Neither feminist nor the secrets of Fatima

SEX:Vagina: A New Biography By Naomi Wolf, Virago, 416pp. £12.99

PICKING THE worst thing about Naomi Wolf’s very silly new book is not an easy task. Is it her inept use of science? Her reliance on self-taught “experts”? Is it the already infamous “cuntini” incident, in which hearing vulva-shaped pasta thus described at a dinner party renders Wolf unable to write for six months? Is it her constant use of the word “goddess”? Is it the way she presents already established ideas as if they were radical? Is it that the whole book is a deeply conservative tract masquerading as progressive feminism? Or is it that the entire thing reads as if it were written by a bright but naive undergraduate who has just discovered the concepts of biology, feminist criticism and women’s history?

The answer is probably all of the above. If proof were needed that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, or at least a thing that can lead to very bad books, Naomi Wolf’s Vagina: A New Biography would be it. Wolf has discovered some basic facts about the human body, and this seems to have blown her mind. Literally. These discoveries were triggered by something that happened to her in 2009. All her life she had been blessed with orgasms so glorious that afterwards she “would see colours as if they were brighter”. But now, alas, the orgasms are only amazing as opposed to mildly hallucinogenic. Wolf discovers there is a problem with a trapped nerve in her spine. An operation later, and the technicolour orgasms are back. But they have been joined, unfortunately for the rest of us, by a desire to share her views on the vagina with the world.

The most life-changing fact? The news that the vagina is connected to the brain. Those of us who have been aware of the nervous system for some time will not be surprised to hear this. It is, however, news to Wolf, who also becomes obsessed with dopamine, which she describes as “the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain”. It supposedly boosts creativity and sexual power, but, though Wolf doesn’t mention it, it does a lot of other less exciting things too, and it does them to men as well.

Wolf is on a roll now, however, and throughout the book she brings up both dopamine and the vagina-brain connection as if she’s sharing the secrets of Fatima. Wolf’s bad science is fuelled by her reliance on anecdotal evidence (she regularly cites members of her own Facebook group) and her tendency to quote people as medical authorities who are nothing of the kind. She frequently quotes a woman called Marnia Robinson, and at one stage describes her as a “dopamine researcher”.

You might expect Robinson to be, say, an endocrinologist. But no. Here’s how Robinson describes herself on her website: “Marnia . . . is a former corporate lawyer who left her career to investigate how ancient sacred-sex prescriptions can heal the widespread disharmony in intimate relationships.”

Marnia isn’t the only refugee from big business to find her true calling in supposedly ancient sexual wisdom. Wolf has become besotted with her version of the ancient Indian practice of tantra. Her depiction of Asian attitudes to sexuality is painfully orientalist, not helped by the fact that the experts she quotes are almost all westerners from the corporate world rather than historians or scholars. Her guru is a man called Mike Lousada, “investment banker turned male sexual healer”, who offers “yoni massage”. We are in the realm of people who refer to the vagina as the yoni.

Wolf’s approach to sex is a mystical one, which is fair enough if that’s what works for her. Although there’s a brief acknowledgment that women have different sexual tastes, there’s a general assumption that what she calls (brace yourself) the “goddess array” – candles, stroking, lots of gazing into each other’s eyes – is right for all women. It isn’t.

She’s not much better when it comes to broader cultural and social issues. There’s nothing new in her view of rape as a tool to subjugate women, and a section on rape as a tool of war is amazingly simplistic. A chapter on sexuality and creativity is equally trite. She picks a few 19th- and early-20th-century female writers and claims their creativity was connected to the fulfilment of their “sexually passionate natures”, conveniently ignoring the fact that many of the writers she cites, including Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Brontë, were virgins when they wrote their passionate work. (They may have masturbated, of course, but in Wolf’s world that doesn’t count: “A happy heterosexual vagina requires, to state the obvious, a virile man.”) In fact, much of the book boils down to the not-exactly-radical idea that a woman just needs a good seeing to. Combine this with Wolf’s vision of women as mystical creatures of transcendental emotion rather than intellect, whose magic vaginas just want a bouquet of flowers and some candles and whose clitorises are an afterthought, and the result is a very conservative book by someone who seems to believe biology is destiny.

And, frankly, the subject of this book deserves better. In 1999 the Pulitzer-winning science writer Natalie Angier wrote a brilliant book called Woman: An Intimate Geography. It was witty, insightful and supremely well informed, and it made the female sexual organs seem like wonderful things. Did you know the acidity of the healthy vagina is the same as that of a glass of red wine?

That entire book was a celebration of the female body and how it works, and reading it would do more to remove any sense of confusion and shame surrounding the vagina than Wolf’s incoherent rambling. Unlike Vagina: A New Biography, Angier’s book is empowering. It won’t make a woman feel like a goddess, but it’ll make her feel like something much more satisfying than Wolf’s candlelit vision: a complicated human being.

Anna Carey’s debut novel, The Real Rebecca, won the senior children’s book prize at the 2011 Irish Book Awards. Her new book, Rebecca’s Rules, has just been published