Wolf also claimed in 'Beauty Myth' that 150,000 women were dying every year from anorexia nervosa, when the real number is closer to 100. Her book gives voice to the genuine frustration many women feel at being judged primarily by their appearance, and so quickly found an appreciative readership; unfortunately the popularity of Wolf's basic message has resulted in a glossing-over of the reality that she often supports her arguments with claims that simply aren't true.

Naomi Wolf is pretty and charismatic, so she plays well on camera, but her shaky claims give the opponents of feminism a too-easy lever to trick impressionable young people into dismissing feminism and feminists entirely. I am strongly pro equal rights for women, I agree that women's sexuality has been swept under the rug (so to speak) for too long, but publishing an edifice of arguments built on a foundation of claims that simply aren't true may not be the wisest path towards a real solution.

I get that some readers find value in the basic message of this book even though many of the technical claims are misleading or incorrect, and I'm all for finding emotional sustenance where you can get it -- if reading this improves your life, great! In the future, though, I hope Wolf takes her hard-won position as a leading voice of feminism seriously enough to check her facts before committing them to print.