Naomi Wolf

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Naomi Wolf (born 1962) is an American writer. At a relatively young age, she became literary star of what was later described as the 'third-wave' of the feminist movement and she is also known for her advocacy of progressive politics.

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[edit] Early life

Wolf was born in San Francisco, California in 1962. She studied at the city's Lowell High School and debated in regional speech tournaments as a member of the Lowell Forensic Society. She later studied at Yale University, where she received her Bachelor of Arts in 1984, and later at New College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

[edit] Works

[edit] The Beauty Myth

She became famous because of her first book The Beauty Myth (1991), which became an international bestseller. In the book, she attacked the exploitation of women by the fashion and beauty industries. Wolf argued that women deserve "the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments regarding women's appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically." The book examines five areas in which Wolf believed women were under assault by the beauty myth: work, religion, sex, violence, and hunger.

Wolf's book became an overnight bestseller, garnering not only praise from the feminist movement but from the public and mainstream media. Second-wave feminist Germaine Greer wrote that The Beauty Myth was "the most important feminist publication since The Female Eunuch."[1] British novelist Fay Weldon called the book "a vivid and impassioned polemic, essential reading for the New Woman--"[2]

[edit] Later Writings

Wolf's later books are Fire with Fire (1993) on politics, female empowerment and women's sexual liberation, Promiscuities (1997) on adolescence and female sexuality, and Misconceptions (2001) on childbirth.

Wolf was approving of the radical free-thinking ways of Andrew Martinez (the "Naked Guy") in 1994.

In 2005, Wolf published The Tree House: Eccentric Wisdom from my Father on How to Live, Love, and See, which chronicled her mid-life crisis attempt to reclaim her creative and poetic vision and revalue her father's love, and her father's force as an artist and a teacher. "I had," she wrote, "turned my face away from the grace of the imagination." While the book received positive reviews, it was criticized by some feminists, such as Germaine Greer, as Oedipal, and as an acceptance of the patriarchy that she had once opposed. Wolf said that she wanted to evolve from feminism and polemics, to get past the "us versus them approach."

[edit] Political consultant

Wolf was involved in Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election bid where she brainstormed with the Clinton-Gore team about ways to reach "soccer moms" and other female voters.

During Al Gore's unsuccessful bid for the 2000 US presidency, Wolf was hired as a consultant to target female voters, reprising her role in the Clinton campaign. Wolf's ideas and participation in the Gore campaign generated considerable media coverage and criticism. According to a report by Michael Duffy in Time Magazine, "Wolf [was] paid a salary of $15,000 a month…in exchange for advice on everything from how to win the women’s vote to shirt-and-tie combinations." This article was the original source of the widely reported claim that Wolf was responsible for Gore's "three-buttoned, earth-toned look." The Duffy article did not mention "earth tones." The Time article and others also claimed that Wolf had developed the idea that Gore is "a beta male who needs to take on the alpha male in the Oval Office".

In an interview with Melinda Henneberger in the New York Times, Wolf denied ever advising Gore on his wardrobe. Wolf herself claimed she mentioned the term "alpha male" only once in passing and that "[it] was just a truism, something the pundits had been saying for months, that the vice president is in a supportive role and the President is in an initiatory role...I used those terms as shorthand in talking about the difference in their job descriptions."

[edit] Recent career

Departing from the second-wave feminism of Andrea Dworkin, Wolf suggested in 2003 that the ubiquity of Internet pornography tends to make males less libidinous towards typical real females.[3] She later followed up on this theme with the assertion that Saturday-night parties with significant alcohol consumption tended towards an increase in one-night stands, which she refers to as "hooking up".[4]

In 2004, sensing that society was finally ready to constructively deal with the issue and frustrated over what she perceived as a code of silence from her alma mater's administration over the decades-old incident, Wolf publicly accused Yale professor Harold Bloom of a sexual "encroachment" when she was a senior at Yale.[5]

According to a 2006 interview with Torcuil Crichton in the Sunday Herald, Wolf claimed to have channelled an adolescent male and had a vision of Jesus Christ in an experience which prompted her to re-explore her own spirituality and her views on what is "sacred" in femininity.[6]

[edit] Criticism

The release of The Beauty Myth coincided with Camille Paglia's release of Sexual Personae, which made a scholarly defense of beauty as a natural and enduring dimension of sexuality. Paglia engaged in a spirited critique of Wolf, which included these comments in her infamous MIT lecture:

"If you want to see what's wrong with Ivy League education, look at The Beauty Myth, that book by Naomi Wolf. This is a woman who graduated from Yale magna cum laude, is a Rhodes scholar, and cannot write a coherent paragraph. This is a woman who cannot do historical analysis, and she is a Rhodes scholar? If you want to see the damage done to intelligent women today in the Ivy League, look at that book. It's a scandal. Naomi Wolf is an intelligent woman. She has been ill-served by her education. But if you read Lacan, this is the result. Your brain turns to pudding! She has a case to make. She cannot make it. She's full of paranoid fantasies about the world. Her education was completely removed from reality."[7]

Christina Hoff Sommers criticized Naomi Wolf for publishing the now debunked figure which claimed 150,000 women were dying every year from anorexia (the actual number is closer to 100). Sommers cites this as evidence of the media's "servile" attitude to prominent feminists, accepting their figures without investigation as if they were the "gospel truth."[8]

[edit] Notable relatives

Her father is author Leonard Wolf. Wolf's brother, Aaron Wolf, is an expert on international water politics.

Wolf was married to the former Clinton speechwriter David Shipley, but the two divorced in 2005.

[edit] See also

Porn creep

[edit] Selected books

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ http://www.amazon.ca/Beauty-Myth-Naomi-Wolf/dp/0679308709
  2. ^ http://www.amazon.ca/Beauty-Myth-Naomi-Wolf/dp/0679308709
  3. ^ The Porn Myth: In the end, porn doesn’t whet men’s appetites—it turns them off the real thing. October 20, 2003
  4. ^ "Hooking Up" Comes With A Price, Author and Feminist Naomi Wolf Tells DePauw Audience September 21, 2005
  5. ^ The Silent Treatment March 1, 2004
  6. ^ Naomi Wolf: I had a vision of Jesus January 22, 2006
  7. ^ September 19, 1991 at M.I.T. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. http://gos.sbc.edu/p/paglia.html
  8. ^ http://www.menweb.org/paglsomm.htm

[edit] External links

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