The obliging feminist: Breaking all the rules of political correctness by reaching out to the rich and the Right, exploring the awkward ambiguities of feminism, being nice: Naomi Wolf, the author of The Beauty Myth, is back

COME THE revolution, women freedom fighters could do worse than hold their victory party at the 21 Club in Manhattan. A Black Forest of wood panelling, the club is full of leather banquettes, silver trophies, thigh-high models of jockeys, and thick with the fug of male power - Eau Sauvage mingling with the burnt autumn of cigar. The carpet pile is so deep you have to paddle. Upstairs, 150 exquisite Ladies Who Lunch are picking their way around the banqueting room like flamingoes. Lunch is coming a little expensive today, at dollars 250 a plate. A fragrant executive from Estee Lauder assures me that we are in for an 'absolutely lovely time'. The people here are 'lovely' and the cause, too, is 'just lovely'. What is the cause? 'Oh, people with Aids.'

We sit down at tables decked in linen and piled with fruit. Out in front is a panel of four women: chairperson Alexandra Penney, editor of Self magazine; Marianne Williamson, feminist and spiritual guru; Georgette Mosbacher, writer of Feminine Force and Republican senatorial wife. Mosbacher, cited in 1992 as one of the three arch-enemies of democratic politics by Bill Clinton's campaign manager, looks like an inflatable Pan-Am stewardess. She has creme-fraiche skin and bee-stung lips; her strawberry-blonde hair is lacquered into the kind of girly-curly wave favoured by the young Mary Tyler Moore. To her right sits a pretty dark-haired young woman wearing soft clothes in muted colours: Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth (1990) and the new Fire With Fire, which seeks to overcome resistance to the other F-word - feminism. Wolf smiles warmly at the miracle of synthetic pulchritude and says: 'I believe we need a new feminism that cuts across the political spectrum.'

Above the chinking of cutlery and glass, the discussion proceeds. It is the kind of breathless talk you can only have in a can-do society. Most people in Britain (a no-can-do society) would blench at the mixture of invocations to personal growth, resolutions in the face of 'life challenges' and New Age baloney. Marianne spends a lot of time meditating: 'It is the most important thing I can do for myself and the planet. Period.' She warns the ladies toying with their grilled salmon and arugula that 'civilisation is closer to breakdown than any of us realise'. Mosbacher purrs that we too can emulate her rags-to-riches story if only we discover our Feminine Force (audio copies sitting in the goodie bags ready to take home).

But it is Wolf's voice that the ladies pause mid-bite to listen to. Mellifluous but resolute, it insists that recent social and electoral advances have given women more power than they realise, that American women have seven million more votes than men and must stop thinking of themselves as victims. There is a rousing hear-hear from my table. At no time does Wolf give any sign that Mosbacher's views are other than delightful, although she does permit herself one teeny dig: 'Women need voices of dissent - and I will work hard to defeat your husband at the next election.' All the panellists are asked to name their mentors - Wolf chooses her namesake Virginia, Mosbacher (to audible groans) her husbands: 'Even though my second husband was an abuser, I'm grateful to him.' After they have kissed and made off, Wolf comes across the room, her face flickering with what just might be mischief: 'You're British, Allison. You want satire? OK, I've given you satire.'

WOLF'S tolerance and diplomacy amazed me: a similar cocktail of personalities on a British platform would have reliably turned into a Molotov. But over the next few days in New York I saw things that started to make sense of it. On the David Letterman show, a young comedian began his routine like this: 'Why do women say they have no power? Jeeze, we're the ones who have no power. I mean all we want is for them to have sex with us and let us get on with our own stuff, right?' He was a big hit. A city tabloid led its front page with a report on a local election that had apparently turned nasty in a 'heated debate'. Reading the story, it emerged that this inferno consisted of, saints preserve us, 'sarcastic asides'. A contemporary of Wolf's at Yale explained to me that in the US 'public discourse strives for consensus because disagreement is seen as rude. Basically, people hate you if you're not nice.' Tread softly, for you tread on their Dream. Proving her point, a poll in the New York Times showed that mayoral candidate Rudolph Giuliani was doing a lot better since he stopped criticising his opponent's dreadful record. It was easy to imagine how the situation might be worse for a young woman expressing views which weren't just rude but revolutionary. Sure enough, in its report on the 21 Club lunch, the New York Post found Naomi Wolf guilty on a couple of counts - superciliousness, impoliteness. Crimes which 150 eye-witnesses knew she had not even been near the scene of.

When we meet a week later over coffee in her hotel (Wolf now lives in Washington with her husband, David Shipley, executive editor of the New Republic) she is upset by the Post story but philosophical: 'I expect to be misquoted, even though I try to make sure I can't get taken out of context.' She urges me not to draw any sweeping conclusions from the lunch: 'I was addressing a group of rich women and trying to get them to give money for Aids patients. If the goal is to try to get them to cough up then my responsibility is somewhat different from when I'm facing off with a cosmetic surgeon.' When I tell her that the night before somebody at dinner said they'd heard she wasn't a nice person, she says the idea must have come from watching one of these more combative encounters.

Being the movement's currently most visible and palatable evangelist (the New York Daily News hailed 'Feminism's Pretty New Face: making women's liberation more attractive in the 90s'), Wolf also comes in for criticism

from purist factions of the sisterhood who are hostile to any accommodations with the 'oppressor media'. 'One thing that makes me crazy about the Left, and I speak as a member of the Left, is that you can be saying the exact same thing you would in some East Village cafe, but if you're saying it on television, or you get paid for it, that's selling out.'

Did she feel constrained? 'You do get to be afraid of speaking without fear because of what might come up or how it might be used and that's a deadly intellectual predicament. I wrote Fire With Fire because I was feeling killed as a writer, suffocated by my responsibilities as some kind of ambassadress for feminism. The next book is going to be about my adolescent sexual experiences and those of other girls - that is not political correctness. I can't have feminist inhibitions about how They might use it against the movement. I wrote the book to clear the path for me to think what I needed to think, and I hope to clear the path for other people.'

She deserves to succeed. Fire With Fire: The New Female Power And How It Will Change The 21st Century is a sane and courageous book which aims to broaden feminism so it stops scaring the hell out of millions of women who share its goals but won't sign up because of its associations - 'anti-family, anti-male, white and middle-class'. Lecturing on campuses around the US, Wolf got female students to build up an identikit feminist for her: 'Hairy legs, fat, scowling, sensible shoes, big breasts - but the wrong kind.' She is very careful to say there is nothing wrong with looking like this, but it is a measure of her deftness in steering a populist course that 'Flexible Feminism for the 90s' has made it to the pages of Glamour and Elle alongside pictures of slim, smiling women with reckless shoes and big breasts - but the right kind.

As is the custom with social-trend books, Wolf claims to have spotted a shift in the Zeitgeist which may not ring a bell with everyone: readers could be forgiven, for instance, for thinking they may have slept through the 'crumbling of the Masculine Empire'. But she does convince you that in America the Anita Hill case angered enough women to sweep Clinton and, more important, Hillary, into power. 'I'm not talking about magic,' she says, and turns to the example of Emily's List, the women's political lobby group. 'In this country dollars 6.2m from 100,000 donors elected 25 women to Congress and the Senate. Simple mathematics. If we're the majority and we donate 10 dollars a year, if only upper-class women donate dollars 20 a year, we'll have a war chest no one can ignore. We're still acting like we're a minority.' Wolf points out that if women wait for the slow drip of evolution, equality will take a 'short 342 years'.

Fire With Fire will be a huge success because Wolf has cannily shifted the emphasis of 'the struggle' from a siege mentality to achievement, pleasure - hell, it could even be fun. We are allowed to to climb out of the trenches and play footie, even footsie, with the other side now as long as we remember that we've got more players and an excellent chance of beating them at their own game.

The book does share some of the flaws of The Beauty Myth: academic sentences bowed down with jargon, gushing raids on the myth kitty ('steal fire from the gods' etc) and hints at a conspiracy - 'There is a comically convoluted effort to keep women from considering the implications of their majority status' - that leave you wondering what this dark force might be. And the research from other countries occasionally feels a bit tacked on (the hailing of Opportunity 2000 as a cause for hope will certainly raise some hollow chuckles here). But what is really refreshing is Wolf's willingness to embrace political incorrectness. 'It's not dissent that's harmful but consensus,' she says. At one university, she was confronted by a group of women's-studies majors, one of whom asked her whether the act of writing a book wasn't in itself exclusionary to women who can't read? Wolf writes: 'I was alarmed by the conversation's atmosphere in which it was clear that, because we were all feminists, my interlocutors somehow owned my brain - as if it were a motel room they'd paid for - were entitled to rearrange the furniture for their greater comfort.'

So it's goodbye victim feminism, which wears suffering as a badge of honour - 'like a Victorian invalid who can wield power only through their sickness and therefore refuses to get well' - and hello power feminism, in which political differences are tolerated (even the Georgette Mosbacher kind) in order to win representation, and commonsense prevails. 'It is just as foolish,' Wolf says, 'to assume that all men are opposed to women's equality as to assume all women favour it.' She even wants a tasteful logo for feminism.

A new image is certainly overdue. In Britain in the 1980s, the great tradition of light-bulb jokes reached its climax with: 'How many feminists does it take to change a light-bulb?'

'That's not funny.'

And Victoria Wood could end her stage show by thanking everyone for being 'such a nice audience. Not like last night. We had this group in - Feminists Against Laughing.' I laughed at that, and I was supposed to be one.

Early on the movement had been tarred with an image of self-righteous disapproval and that hardened through the years into the obdurate armour we now call political correctness. Wood, with her own joyous debunking of the Beauty Myth ('I went into this boutique. The only thing that fit me was the cubicle curtain') and her irreverant lyrics in songs like 'Don't Do It' ('It's sad to be stuck by the side of a person/you don't even like/Tell me what could be worse than/A life full of nothing, it's stupid it's painful/Don't do it'), had a surer sense of how to reach the mass of women than polemicists with their talk of paradigms and parameters. Not surprisingly, the refrain of Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse - Don't do it, ever - was to prove rather less catchy.

NAOMI WOLF's life has not followed the traditional rebel's trajectory from repression to freedom. She was born in 1962 in Haight-Ashbury, a suburb of San Francisco that was so laid back it was waving its legs in the air. Dad was a college teacher, Mom a graduate student in anthropology, both were liberal Jews and 'feminists from way back'. Her father regularly took care of Naomi and her brother and half-sister. Wolf remembers it as 'an egalitarian paradise. I still think of the rest of the world as insane. I came East to college and I encountered the class structure, racism, homophobia. In San Francisco they did exist but the civic contract was aimed at that being bad.'

Home was culturally middle-class, but financially barely so. Wolf's act of defiance in this hippie world was to study like crazy. She brought the same determination to anorexia, which she pursued during her 13th year until a doctor pointed out he could feel her spine through her stomach. Recollections of that time formed the best, because most savagely direct, writing in The Beauty Myth. There was no one cause, just factors like discovering a note of her mother's skimpy daily food in the kitchen, a visit to an older, diet-conscious cousin who admired Naomi's 'one-piece kid's body', reading a Cosmopolitan article advising women how to pose in bed the better to disguise their fatness from their men, and a boy called Bobby pinching her stomach as she bent over a water-fountain in the school-yard saying: 'You'd better watch it, Wolf.' It wasn't until years later that she remembered Bobby had been the fattest boy in the school.

At 17, she won a scholarship to Yale, which she adored. The only blots were having to unlearn the poor's healthy enthusiasm for wealth when she was exposed to 'the deadly combination of upper-middle class feminine gentility about money and left-wing victim feminist guilt'. Then there was the famous professor who one day put his hand on her thigh. 'I knew and he knew that he could do this to me and I couldn't do anything. I was dependent on him for grades and recommendations. And they knew in the administration that this is what that guy does. He does it year after year. It seemed to undermine all the nice, liberal, meritocratic language with which I was surrounded. I guess at some level it made me want to become as important as he was.'

Wolf's conversion proper came on the Iffley Road. In 1983, she won a Rhodes Scholarship to New College, Oxford, which boasted 49 male fellows and one female. Only 21, she felt she had travelled back 2,000 years: 'First there was this futuristic Utopia, then liberal humanism, then the Dark Ages at Oxford. It is still the highpoint of my experience of injustice. In a place like here (she gestures out at New York) sexism is covert - we know we're supposed to be embarrassed about it. At Oxford it was luxuriated in. I had never been somewhere I was expected to feel wrong. They were right and I was wrong. It made me more adamant about seizing the citadel. I was not going to sit in an encampment out there in the marshes. I want New College, I want Christ Church.'

For her MPhil Wolf was researching representations of beauty in literature, work that was to become The Beauty Myth. She read from it at a viva in front of six male dons, and there was a long silence. Finally, one of them said 'That reminds me of something Jane Austen's father used to say.' She laughs when she tells this story, a laugh full of a bitter resilience that would not have been lost on the Great Jane.

It was about this time that I met Wolf briefly. Our then boyfriends, both graduate students, shared a house. She was warm, funny, sexy and quite terrifying with her eager questions. 'Do British women shave their armpits?' I wasn't quite sure. Her colour and conviction made me feel pallid and hopelessly weedy by comparison. Still do. The last time I saw her she gave me a present, a book of women's erotic short stories. This from the woman whom Camille Paglia was later to damn as 'Little Miss Pravda'. She'd written one of the stories, but I'd have to guess which. Somehow, I have always hoped it was not the one where the plumber bends over the bath.

IT WAS no surprise in 1990 to see Naomi Wolf's name all over the papers, her face on the television when The Beauty Myth was published. She had always glowed with a confidence that would easily brighten into fame. The book claimed that just as women's advances had started to make them feel better about themselves, so the myth of female perfection - achievable only through masochism or surgery - had intensified to make them feel worse. It was reprinted five times and spent weeks at the top of the bestseller lists. Germaine Greer called it 'the most important feminist publication since The Female Eunuch'. But other critics accused it of being sloppily researched, naive, an 'obsolete rehash'. Matters were not helped by Wolf's publishers who trumpeted the book as if they had never heard of Simone de Beauvoir or Betty Friedan. But the criticism that what Wolf said was 'not new' was unfair. Each generation of women needs to have these themes reiterated, and many in their twenties read the book with the same sensation of blinkers falling from their eyes that their sniffy elder sisters had experienced reading The Feminine Mystique.

Something that bothered many readers, including myself, was that while Wolf was exhorting her readers not to waste their lives worrying about living up to the heavily marketed ideals of beauty and slenderness, her own heavily marketed book featured a photograph of the author looking, well, beautiful and slender. I asked her whether she had any regrets about that and the way the book had been hyped.

'It's a publisher's hubris to say, 'Oh it's the next big feminist book.' But it was a big feminist book in Canada, Germany and Australia where no one hyped it, and a bestseller in the US without my picture on it. In this country breast implants have been made illegal and the FDA has clamped down on the dieting industry. I'm not saying The Beauty Myth did that but certainly the debate about it created an environment in which those things could happen.'

Can't you see a problem in an attractive woman telling other women not to worry about attractiveness? 'Of course, I can. What I would say is that writing The Beauty Myth, no matter what I looked like, my appearance would be an issue. If I was a conventional stereotype of a huge, hairy feminist it would be an issue. I could be considerably more good-looking than I am and it would be an issue.

' What we have to do is stop apologising. There is no right way to look and be a serious author, a serious thinker, if you are young and female in this culture. It's time to say fuck you, I'm gonna have footnotes, I'm gonna have breasts. Yes, I like nice sweaters. I do. Sue me.

'Look at your Mick Imlah and Michael Ignatieff - cute guys. Babes, baaaabes. They do not get any of this. They get to review things, they get to write and they're luminaries and no one says 'Well he only gets to review novels because (she whispers) you've seen what he looks like, right?' '

Whether she likes it or not (and she does not) Wolf is herself a beneficiary of the Beauty Myth. Her appearance has allowed her to reach parts other feminists cannot. Susan Faludi's Backlash was a better book than The Beauty Myth but its author lacked what Elle calls Wolf's 'borderline glamour-babe look' and therefore her exposure. This is not fair, but then the world Wolf seeks to change is not a fair place. In a conversation between four feminists, including Wolf, in this month's MS magazine, 'bell hooks' (black, well-built, cropped hair, no capital letters) says: 'I think we have to be honest about who those vehicles (the mainstream press) are available to. I have written eight feminist books. None of the magazines that have talked about your book, Naomi, have ever talked about my books at all.'

Wolf is going to have to face a lot worse from her home team. She has tried not to offend the women who have made feminism into a beleaguered sub-culture, because she does not like to offend, but there is no helping it when hard things have to be said and done. To win votes for this cause you have to appeal to a broad spectrum of feeling, not least inside your own heart. In Fire With Fire Wolf comes out pro-choice but with strong personal reservations about abortion. This is very human, but it is not politic. Nor is her unashamed enjoyment of the girly side of life: when I see a photo of her recent white wedding and ask which one is her husband, she says 'Come on, who's the most gorgeous?'

As we walk out of the hotel into a dazzling autumn day, Wolf begs me once again to tell her who had told me she wasn't a nice person: 'I won't be able to sleep.' For goodness sake, you're as bad as the princess and the pea, I say. You write in the book that when we tell the truth we're going to make some people very angry, and just look at you. For one moment she gets that intense, concerned look, the one she has when she's trying to make sure you don't take a remark out of context. Then she pulls a funny face: 'I didn't say I had to embody my ideals, did I?'

'Fire With Fire', Naomi Wolf's new book, is published by Chatto & Windus on 18 November

(Photograph omitted)