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We can finally admit it: Naomi Wolf was rubbish all along
It shouldn’t matter – indeed, it’s the exact opposite of what should be – but for me it’s always fun to have a beautiful public face of feminism. From the outrageously sexy young Germaine Greer to Gloria Steinem as an undercover Bunny Girl to the Marilyn Monroesque Posie Parker, you can imagine the pathetic men who say “All feminists need is a good seeing to – but no one would!” being totally discombobulated by these visions of ravishing radicalism.
Maybe this was partly why we feminist fanatics – even the famously spiky Greer – gave such a rapturous reception to Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, published in 1990 when she was still in her twenties, with hair to make the Dynasty dolls look dressed down. She also had a persuasive idea: that the cult of thinness had constrained and desexualised women just at the point when they had supposedly been liberated – thus negating that liberation on a physical level.
Although, of course, there had to be a Carabosse at the christening of this bright new media star and naturally it was none other than Camille Paglia, who derided Wolf as incapable of “historical analysis” and “completely removed from reality” by virtue of her upbringing and education. (Unlike the Italian bruiser, Wolf was the daughter of an anthropologist and a scholar who attended speech tournaments while at high school before getting a BA in English literature from Yale and becoming a Rhodes scholar at Oxford.)
This set off a right old ding-dong between the pair in the hallowed pages of The New Republic and I even put myself – selflessly! – between the two of them when I had my own scrap with Paglia in 1993: “How you of all people can complain of my ‘malice’ is a mystery to me – now you know how Naomi Wolf feels every time you spew up your spiel.”
Well, I rarely feel I’ve backed the wrong horse, but when Wolf made a momentous fool of herself a couple of weeks back – the BBC’s Matthew Sweet basically destroyed her assertion in her latest book, Outrages, that dozens of men were executed for sodomy in Victorian England – my suspicion that I am easily swayed by a pretty pair of eyes was woefully confirmed.
Looking back, the warning signs were always there. The estimable Christina Hoff Sommers called Wolf out for claiming that 150,000 women in the USA were dying every year of anorexia; it turned out to be between 100 and 400, corrected in later editions of The Beauty Myth. For Promiscuities – her sex book – The New York Times labelled her with a scarlet letter A for Awful: “a sloppy thinker and incompetent writer… she tries in vain to pass off tired observations as radical aperçus, subjective musings as generational truths, sappy suggestions as useful ideas.”
Her experience of childbirth brought us Misconceptions in which, predictably, this most privileged of women moaned about her C-section and harked back to the beauty of home births, with no apparent appreciation of the horrendously high historical death rate of women in childbirth before it was medicalised.
But it was with 2007’s The End of America (interestingly, also the title I gave an essay in The Face magazine when I was a hysterical teenager) that Wolf not only jumped the shark but grabbed it in a wild embrace and danced a polka with it. Taking the September 11 Islamofascist attacks as a starting point, she astonishingly warned America against becoming like Nazi Germany, claiming that the tenets of home-grown fascism – invoking a terrifying enemy, developing a paramilitary force not answerable to citizens, engaging in arbitrary detention – were already in motion. Not surprisingly, Michael Moynihan on The Daily Beast called it “an astoundingly lazy piece of writing”.
Wolf went on to exonerate real fascism in an attempt to expose imaginary fascism when, in 2014, she suggested that Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant weren’t really beheading people and that it was possible that the videos of two Americans and two Britons had been staged by the US government – and, with extraordinary insensitivity, that both the victims and their grieving parents were actors.
Before long she was embracing the hijab as a vehicle of liberation and sending locks of her lustrous hair to Julian Assange – which is to say that, like many liberals, she had gone full-on Stockholm syndrome (or rather, Sharia syndrome) out of a creepy combination of cowardice and masochism.
It’s liberating now to admit that Wolf really was rubbish all along. Like many an irritating Sunday supplement columnist, whatever she did at any time in her life became, by definition, the burning feminist issue of the hour: being pretty, enjoying sex, spawning, having a menopausal yen to “hijab up” for some short-tempered imaginary sheikh. I may well have my faults as a writer – but when I was, variously, a lesbian, a cougar and drug fiend I never wrote pieces (let alone whole books!) about how women in general were becoming lesbians, cougars and drug fiends – it was just what I fancied doing at the time.
Unlike the learned Ms Wolf, I left education at the age of 17, but even I know sloppy thinking when I see it; it’s like looking in the mirror and saying "I do this… therefore it is". It’s proof of a pathetically unrigorous level of intellect to mistake a predilection for a phenomenon.
I’m not entirely enjoying this – I know of people who have been cured of their eating disorders by reading Wolf’s first book. (Well, we’ve already established that she worked miracles by bringing deaths from anorexia down from the hundreds of thousands to the hundreds – in the second edition.)
But she has taken the lazy way out one too many times and her reputation as a thinker is ruined. What a good job she still has lovely hair! And Prof Paglia – how it pains me to say this! – on this subject at least, you were right all along.