My Feminist Perspective? Knowledge Is Power

Naomi Wolf Defends 'Vagina' Against Critics
NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 19: Author Naomi Wolf attends the 'Burma Captured: In Images and In Spirit' benefit ball at the New York Friars Club on September 19, 2011 in New York City. (Photo by Mark Von Holden/Getty Images)
NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 19: Author Naomi Wolf attends the 'Burma Captured: In Images and In Spirit' benefit ball at the New York Friars Club on September 19, 2011 in New York City. (Photo by Mark Von Holden/Getty Images)

Many critics and readers, including many feminists, have welcomed my book Vagina: A New Biography. Some critics, though – feminists too, of another kind – are accusing me of a form of contemporary heresy.

'Vagina' is an account of the latest neuroscientific and other findings that markedly update our understanding of female sexual desire, arousal and orgasm, at a time when conventional wisdom about female sexual response is arrested in research from Masters and Johnson, decades-old; at a time when, even in a hypersexualised society, 30% of American women self-report not reliably having orgasms when they wish to; in a year when 2,000 British women with normal labia requested labiaplasties. Surely reporting on fresh information about female sexual response is an obviously feminist thing to do?

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