Susie Bright's Sexual State of the Union covers the same ground as Wolf's Promiscuities, but from another point of view. Consider this fact: both Susie Bright and Naomi Wolf made early sexual discoveries in the bushes. This is a common rite of passage -- I too had a memorable encounter in a hedge when I was almost seven, with two boys whom I never saw again -- (just as well, I think, since I doubt that we had much in common, despite our mutual curiosity). It is the contrast between Wolf's and Bright's stories which is particularly telling. The lone, impressionable Wolf is lured into the shrubbery at the age of ten by a strange adult who claims to have lost his contact lens; she flees in a state of terror. Melodramatically, Wolf refers to the disturbed man as a "devil" more than once -- even though no physical contact has occurred -- little caring what devils may have been afflicting him. To this day, the adult Wolf is still preoccupied with the trauma's effect on her. The mischievous Miss Bright, on the other hand, discovers a cache of dirty Polaroids during an after-school expedition with a bratty gal pal. Bright's impulse is to return to the site, to re-examine the Polaroids.

While Susie Bright uses sex to learn about the rest of the world, Naomi Wolf's sexual experiences simply teach her more and more about herself -- and she seems to resent any information that reveals evidence of sexuality alien to her own. Wolf's response, as a teen, to Nabokov's Lolita is funnier than she realizes: at sixteen, she is horrified to discover that a novel could urge young female readers to empathize with someone totally unlike them, a middle-aged lecher. (Empathy -- what a thing to impose on a literate teenager!) Two decades later, Wolf doesn't appear to have gained much insight into the experience; her first reading of Lolita might as well have been her last.

In Sexual State of the Union, Bright travels from one end of the country to the other, wryly commenting on the market for sex toys and sex change operations. She uncovers the mortifying foibles of on-line love slaves, and throws into the mix quirky details about a book tour's effect on one's sex life. If these three books were to disrobe a little, Bright's Sexual State of the Union would be spilling out of a leather bustier, cheerfully flaunting its ripped fishnets. Wolf's prose reminds me of something heavily padded and beige with too much lace in all the wrong places. As for Last Night in Paradise, it is the ideological equivalent of a black underwire bra -- one of those soft-cupped, seamless numbers, elegantly constructed, with perfectly adequate support.