Welcome to The Bombshell, a regular column about the peculiarities of the fairer sex.

It can’t be easy to be a man these days, what with the gender’s looming end, but thinking about Naomi Wolf’s new and much-ridiculed biography of the vagina has reminded me once again of the main reason why I would not want to be a man, or, make that a heterosexual man. Having sex with a woman is a complicated challenge. It exhausts me to think of it.

I feel sorry for the mystified males who have to have sex with us. One friend recently left by his wife wants to write a book for men called Stop, It Tickles. Here is how he explains his title: You meet a woman, she likes you a lot, you get together and maybe get married. But there always comes that night when you are doing the thing you always did, the thing she always liked, and suddenly she says: “Stop, it tickles.” And that’s the beginning of the end of all of it.

Another male friend, also not long ago turfed out by his wife and hunting for a replacement in the brave new world, has discovered that all the women he dates seem to come with their own plastic battery-powered devices. He’s had to learn how to operate them.

What do women want? No, really. What the hell do women want?

The mystified Viennese head doctor was well and truly perplexed, and a century of women (and not a few men) have since tried and failed to come up with a satisfying answer, leaving men like my two friends, helpless. Now comes—and comes—pop feminist Naomi Wolf with a suggestion. Her advice book is so prurient and visceral that the title is asterisked out on the iTunes library on my iPad.

In Vagina: A Biography, the answer to what women want is simple and old-fashioned: Women want flowers, eye-gazing, poetic language, cuddling and a lot of languorous attention to a very particular spot between the legs.

Who could possibly argue with that? And yet, the book has already spawned a slag pile-on, by—surprise, surprise—other women. And not just any women, but slightly younger pop-culture feminists, some of whom have at one time or another been anointed, as was Ms. Wolf in her 1990s heyday, as the “new” face of feminism, another photogenic, usually New York-based and usually Jewish gal ripe to step into Gloria’s pumps.

Interestingly, every one of the reviews of her book that I can find are by women. Perhaps because it’s a visceral topic, literally, for women, book review editors from The New Yorker to Slate decided that this one is not man’s territory. That’s too bad, because men are the ones who need to read it.

Vagina could have been an interesting bookend under everyman’s bedside reading lamp, beside Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men. As capital-M Men are going extinct, small-m men will have to step up to the big V with more reverence than ever before.

Ms. Wolf’s book shows them why and how.

How women come has perplexed heterosexual males since long before Freud’s “what do women want?” It has driven men to poetry and pornography and, finally, to prostitutes, who enable those who can’t figure it out to dispense with the tricky problem altogether.

Ms. Wolf’s book is filled with much purple silliness about goddesses and half-baked science about body chemistry, but it raises a legitimate question: Does a happy vagina make a happy woman and, by extension, a happy home and world? Given that benign intent, why then has her book sent so many of her peers into apoplexies of meanness, sarcasm and statements like this one from British reviewer Susanna Moore, who after decrying Ms. Wolf’s book as self-help crap dressed up as feminism, dubbing it “a bit anti-dildo” … and noting that “it’s like lesbianism never happened, nor class, nor vast swaths of feminist theory, ” concludes, “I can be this brutal because … I am indeed a cunt.” Yikes!

I’m not a Naomi Wolf fan. Her book is indeed cringe-worthy. But something about the tenor and tone of the reviews is so over the top it seems reasonable to ask why.

The reviewers are or once were members in good standing of the “young feminist writers” club. They have all written provocative books or essays about women’s needs, women’s problems, women, women, women. And they too have revealed themselves intimately at least once or twice, in print, because … oh yes, the personal is still political and, well, that stuff sells.

The New York Review of Books gave British writer Zoe Heller several thousand words artfully arranged around a very distracting color print of Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde, his 1866 painting of a woman’s crotch. Ms. Heller, a “confessional” English journalist, born in 1965, who made a shtick of her own romantic life in her columns for the Independent before writing novels including Notes on a Scandal, finds nothing redeeming in the book, pointing out that Ms. Wolf doesn’t know her “correlates” from her “causes” in science. She goes beyond the book to critique Ms. Wolf’s demand that Julian Assange’s Swedish rape accusers come forward, since hiding their names is a pre-feminist Victorian relic. “There is a strange hubris in Wolf’s claim to understand how all rape affects all women,” Ms. Heller writes. “It is the same hubris that compels her to instruct us on how all women need to be wooed, and how all women feel when they come … Her refusal to acknowledge the heterogeneity of female temperament, of female sexual proclivity, of female desire, would be galling, if it were not so dotty.” Ouch.

Over at Slate, Katie Roiphe offers her take not only on the book but on Wolf’s entire career. Ms. Roiphe—a single mom of two, living in New York, born in 1968—wrote a controversial book on date rape that kinda, sorta blamed the victim, called The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism. She has since crafted a career as the go-to girl for the slightly anti-PC feminist take—not Caitlin Flanagan, but Caitlin on the left.

Ms. Roiphe gets into the ring and administers a full-body takedown in the first 10 seconds. “I doubt the most brilliant novelist in the world could have created a more skewering satire of Naomi Wolf’s career than her latest book,” she opens. “The very public story of how Naomi Wolf went from a bright, promising Rhodes Scholar to this inventive variety of navel-gazer tells us some uncomfortable things about the culture and more specifically, the media.”

Ms. Roiphe proceeds to rip apart everything Ms. Wolf has written or done since her first book, and yes, O.K., comparing her Caesarean to being crucified and then publicly announcing she discovered Jesus on a book tour in Scotland was a bit much, but does that really make her a “yuppie barracuda”?

Last but not least, The New Yorker gave Ariel Levy a handful of pages and her own podcast with Judith Thurman and Sasha Weiss to talk about how Ms. Wolf’s book is just Fifty Shades of Grey dressed in an old second-wave-feminist Guatemalan alpaca vest. “Anger the vagina and the woman will have no choice but to become a harpy. Biology is destiny once again,” writes Ms. Levy, an out lesbian and author of the crackling cultural zeitgeist book Female Chauvinist Pigs (2005), for which she was anointed by no less an authority than Cindy Adams of The New York Post as “feminism’s newest and most provocative voice.”

All this fury and revulsion begs the question: Why not just ignore her, if what she’s saying is so idiotic? Why is this book getting so much space—mansions—in the nation’s high-end media real estate, the Fifth Avenue of pop culture? Is it the Rhodes scholarship? The New Voice of Feminism mantle she once wore? Or is it something more … personal?

I suspect that Ms. Wolf’s purple new age-y prose drives these women nuts because (a) their editors handed the book to them for review because they thought it was an Important Feminist Book when it’s actually slight and (b) there’s a grain of truth in what she’s trying to say.

There certainly are orgasms and orgasms, and women know the difference. But trumpeting the V orgasm as superior to all others is problematic for a number of demographic groups, including under-endowed men and the women who love them, lesbians, and any of the one-third to two-thirds of women who, according to Ms. Heller, simply can’t come that way.

The problem is that Ms. Wolf accepts nothing less than total “technicolor” vaginal orgasm satisfaction. “Unfortunately there is not, physiologically, much middle ground available for women,” she writes. “Either they are extremely well treated sexually, or else they become physically uncomfortable and emotionally irritable.” She concludes that: “A happy heterosexual vagina requires, to state the obvious, a virile man.”

As a heterosexual female who celebrates sex with virile men, Ms. Wolf’s point of view is radical. She doesn’t tote sex tools in her purse on dates with under-endowed or aged-out Viagrans who left their blue pills in the other pants pocket. She doesn’t have sex with women. She apparently has a boyfriend who does things the way she likes. Those facts of her life put her outside the mainstream as mediated by feminism’s new elites, who promote the doctrine that there are so very many different kinds of sex, so very many different roads to pleasure, all equally satisfying depending on what gets you off.

Maybe so. But like the virile capital M men going the way of the woolly mammoth, Ms. Wolf’s white-bread real P-in-V sex for red-blooded hetero women is just not the fashionable option anymore.

Nina Burleigh is the author of The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox among other books. Follow her at @ninaburleigh.

Naomi Wolf professes to have climaxes so transcendent that they seem to transform her, albeit briefly, into Snow White. “My partner and I had just made love,” the author writes in the introduction to her new book. “I looked out of the window at the trees tossing their new leaves and the wind lifting their branches in great waves, and it all looked like an intensely choreographed dance, in which all of nature was expressing something. The moving grasses, the sweeping tree branches, the birds calling from invisible locations in the dappled shadows ... I thought, it is back.” A degenerative spinal disease had led to a compressed pelvic nerve that had been making Ms. Wolf’s climaxes ho-hum, you see, and she wasn’t about to take it lying down. And thus a humble crotch nerve launched the labia-gazing investigation that informs Vagina: A New Biography (Ecco, 400 pp., $27.99).

Ms. Wolf’s book is the third in a trifecta of new nonfiction works about sexual anatomy that also includes Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History (W.W. Norton & Company, 352 pp., $25.95) and Why Is The Penis Shaped Like That? (FSG, 320 pp., $16.00) Are we, as a culture, entering our genital stage? More likely, some editors at some publishing houses knew what would sell. But where the latter two books deliver on their premises (earnest investigation and toilet science, respectively) Ms. Wolf’s is a future footnote. What begins as a personal essay about the author’s vaginal condition and the corresponding change in consciousness she feels it provokes leads to an evaluation of the ties between women’s vaginas and their ability to reach their full potential. She explores both the positive effects a happy vagina can have on a woman’s creative output (see: Georgia O’Keeffe, Gertrude Stein, Anaïs Nin) and the deleterious effect vaginal trauma can have on her emotional and sexual futures. But she takes her analysis a feminist-baiting step too far: “Once I had evidence that these connections were real, I felt that they held the key to much that had happened to women throughout history.”

In other words, if women have super-orgasms à la Ms. Wolf’s, they will be propelled toward a creative and emotional ecstasy of a sort they’ve never known; if they merely have regular orgasms, or worse, if the vagina-brain neural connections are damaged, they’re destined to a life of mediocrity and what Holly Golightly called “the mean reds.” The problem is that there’s no scientific evidence to support that Ms. Wolf has anything other than regular orgasms—if there was, she’d have shared it—so she’s merely creating yet another potentially unattainable ideal for women, of the kind she first decried in her 1991 book The Beauty Myth. Call it The Orgasm Myth. She outlines all the stages of female sexual arousal needed to get to this questionable state, and explains that “for this process to be complete, and thus truly fulfilling, the stimulation must be unhurried and carefully attuned to how the woman is reacting. The process requires attention and time.” She names this process “The Goddess Array” and spends a good portion of Vagina reiterating its importance, going so far as to say that there is a prescribed set of “words, actions, and gestures that women cannot do without” to achieve “high orgasms,” as opposed to, you know, the boring, old-fashioned kind. It reads, unfortunately, like the pages of a ’60s self-help book: stress, rushing and lack of foreplay will lead to unsatisfying sex and general unhappiness, and long, lingering coital sessions will do the job better. This is news?

Ms. Wolf’s only evidence of this special, New New Woman kind of orgasm is anecdotal, and her conclusions specious. The analysis gets more interesting when she explores the implications of the brain-vagina connection for victims of systemic rape of the kind seen recently in the Congo and Sierra Leone: “Could these commanders be ordering their troops to engage in atrocities that damage the female pelvic nerve because centuries of experience have shown that a consequence of this kind of violence is that the women who experience it will be easier to subjugate?” Maybe. But the main argument she returns to again and again is the kind of stretchy polemic that could do more harm than good. The book does accomplish one historic feat: it manages to make pussy very, very boring.

If Vagina: A New Biography is, at its best, sobering, the insights to be gained from Florence Williams’s Breasts: A Natural & Unnatural History are delirium tremens. The author kicks things off by working her way playfully through a number of origin theories (sexual selection versus natural selection, or breasts-for-men versus breasts-for-babies) and a freak-show survey of the history of breast implants (early models were filled with “glass balls, ivory, wood chips, peanut oil, honey, goat’s milk, and ox cartilage”). Then, intriguingly, Ms. Williams shifts gears: After having her own breast milk tested and receiving results that show levels of flame retardant in her bloodstream 10 to 100 times higher than those of her European counterparts, she sets out to discover what other chemicals might be in there and what they’re doing to her body.

The results are bracing. She has one particularly alarming conversation with a University of Texas professor who runs an experiment in which he breaks down hundreds of everyday plastic products and feeds them to breast cancer cells. Ninety percent of them made breast cancer cells grow.

Ms. Williams trots out an obvious fact that nonetheless feels revelatory: the breast is the only organ that still has to do most of its basic construction after birth. (And, as she points out, it’s also the only organ without its own medical specialty.) Scientists think it may be most susceptible to environmental factors while growing, so keep your children away from plastics and chemicals unless you want them to grow scary mutant breasts, and keep yourself away from those toxic substances while pregnant—when the breasts also undergo structural change—insofar as you can. Of course, to echo the author, “We can only eat so much quinoa out of a paper bag.” The real solution to this problem is to tackle it at its source, i.e., the producers of the everyday products that infuse us with chemicals to begin with. But good luck with that, especially if you’re an American. As we learn in Breasts, 162 countries agreed to ban 21 of the worst organic chemical offenders in 2004, but the U.S. wasn’t one of them.

Given the infested state of our breasts, we may want to re-evaluate the current lactation mania whose epicenter lies in Park Slope—though, given the miraculous qualities of breast milk as outlined in Breasts (inhibiting the transmission of HIV, changing structural makeup based on the sex of the child, regulating infant appetite; the list goes on) it remains a tossup. “Human milk is like ice cream, penicillin, and the drug ecstasy all wrapped in two pretty packages,” Ms. Williams extols. That’s the glass-half-full analysis. As she goes on to write, breast milk now regularly includes DDT, PCBs, trichloroethylene, perchlorate, dibenzofurans, mercury, lead, benzene and arsenic (all of which lends new meaning to Lord Mitford’s famous dismissal of people as “sewers”).

“If human milk were sold at the Piggly Wiggly,” the author concludes, “it would exceed the federal safety levels for some of those chemicals in food.” And the chemicals aren’t the neighborly kind, either: their presence in the environment has been linked to everything from early puberty in offspring (a 4½-year-old in Puerto Rico with fully developed breasts, for one) to higher rates of miscarriage and lymphoma. The potential for offloading these chemicals to babies is considered such a risk that the government of massively pro-breastfeeding Norway, where 99 percent of new mothers eschew formula, is currently reviewing its official stance.

If you’re an open-minded male who’s gotten this far in our review, I commend you—and your reward is this fun anecdote: At the soon-to-be-famous Marine Corps base Camp Lejeune, the drinking water supply has been discovered to be the most chemically contaminated in the country—and the base is also home to “the largest cluster of male breast cancers ever identified.” These incidences, of which over 71 have been discovered thus far, could be due to other causes, but suffice it to say that many unkempt eyebrows are raised. As Ms. Williams sums it up, “Breasts are our sentinel organ. They offer us a window into our rapidly transforming world and the excuse to steward it better.”

Lest our bescrotumed readers still feel left out (the lingering prospect of male mastectomies notwithstanding) let us now turn to Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?, a collection of essays by writer Jesse Bering that’s equal parts sedulous and silly.

As the name might suggest, the author largely avoids discussion of “the dark, labyrinthine abyss of the female reproductive tract.” He’s aware of his masculine lens and offers by way of introduction the fact that he is “very, very gay,” before going on to tackle a number of evolutionary-biological “Why?”s through essays such as “So Close and Yet So Far Away: The Contorted History of Auto-Fellatio” and “A Rubber Lover’s Tale.” “I want you to enjoy learning about your wildly ejaculating penises, your dribbling vulvae, and your own fears, biases, fetishes, and desires,” Mr. Bering proclaims, and he truly does leave few stones unturned. Pedophiles, self-breastfeeders, premature ejaculators, sex maniacs, horse-seducers, men who eat their own toes, pre-homosexuals, female ejaculators (or “Ejillculators”) and a whole host of other sexual notables get the “How’d they get this way?” treatment, as does a lab full of laughing rats.

In “An Ode to the Many Evolved Virtues of Human Semen,” the writer explores a position taken by researchers Gallup and Burch in which they speculate that women who enjoy frequent unprotected sex may be less depressed because of the anxiolytic chemicals in semen: cortisol, estrone, prolactin, oxytocin, melatonin and seratonin. “Happiness appears to be a function of the ambient seminal fluid pulsing through one’s veins,” he writes. (It’s unclear where this naturally occurring Prozac fits into the Goddess Array.)

As to the book’s titular question, Penis doesn’t give an answer, because at the end of the day, we don’t really know. But there are many fun theories. The one with the most viral potential—so-called Penis Displacement Theory, so named by Mr. Bering’s beloved Gallup and Burch after a recent study—involves men scraping their competitors’ semen out of the vaginas of their beloveds with each back-thrust.

Their unsuitability as subway reading aside, these three works also share one big takeaway: the more we learn about genetics and biology, the more likely we are to accept that “we are only as free as our genes were pliable in the slosh of our developmental milieus,” to quote Mr. Bering. And so too are the books unable to escape their natures: Penis looks down at the gutter, Vagina looks inward and Breasts points straight ahead.

editorial@observer.com

Dr. Adams, left, with Dennis Kucinich.

Patch Adams, MD, the clown doctor portrayed by Robin Williams in the eponymous 1998 film, has joined several dozen prominent figures of the American Left in asking Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa to grant WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange political asylum.

"The 'crime' that he has committed is that of practicing journalism," states the letter, delivered to the Embassy of Ecuador in London yesterday by American advocacy group Just Foreign Policy. 

Dr. Adams and the other letter signers are concerned that if Mr. Assange is extradited to Sweden, he will be imprisoned and re-extradited to the United States, where he's liable receive the same treatment as alleged leaker Private Bradley Manning. That includes "repeated and prolonged solitary confinement, harassment by guards, and humiliating treatment such as being forced to strip naked and stand at attention outside his cell." Many think the U.S. government has an indictment prepared already.

Other letter signers include the directors Michael Moore, Danny Glover and Oliver Stone; writers Naomi Wolf, Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges and Glenn Greenwald; pundit Bill Maher, and other activists, whistleblowers and professors.

Ecuador is a strategic option for Mr. Assange right now because President Correa desperately needs to shore up his free press bona fides. After winning two high profile libel lawsuits earlier this year, President Correa pardoned the journalists under international pressure. He has been interviewed by Mr. Assange and publicly praised WikiLeaks.

Naomi Wolf vs Officer Rick Lee

Remember last week, when writer/activist Naomi Wolf jumped sides during the Huffington Post's Game Changers party and joined up with the people protesting Governor Andrew Cuomo outside, leading to her arrest? According to ANIMAL editor in chief Bucky Turco, who filmed a portion of Ms. Wolf's stand against the man, her run-in with the police involved none other than beloved "Hipster Cop" Detective Rick Lee.

The video is dark and for the most part unintelligible, so we're taking Mr. Turco at his word that Ms. Wolf's efforts to tell the protesters that their rights were being infringed upon were intercepted by Detective Lee.

“What do you want to see the permit for,” asks Lee. “I’m a reporter with the Huffington Post,” responds Wolf. After a brief exchange, Lee went from explaining how the venue can restrict public movement to admitting they could technically “march” in front of the venue. Assuming she scored a coup, she went over to tell the protesters this, to which Lee can be overheard telling her, “They know already, don’t waste your breath. They know that already.”

Whether or not Officer Lee was the one to actually arrest Ms. Wolf remains unknown. But we doubt it...he seems like the kind of guy who has read The Beauty Myth.

Naomi Wolf (b. 1962)

Naomi Wolf is an American feminist and political author. She is best known for the The Beauty Myth, feuding with Camille Paglia in The New Republic, and receiving unwanted sexual advances from Harold Bloom as an undergraduate at Yale. Ms. Wolf's most visible involvement in Occupy Wall Street was getting arrested this week among the protesters outside The Huffington Post Game Changers awards ceremony (to which she was invited) for violating a (likely fictitious, she claims) permit which gave the NYPD the right to police a public sidewalk. She wrote in the Guardian:

In my book Give Me Liberty, a blueprint for how to open up a closing civil society, I have a chapter on permits – which is a crucial subject to understand for anyone involved in protest in the US. In 70s America, protest used to be very effective, but in subsequent decades municipalities have sneakily created a web of "overpermiticisation" – requirements that were designed to stifle freedom of assembly and the right to petition government for redress of grievances, both of which are part of our first amendment.

Despite identifying with the left, Ms. Wolf is on a bit of a Founding Fathers kick, making her an interesting figure in the comparisons between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.

Naomi Klein (b. 1970)

Naomi Klein is a Canadian anti-corporate globalization activist and author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine. On October 6, she addressed the crowd at Zuccotti Park. Her speech, entitled, "The Most Important Thing In the World Now," began "I love you" and was reprinted in The Nation, where she is a contributor, and The Occupy Wall Street Journal. It praised Occupy Wall Street's steadfastness, compared to the WTO and G8 protests' transience, and linked its aims to climate change:

Ten years later, it seems as if there aren’t any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world.

The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. And the atmosphere cannot absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological.

Naomi Watts (b. 1968)

Naomi Watts is an British-Australian actress who attended the same high school as Nicole Kidman and got her big break in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. She is not known to have participated in the Occupy Wall Street movement, but, as she, husband Liev Schreiber and their two sons live in Manhattan, she definitely knows it exists. Don't rule out a sighting and keep your eyes peeled--an avid urban cyclist, she'll blend right in.

Naomi Campbell (b. 1970)

Naomi Campbell is a British supermodel and fashion icon of the '80s and '90s who later became best known for habitually assaulting her employees with her Blackberry. Her affection for superwealthy businessmen makes an unlikely candidate for involvment in Occupy Wall Street movement. (She now lives in Moscow with Vladislav Doronin, "The Donald Trump of Russia.") Protesters may take issue with the fact that Ms. Campbell once accepted "dirty-looking" diamonds from the former Liberian president and Sierra Leone civil war warlord Charles Taylor.

Aside from their names and ages, the Naomis have at least one other thing in common. When Google image searched, the search engine auto-filled "hot" after their names. Point Ms. Wolf!

Naomi Wolf gets arrested outside Huffington Post Game Changers

The protesters were shouting anti-Andrew Cuomo-isms. Now see, that was interesting. So far Governor Cuomo has remained a figure larger outside the debates of Occupy Wall Street, while Mayor Michael Bloomberg has taken the brunt of most of the protesters ire. But this event - which drew protesters who knew about the Governor's appearance with his son, Mario... who might have even been alerted ahead of time by Arianna's team for some big PR, as far as we knew - targeted either Cuomo's desire to repeal the millionaire's tax, or to get rid on the ban on FRACKing, an anti-Green hydraulic drilling into wells.

But despite the major star power and the presence of Kim Kardashian (who won the award for Business Game Changer for 2011, a whole other story), Huffington Post was still, well, The Huffington Post. Meaning that eventually, one the celebrities was going to dive into the crowd and switch sides. That person happened to be Feminist author Naomi Wolf.

Have you ever seen someone look so happy to get arrested? Famous people at Game Changers not detained for protesting (or telling the protesters that they don't need a permit for a megaphone): Kyle MacLachlan, Cheryl Hines, Ms. Kardashian, Nora Ephron, and Gayle King.

Ms. Wolf was represented by lit agent John Brockman. Neither was not available for comment. In her last three books—one a memoir about her father, the other two polemics on American politics—the author has departed from the area of expertise she established early on with the internationally bestselling The Beauty Myth and reinforced with subsequent efforts such as Fire With Fire: The New Female Empowerment and How to Use It, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood and Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood.

She last made a big splash with a 2004 New York magazine story that recounted her experience of sexual harassment at the hands of professor Harold Bloom while a student at Yale.

More from Leon Neyfakh:

After Times Kennedy Leak, Hachette Hires Private Dick

Another Wronged Wife Wants to Write About It

“Everything I’ve ever written comes out of the poetry,” Ms. Jong said, sipping red wine. “The poetry reminds me of where I came from. It keeps me in the world of the unconscious, the world of metaphor, the world of dreams. For me it’s essential.”

Nearby stood Ms. Jong’s co-hosts: the feminist writer Naomi Wolf, dressed in a sweater that from far away looked to be made of gold shavings, and Daphne Merkin, who said she was going home soon to finish a book review for the Daily Beast.

“One of the things that starts happening when you reach your 50s and 60s is a lot of people you love start dying,” Erica Jong said last night during her book party at the New York Yacht Club near Times Square. Dressed in a bright red button-down with black epaulettes and handsomely diamond-studded flannel slippers, she was talking about her new collection of poetry, Love Comes First, and how a lot of the poems in it are about loss.

“Everything I’ve ever written comes out of the poetry,” Ms. Jong said, sipping red wine. “The poetry reminds me of where I came from. It keeps me in the world of the unconscious, the world of metaphor, the world of dreams. For me it’s essential.”

Nearby stood Ms. Jong’s co-hosts: the feminist writer Naomi Wolf, dressed in a sweater that from far away looked to be made of gold shavings, and Daphne Merkin, who said she was going home soon to finish a book review for the Daily Beast.

A large screen mounted off to the side and away from Ms. Jong’s guests showed a video of the author reading from the book in Central Park. Earlier, she had recited a few of the poems aloud.

“We’ve never had a party here before,” she said, looking around the spacious wood-paneled hall. Charming model yachts stood on display in tall glass cases, and a comically large fireplace filled with logs. Her husband, Ms. Jong said, was a member of the club.

“I love to sail and my husband is a mad sailor,” she said. “We keep our boat in Norwalk, Connecticut. I’m his deck monkey!”

She called over her daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, an author in her own right who recently took a job as a literary agent with David Vigliano Associates. Both mother and daughter took off their shoes.

A moment later Ms. Jong-Fast was talking about her new career.

“I sort of liberated myself to be a capitalist,” she said. “My whole life I’ve thought, ‘Ohhhh, I have to be an artist!’”

By around 8:30 the crowd had thinned; a few Yacht Club professionals carried out a tray of uneaten dessert cakes the size of softballs. The Daily Transom lingered to ask Ms. Jong's husband about the model yachts.

Sadly, the article was released too prematurely (tee-hee) to include this month's poster boy for self-love, David Duchovny.

But you probably already know about the perils of using internet porn if you read David Amsden's October 13, 2003 story in New York Magazine. Or Naomi Wolf's essay accompanying that piece. Or Amy Sohn's column from the same magazine from May 21, 2005. Or Pamela Paul's 2005 book, Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families. Or Ms. Sohn's September 11, 2005 review of Ms. Paul's book, in which she dismissed its thesis despite having written about it a few months before.

Not a reader? Maybe you saw Rita Cosby's MSNBC report from March 3, 2006. Or CBS News' 'Eye on Technology' segment from May 1, 2007. Or Good Morning America's Pornography Threatens a Marriage from June 5, 2007. Or Fox News' 8 Signs Your Partner is Addicted to Porn from June 9, 2008.

Of course, that's not to mention the classics from The Holy Bible to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Medical Arts Productions to Philip Roth, Jerry Seinfeld to There's Something About Mary to American Pie, and David Denby, and countless others who have known for centuries that men sometimes masturbate.

Naomi Wolf is one lucky lass. Oh, she's had her share of troubles-like that time at Yale when Harold Bloom laid his "heavy, boneless" paw on her trembling undergraduate lap, traumatizing her into a two-decade long silence from which she could only be coaxed by a story contract with New York magazine. It can't have been fun getting ridiculed as Al Gore's color consultant during the 2000 Presidential campaign, especially for a woman who made her name decrying the image industry in a 1991 best-seller called The Beauty Myth. And Ms. Wolf's most recent books, Promiscuities (1997) and Misconceptions (2001), were dismissed by the few who read them as self-important memoirs masquerading as sociology. But she has a big shiny mane of hair, rosy cheeks and a really, really great dad-and The Treehouse, her latest effort, does a lovely job of immortalizing him.

Still-does it have to take place in a treehouse? Why must every sophisticated, middle-aged urban person these days retreat to the countryside for personal growth and insight, like some lunatic pack of nouveaux Thoreaus? (It's especially galling when you just know they have great apartments in the city.) Personally, I get more "insight" from 10 minutes of walking down 79th Street, any day of the week, than from hours sitting on a rickety sun-porch surrounded by the hum of cicadas. Ms. Wolf, however, had been craving relief from the exigencies of being Naomi Wolf-from "the public dog pit," as she puts it-and so she purchased and lovingly restored a ramshackle homesteader's cottage in the Hudson Valley, essentially morphing into a combination of Martha Stewart and Simple Abundance's Sarah Ban Breathnach. She knelt over a humble pine staircase for days, scrubbing with steel wool and Goo Gone "as if scraping something from inside of me"-really, privileged feminist intellectuals these days make such fetish of housework, it's a wonder they don't become fulltime charpersons.

She spins out long, luxurious paragraphs on her maiden efforts with power tools: Naomi Wolf, meet Home Depot. On the cordless drill: "It felt heavy and awkward and full of potential …. I whizzed [it] in the air and felt an exhilarating buzz." On the screwdriver: "It was solid …. At last I drove the screw into the drywall neither too deeply nor too weakly." Sisters are doing it for themselves!

Ms. Wolf had the help of handymen in mud-caked overalls who inevitably revealed that they, too, were capable of deep thoughts and florid literary sensibilities ("Mr. Christian's vision was the eighteenth-century ideal of the sublime in painting," burbles his employer). Heartbroken friends arrived at the house to have their spirits refreshed-though apparently nature can't fix everything: Naomi exhorts one divorced research scientist to buy a La Perla underwire bra, the kind that retails for three figures. Students and protégés visited, including a "spunky, fast-talking 24-year-old Hispanic-American with a sprightly expression"-Naomi was running her very own Fresh Air Fund. The adults cheerfully pitched in to build her daughter Rosa the treehouse of her dreams, subliminally satisfying dreams of their own. For "everyone needs a treehouse," declares Ms. Wolf with sweeping benevolence-though those who can't afford a country house might need to "build a treehouse internally … maybe it's a seat on the train when someone is going to work," or perhaps it requires lashings of Calgon: "in your bathroom, when you have drawn a bath and closed the door." (Gee, thanks.)

Onto this familiar tale of bucolic self-discovery is grafted the far more interesting story of shaggy octogenarian Leonard Wolf- Rumanian Jewish immigrant, bohemian poet, teacher, former Communist, retired horn dog-a man to whom Naomi (or "honey," as he calls her) was now, at a moment of unspecified personal or career crisis, ready to concede some central "Oedipal" struggle: "I was better at going on Crossfire," she boasts ruefully-but her father had remained true to his artistic ideals, indifferent to fame and monetary wealth, self-publishing his work. His integrity, she suddenly realized, trumps her bullheaded, publicity-adept ambition.

And so Naomi attempted to lift the "portcullis of [her] rightness": Appointing herself Leonard's humble amanuensis, she transcribes his lecture notes ("Lesson Three: Destroy the Box"; "Lesson Nine: Your Only Wage Will Be Joy") in a kind of Artist's Way-esque penance for the crummy mediagenic books on which she'd squandered her literary gifts. ("I have made plenty of excruciating mistakes," she admits.) She reveals that, decades ago, she turned her back on the muse, abandoning her own girlish poetry. "Let me hold the stone up to the light," she writes, quoting from her juvenilia. Was it her verse that incited Mr. Bloom's fumbling lust?

This being Naomi Wolf, it's impossible to see The Treehouse as a simple exercise in quiet humility. Over the years, she's hitched herself so savvily to publishing trends: The Beauty Myth coincided with Susan Faludi's Backlash; Promiscuities limped along behind Mary Pipher's study of troubled girls, Reviving Ophelia; Misconceptions rode a wave of nauseating mommy lit-would it be entirely cynical to detect in this latest effort a whiff of The Greatest Generation? Just a hint of the saccharine tracts of Mitch Albom?

It doesn't matter, though, because as any daughter who idolizes her imperfect father will instantly recognize, Naomi has managed a heroic act in committing his life story to the printed page. It's a pity that someone decided to package Leonard Wolf as an "eccentric" on the dust jacket, as if Oprah-anesthetized American readers couldn't swallow as "normal" the idea of a man who smokes a meerschaum pipe; who favors beverages like absinthe, collects medieval Arabian astrolabes and spouts poetry from memory-"the man will quote Chaucer at the drop of a hat," writes the daughter, using a cliché for which the father would surely reprove her ("Lesson Four: Speak in Your Own Voice").

He seems a fascinating guy, coming of age in San Francisco during the boozy Beatnik 1950's, hobnobbing with E.M. Forster, Eudora Welty and Anaïs Nin-an era Ms. Wolf can't help but romanticize in contrast to her experience reading deconstructionist theory at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in the 1980's ("years of bad hair and bad fashion, of bad food"). The Wolf tykes-and there turned out to be more of them than they knew: Papa was a rolling stone-were richly indulged, not with material possessions, but with boundless opportunities for personal expression, such as scribbling on themselves and cooking family meals. One night, little Naomi mounted a feast out of The Canterbury Tales, with heather fronds strewn on the dining room and "gobbets of cheese." It sounds like an ideal childhood (though surely with dark undercurrents glossed over here), and Leonard a wonderful patriarch.

I wish Ms. Wolf had had the courage just to write his biography, without resorting to pastoral contrivances like the treehouse. But a straight biography wouldn't have been as commercially viable as this inspirational book aimed at the "artist" that Leonard Wolf believes, with quaint faith, "inheres in everyone." Presumably, he hasn't seen American Idol.

Alexandra Jacobs is features editor of The Observer.