Naomi Rebekah Wolf
Naomi Rebekah Wolf (born 1962) is an American feminist author, journalist, and conspiracy theorist.
After the 1991 publication of her first book, The Beauty Myth, Wolf became a prominent figure in the third wave of the feminist movement. Feminists including Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan praised her work. Others, including Camille Paglia, criticized it. In the 1990s, Wolf was a political advisor to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
Wolf's later books include the bestseller The End of America in 2007 and Vagina: A New Biography. Critics have challenged the quality and accuracy of her books' scholarship; her serious misreading of court records for Outrages (2019) led to its U.S. publication being canceled. Wolf's career in journalism has included topics such as abortion and the Occupy Wall Street movement in articles for media outlets such as The Nation, The New Republic, The Guardian, and The Huffington Post.
Since around 2014, Wolf has been described by journalists and media outlets as a conspiracy theorist. She has been criticized for posting misinformation on topics such as beheadings carried out by ISIS, the Western African Ebola virus epidemic, and Edward Snowden.
Wolf has objected to COVID-19 lockdowns and criticized COVID-19 vaccines. In June 2021, her Twitter account was suspended for posting anti-vaccine misinformation.
Accusation
In a 2004 article for New York magazine, Wolf accused literary scholar Harold Bloom of a "sexual encroachment" in 1983 for touching her inner thigh. She said that what she alleged Bloom did was not harassment, either legally or emotionally, and she did not think herself a "victim", but that she had harbored this secret for 21 years. In a 2015 interview with Time, Bloom denied ever being indoors with "this person". Explaining why she had finally gone public with the charges, Wolf wrote:
I began, nearly a year ago, to try—privately—to start a conversation with my alma mater that would reassure me that steps had been taken in the ensuing years to ensure that unwanted sexual advances of this sort weren't still occurring. I expected Yale to be responsive. After nine months and many calls and e-mails, I was shocked to conclude that the atmosphere of collusion that had helped to keep me quiet twenty years ago was still intact—as secretive as a Masonic lodge. Sexual encroachment in an educational context or a workplace is, most seriously, a corruption of meritocracy; it is in this sense parallel to bribery. I was not traumatized personally, but my educational experience was corrupted. If we rephrase sexual transgression in school and work as a civil-rights and civil-society issue, everything becomes less emotional, less personal. If we see this as a systemic corruption issue, then when people bring allegations, the focus will be on whether the institution has been damaged in its larger mission.
In Slate magazine around the time the allegations against Bloom first surfaced, Meghan O'Rourke wrote that Wolf generalized about sexual assault at Yale on the basis of her alleged personal experience. Moreover, O'Rourke wrote, despite Wolf's assertion that sexual assault existed at Yale, she did not interview any Yale students for her story. In addition, O'Rourke wrote, "She jumps through verbal hoops to make it clear she was not 'personally traumatized,' yet she spends paragraphs describing the incident in precisely those terms." O'Rourke wrote that, despite Wolf's claim that her educational experience was corrupted, Wolf "neglects to mention that she later was awarded a Rhodes [scholarship]." O'Rourke concluded that the "gaps and imprecision" in Wolf's article "give fodder to skeptics who think sexual harassment charges are often just a form of hysteria."
Separately, a formal complaint was filed with the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights on March 15, 2011, by 16 current and former Yale students—12 female and 4 male—describing a sexually hostile environment at Yale. A federal investigation of Yale University began in March 2011 in response to the complaints. In April, Wolf said on CBS's The Early Show, "Yale has been systematically covering up much more serious crimes than the ones that can be easily identified." More specifically, she alleged "they use the sexual harassment grievance procedure in a very cynical way, purporting to be supporting victims, but actually using a process to stonewall victims, to isolate them, and to protect the university."[165] Yale settled the federal complaint in June 2012, acknowledging "inadequacies" but not facing "disciplinary action with the understanding that it keeps in place policy changes instituted after the complaint was filed. The school [was] required to report on its progress to the Office of Civil Rights until May, 2014."
In January 2018, Wolf accused Yale officials of blocking her from filing a formal grievance against Bloom. She told The New York Times that she had attempted to file the complaint in 2015 with Yale's University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct, but that the university had refused to accept it. On January 16, 2018, Wolf said, she determined to see Yale's provost, Ben Polak, in another attempt to present her case. "As she documented on Twitter," the newspaper reported, "she brought a suitcase and a sleeping bag, because she said she did not know how long she would have to stay. When she arrived at the provost's office, she said, security guards prevented her from entering any elevators. Eventually, she said, Aley Menon, the secretary of the sexual misconduct committee, appeared and they met in the committee's offices for an hour, during which she gave Ms. Menon a copy of her complaint."[167] This was reported and confirmed by Norman Vanamee, who apparently met Wolf at Yale that morning. In Town & Country magazine in January 2018, Vanamee returned to the story and wrote, "Yale University has a 93-person police department, and, after the guard called for backup, three of its armed and uniformed officers appeared and stationed themselves between Wolf and the elevator bank."
Criticism
Vagina: A New Biography was much criticized, especially by feminist authors. Katie Roiphe called it "ludicrous" in Slate: "I doubt the most brilliant novelist in the world could have created a more skewering satire of Naomi Wolf's career than her latest book." In The Nation, Katha Pollitt called it a "silly book" containing "much dubious neuroscience and much foolishness." It becomes "loopier as it goes on. We learn that women think and feel through their vagina, which can 'grieve' and feel insulted."
Toni Bentley wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Wolf used "shoddy research methodology", while with "her graceless writing, Wolf opens herself to ridicule on virtually every page." Janice Turner in The Times wrote that since Mary Wollstonecraft, female "writers have argued that women should not be defined by biology", yet "Wolf, our self-styled leader, has declared that female consciousness, creativity and destiny all come back" to a woman's genitals. Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum wrote: "By asserting that what's between a woman's ears is directly informed by what's between her legs—'the vagina mediates female confidence, creativity and sense of transcendence,' Wolf writes—it acts as a perverse echo of Republican efforts to limit reproductive rights." In the book, according to Suzanne Moore in The Guardian, "feminism becomes simply a highly mediated form of narcissism devoid of any actual brain/politics connection."
In The New York Review of Books, Zoë Heller wrote that the book "offers an unusually clear insight into the workings of her mystic feminist philosophy", that the part of the book about the history of the vagina's representation is "full of childlike generalizations", and that Wolf's understanding of science "is pretty shaky too".[87] In an interview with The New York Times, Wolf rejected claims that she had written more freely than her sources could sustain. In The New York Observer, Nina Burleigh suggested that critics of the book were so vehement "because (a) their editors handed the book to them for review because they thought it was an Important Feminist Book when it's actually slight and (b) there's a grain of truth in what she's trying to say."
In response to the criticism, Wolf said in a television interview:
Anything that shows documentation of the brain and vagina connection is going to alarm some feminists…also feminism has kind of retreated into the academy and sort of embraced the idea that all gender is socially constructed and so here is a book that is actually looking at science…though there has been some criticisms of the book from some feminists…who say, "well you can't look at the science because that means we have to grapple with the science"…to me the feminist task of creating a just world isn't changed at all by this fascinating neuroscience that shows some differences between men and women.
At a party organized to celebrate Wolf's publishing deal for this book, the male host invited guests to make pasta pieces shaped like vulvas. Wolf came to view this as mocking, and recounted feeling pressured to remain silent as the butt of a joke, something she said women often feel pressured to do. She said the incident resulted in her having writer's block for the next six months.
Serious Error
Wolf's book Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love was based on the 2015 doctoral thesis she completed under the supervision of literary scholar Stefano-Maria Evangelista, a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. It studies the repression of homosexuality in relation to attitudes toward divorce and prostitution, and also in relation to the censorship of books.
Outrages was published in the UK in May 2019 by Virago Press. On June 12, 2019, Outrages was named on the O, The Oprah Magazine's "The 32 Best Books by Women of Summer 2019" list. The next day, the U.S. publisher recalled all copies from U.S. bookstores.
In a 2019 BBC radio interview, broadcaster and author Matthew Sweet identified an error in a central tenet of the book: a misunderstanding of the legal term "death recorded", which Wolf had taken to mean that the convict had been executed but in fact means that the convict was pardoned or the sentence was commuted. He cited a website for the Old Bailey Criminal Court, which Wolf had referred to in the interview as one of her sources. Reviewers have described other errors of scholarship in the work.
At the Hay Festival in Wales in May 2019, a few days after her exchange with Sweet, Wolf defended her book and said she had already corrected the error.[103] At an event in Manhattan in June, she said she was not embarrassed and felt grateful to Sweet for the correction. On October 18, 2019, it became known that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's release of the book in the U.S. was being canceled, with copies already printed and distributed being pulled and pulped. Wolf expressed hope that the book would still be published in the U.S.
In November 2020, Virago published a UK paperback edition of the book that removed the incorrect references to the execution of men for sodomy included in the hardback edition. Interviewed about the new edition, Sweet said that the book continues to misread historical sources: "Dr Wolf has misrepresented the experiences of victims of child abuse and violent sexual assault. This is the most profound offence against her discipline, as well as the memories of real people on the historical record". Cultural historian Fern Riddell called the book a "calumny against gay people" in the 19th century and said that Wolf "presents child rapists and those taking part in acts of bestiality as being gay men in consensual relationships and that is completely wrong". The Daily Telegraph reported that there had been calls for Wolf's 2015 DPhil to be reexamined, and for Virago to withdraw the book. In a statement to The Guardian, Wolf said the book had been reviewed "by leading scholars in the field" and "it is clear that I have accurately represented the position". Oxford University stated that a "statement of clarification" to Wolf's thesis had been received and approved, and would be "available for consultation in the Bodleian Library in due course".
In March 2021, Times Higher Education reported that Wolf's original thesis remained unavailable six years after it was examined. Oxford doctoral graduates can request an embargo of up to three years, with the potential for renewal. The thesis finally became available in April 2021, with nine pages of corrections attached dealing with the misreading of historic criminal records. Wolf had submitted the thesis to the archive in December 2020, more than five years after her DPhil was awarded, and had requested a one-year extension to the embargo period so that she could seek legal advice. The extension request was declined.
In university teaching, Outrages has been used as an example of the danger of misreading historical sources.
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