Feminist Fraudulence
In a TNR article titled, ‘The Madness of Naomi Wolf’ by Liza Featherstone (June 10, 2021), the subheading proclaims: ‘The “Beauty Myth” author has gone from being a feminist icon to an anti-vaxxer banned by Twitter. But she’s always struggled with the truth.’
Featherstone describes how, ‘With each subsequent decade, Wolf has injected a little more madness into the cesspool of weird that we sometimes call “the discourse.” In 2012, she wrote a silly book all about her vagina and not much else: Vagina: A New Biography. (The less said about it the better.) Her most recent book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, about the relationship between the repression of homosexuality and societal attitudes toward divorce and prostitution, came out in 2019; a central argument was based on a historical error so embarrassing that the publisher was forced to unpublish it. (Wolf misunderstood the term “death recorded” to mean that a convict had been executed, when in fact it means the person was pardoned or their sentence commuted.) Still, to fangirl is pleasurable, and for that reason I preferred not to examine my youthful icons too carefully. Remaining loyal to the Naomi Wolf of the early 1990s, I chose to ignore her present-day existence for years. That is, until her recent turn to anti-vax insanity.’ The current turn would seem to represent the former feminist icon’s ultimate fall from grace.
For my part, I never liked Naomi Wolfe anyway. I never read any of her books or articles, having devoured the works of all the legitimate Second Wave Feminists I could get my hands on. I distrusted Wolfe from the start. Intuitively, I just wasn’t buying; it looked to me as if she was both exploiting and undermining the feminist cause for personal position and aggrandizement, glamourizing herself by dissing glamour — an easy and obvious mark.
Turns out I was right.
Now she’s glamourizing herself by dissing anything that will get her sensationalistic attention. Either that or she’s so delusional she really does think ‘vaccine technology’ can enable time travel and that ‘vaccinated people’s urine and feces should be separated in our sewage system until their contaminating effect on our drinking water has been studied….She fears that while pro-vaccine propaganda has emphasized the danger the unvaccinated pose to the vaccinated, we have overlooked how toxic the vaccinated might be.’ She’s currently getting lots of attention from racist nut cases by ‘headlining an anti-vaccination “Juneteenth” event this month in upstate New York. (Yes, the organizers chose that date to suggest that vaccines are slavery.)’
Vile.
