Sex, Not Sleaze Sexuality Should Be Sacred, Argues Author Naomi Wolf, So Why Does Popular Culture Make It So Unseemly?

It’s not a title you’d find in the child-rearing section, but Naomi Wolf’s “Promiscuities” has a lot to say about ugly realities parents would like to ignore.

Wolf’s account of her sexual life as a young woman - actually, as a girl - shows how our culture gives girls an utterly cheap idea of their sexuality.

It also shows how the details of daily life - lyrics, album covers, sex publications on view on the street - so deeply influence kids.

The time and place is San Francisco, 1968 to 1971, when “a scattered group of girls undertook the passage from girlhood to womanhood.”

Along the way, the middle schoolers study sex guides left around the houses in which they baby-sit, get directions for oral sex from “The Sensuous Woman” and delve into one girl’s mom’s copy of “Fear of Flying.” They move on.

Having no formal or ritual way of becoming a woman, it came down to this: a race to lose virginity, to become a “sophisticate” (while running the risk of also being a slut). Sexual intercourse equaled womanhood.

She writes: “In our culture, men were deciding for us if we were women. Heck: teen-age boys were deciding for us if we were women.”

And where were the adults?

As for her parents: “Loving, distracted, indulgent, my parents would never follow through on threats to ground me. Would a mounting pile of filthy clothes, leftover food and irretrievable textbooks that had to be expensively replaced do it? No? Well, what about hitchhiking to Mount Shasta with Martin and not phoning in when I got there safely? No?

How about spending the night on the couch in the Hustler-strewn living room of the hippie bikers there who took us in and, miraculously, gave us nothing worse to remember them by than their hospitality? No? Well, what, then?

My parents trusted me. It drove me berserk.”

She went with her boyfriend to a clinic for birth control: “It was like going to the vet: as if we were being processed not on a social but on an animal level.”

No one talked about responsibility, or morality.

There was plenty of sleaziness from predatory men: “There was always some fortyish fellow at the bar trying to look studly in our direction, or some unemployed guy in his thirties trying to convince one of us that he was David Bowie’s stage manager.”

As adults, Wolf and her girlhood friends recall that “girls we knew were expected to have slept with anywhere from 10 to 30 guys by the time we were in college.

If you hadn’t at least made a start, you were repressed or geeky or ‘inexperienced,’ a real pejorative.”

In “Promiscuities” (Random House, $24), Wolf is describing her own coming of age, but it is hardly different from what kids encounter every day in 1997.

You could argue, with some science to back you, that it’s even worse now.

It’s the same thing as psychologist Mary Pipher describes in her perennial best-seller “Reviving Ophelia”:

“In the halls of junior highs, girls are pressured to be sexual regardless of the quality of relationships.

“Losing virginity is considered a rite of passage into maturity.” And while schools have sex-education classes, “Most do not help students with what they need most - a sense of meaning regarding their sexuality, ways to make sense of all the messages, and guidelines on decent behavior in sexual relationships.”

All of this is a pretty persuasive picture that parents need to take responsibility for at least doing what they can to counter popular culture, from the early years on, for both girls and boys.

There may be no obvious, immediate payoff, but there is the opportunity to prime kids for some critical thinking.

Wolf goes beyond talking about teaching respect. She proposes that we move closer to the example of cultures that regard (or regarded) women’s sexuality as sacred.

Although we may not be able to do much to convince boys to think of teen-age girls as nascent fertility goddesses - wondrous as that would be - we at the very least have a responsibility to not close our eyes to what popular culture is teaching our kids, and how it’s damaging both boys and girls, in different ways.