Naomi Wolf's book Vagina: self-help marketed as feminism

[struggle4progress]

Suzanne Moore
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 5 September 2012 15.00

By now we all know that Naomi Wolf has mind-blowing orgasms. I must say globally this has been a concern. Was this woman getting enough? Yes, oh yes, she has got a book's worth. I read Vagina: A New Biography in a bar while feasting on some very fine cuts of meat, so I am not just judging it by the extracts, ie the insane pasta party where "Alan", a supposed friend, served her "cuntini". This trauma upset her for six months. Someone give her a hotdog quick to spare us more of this existential despair ...

My problem with Wolf is longstanding and is not about how she looks or climaxes – but it is about how she thinks, or rather doesn't. She comes in a package that is marketed as feminism but is actually breathlessly written self-help. Her oeuvre, if I can use this word, is basically memoir, in which she struggles to tell some heroic truth that many others have already told us. The great trick is to present this material as new, and to somehow speak on behalf of all women when she is infinitely privileged and sheltered.

Hence feminism becomes simply a highly mediated form of narcissism devoid of any actual brain/politics connection. What we have here is Californication, with a little trot through some basic women's studies linking female creativity with sexual awakening. Think Georgia O'Keeffe with bit of Anaïs Nin thrown in. Which is nice.

It gets dodgy when she drags in some neuroscience as evidence and appears more clueless than someone who has failed her chemistry GCSE but has two TED talks on her iPhone ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/05/naomi-wolf-book-vagina-feminism

[struggle4progress]

1. Say no to Naomi Wolf’s latest hair-tossing hokum

Anne McElvoy
05 September 2012

It takes a lot to put me off feminism, but one more book from Naomi Wolf might just do the trick ...

... But really what Ms Wolf is doing is to re-invent feminism with a light (and lightly understood) sprinkling of neuroscience. The result mistakes the search for the perfect sexual experience by an attractive woman for a major humanitarian journey ...

But the Wolfian sin is to reduce so much female experience to sex and sexual language. When it comes to a clash between her feminism and her Left-wing political views (we are at the dizzy political altitude here where Obama is regarded as a tyrant on civil liberties), confusion reins.

She makes threadbare excuses for Julian Assange, on the grounds that he might be having a rougher time than other alleged Swedish rapists: though not many of them are holed up in other people’s embassies. Oh, what a self-serving, unappetising dish is being served up here in the name of feminism. Let’s just say no.

http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/anne-mcelvoy-say-no-to-naomi-wolfs-latest-hairtossing-hokum-8106385.html

[struggle4progress]

2. We deserve better than this claptrap

One of the greatest victories of the feminism of the 1970s and 1980s was to show the world that the personal was political. The intimate underpinnings of human existence, from sex and romance to child-rearing, drudgery and domestic violence, were not just private, irrelevant women's issues: they were essential to political and public life. Unfortunately, over the past two decades, the trajectory of women's liberation in public discourse has undergone something of a reversal: instead of making the personal political, the political has, slowly but surely, been permitted to collapse into the personal.

In a culture where debates about cupcakes and pubic grooming are still top priority in fashionable feminist circles, Naomi Wolf's new book, Vagina, seems to represent the apotheosis of that philosophy. Going by the extensive interviews and extracts being serialised this week, Vagina focuses on the author's recent difficulties achieving satisfying orgasm and subsequent treatment for a trapped nerve in her back, and attempts to extend the lessons of this minor surgery, beyond "private doctors are wonderful if you can afford them", to the entire female experience. In this case, the entire female experience seems to apply only to wealthy, straight, successful, cisgendered white women living in New York City. One extract centres quite seriously on a dinner-party incident where the host served uncomfortably yonic handmade pasta. I wish I were making this up ...

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/laurie-penny-we-deserve-better-than-this-claptrap-8102756.html

[struggle4progress]

3. ... Even a lay reader like myself can see that Wolf's scientific interpretations are shaky.

There are leaps of logic in this deeply flawed book, correlation is mistaken for causation, and she relies heavily on anecdotes instead of research. Most troubling, she presents her theories and goes looking for confirmation. Rather than investigating a question, she's trying to prove a point ...
Review: Naomi Wolf, Hanna Rosin tackle women in a new century
Though provocative, Wolf's 'Vagina: A New Biography' takes leaps of logic. Rosin's 'The End of Men — and the Rise of Women' offers thoughtful research.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-naomi-wolf-hanna-rosin-20120909,0,1826972.story

[struggle4progress]

4. Vagina: A New Biography by Naomi Wolf – review

Does this book reveal an existential crisis among women or merely tell us more than we wanted to know about its author, asks Jenny Turner
Jenny Turner
guardian.co.uk, Friday 7 September 2012 17.55 EDT

... I read this book in utter bafflement. What is this big news that Wolf has to impart? Vaginas feel stuff, so yes, of course they must be packed with nerves; and nerves, we know, join up with each other at the spine to link into the brain. That's why they call it the central nervous system; that's what being human is all about. Feet, too, join up with the CNS – thus reflexologists, and why bunions are so painful. And so do the intestines ...

The stuff about rape and sexual violence is just strange. Wolf's main argument – that rape is at least half-consciously a subordinating tactic deployed by men – has been feminist orthodoxy since 1975, when Susan Brownmiller published her canonical Against Our Will: Men and Women and Rape: "From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." And yet, Wolf says that Brownmiller, like others of her generation, writes about rape while following an "individualised reading of sexuality posited by Freud", which is surely just not so. Wolf's take on classic women's liberation in general is perverse ...

... Wolf, this book tells us, has also been looking at images of sexual awakening in Christina Rossetti and Kate Chopin, because she has recently gone "back to graduate school". And discussing orgasmic rats with "a group of brilliant young women" at "a cottage on an old farm". Chatting with Mike Lousada for "a London newspaper". And visiting, in 2004, a refugee centre for women raped during the civil war in Sierra Leone ... All of it really just connected by the life, the interests and the ego of Naomi Wolf herself ...

... why are we still letting one of the Anglophone world's most famous feminists waste everyone's time with all this burble about the "universal feminine" with its "Goddess-shaped" hole?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/07/vagina-new-biography-naomi-wolf-review?newsfeed=true

[Neoma]

5. Whoa, lots of articles.

You should mention this in the Feminist's group.

[struggle4progress]

6. Why the Uproar Over Naomi Wolf’s Vagina?

September 12, 2012
BY Sady Doyle

... And yet the book isn't rabidly offensive. Silly, essentialist, willfully ignorant of the existence of trans people: Sure. But for the most part, Wolf believes that sex is nice, being mean to women is bad, and your partner should try to hold your hand and make eye contact. None of that is interesting, but none of it is inflammatory. Which makes it odd that the book itself is getting so much negative attention.

The reason for this is most likely on page 154: “When I sought in 2011 to tease out, in the rape accusations against Julian Assange, what happened after the woman's sexual consent on one level as well as her alleged lack of consent on another, I was attacked by feminists.”

This is entirely wrong. What Wolf did, in reality, was to minimize and wrongly report the allegations, just as she is doing here–in fact, there were two women; one says she struggled while Assange physically pinned her down until she let him penetrate her, and the other, Assange's own lawyers admit, was unconscious at the time of penetration–and to accuse the women in question of calling the “dating police” after some bad sex. Even if Wolf didn't know the real allegations in 2010 (not 2011) when she first said and wrote these things, she was wrong to become an Assange spokesperson while so completely uninformed. And she almost certainly knows the allegations now that they've been more widely circulated, due in part to those “feminists.” So it would appear Wolf is now obfuscating her own obfuscations.

Wolf's response to the Assange allegations was a disgrace, and her attempt to rewrite history only disgraces her further ...

[bemildred]

7. Ms Wolf's work has always seemed kind of personal to me.

As in she takes a personal, not an academic perspective, she is a popularizer and a proselytizer, not a judicious studier.. I've thought about this book some, I think it's an interesting effort at consciousness raising, sort of like a personal meditation on penises, if I were to write it. I'd be curious to know what women think about it, their opinions seem most relevant to this book.

[struggle4progress]

8. I tried to make sure all the reviews I have posted were written by women:

Suzanne Moore, Anne McElvoy, Laurie Penny, Carolyn Kellogg, Jenny Turner, Sady Doyle

[bemildred]

9. Good job. nt

[closeupready]

10. Sheer silliness. Women are more than vaginas, but I guess in

Ms. Wolf's world, that's all anyone needs to know.

It's not that one's anatomy is unimportant, but bears have vaginas; dolphins do; prairie dogs do. And...?

What they DON'T have are things like published books, or interesting thoughts about life lived as a female dolphin.

[bodem1955_om]

11. +1000

couldn't agree more really