Swooning Beauty: A Memoir of Pleasure

A performance artist and art history professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, Frueh has a lot to say about her own sexuality. She shares with readers her girlhood masturbation pleasures, her memory of seeing her parents having sex and her parents' celebration of her first period. She describes her various experiences of arousal and orgasm, as well as her intense identification with Mel Gibson in Braveheart . She discusses favorite outfits, perfumes and makeup. Now and then she mentions her love of chocolate and sensuous flowers, and her theories about why people admire her "luminous sexuality" and find her so "seductive" and "glamorous." Yet it may be hard for some readers to find Frueh as fascinating as she finds herself. For Frueh's wing of the avant-garde, it's liberating to be into beauty, especially "high femininity" styling. Thus she dismisses Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues as insufficiently outrageous or revolutionary, only to go on for pages about the wonderfulness of the color pink, or how hot she thinks she looks in her Betsey Johnson dress with her cute little ankle boots. Frueh's book will be too narcissistic for most readers, though those who enjoy deep discussions of vaginas and vulvas will certainly be pleased. (Mar.)