naomi wolf

If you visited CNN's website last week you would have found the headline "Britney's Fat Fight" nestled between a story about the "Foot and Mouth Threat" in the UK and the "Quake Rattle" in Sumatra. Such is the importance of a little bit of lard hanging off the pop tart's naval region that it deserved such prominence. Sounds absurd to me.

But after popping out two kids, going through a toxic divorce and having a nervous breakdown that left her without hair on her head or her nether regions, it made me wonder: if Britney is indeed "fat", what's that saying about the rest of us?

True, maybe she shouldn't have pranced on stage in nothing but a sparkly push-up bra and barely-there panties when she supposedly had sniffed an entire bowl of French fries and swigged a couple of margaritas. But in normal circumstances without the lights, stage, back-up dancers and an audience of 7.2 million people, would our reaction have been any different?

The men I've posed the question to say that it would. If she were a regular Jane walking on the beach with two kids under five in tow, she'd have been rated a whopping nine out of 10 on the Sheila-scale, with some even labelling her a bona fide yummy mummy.

The women I polled expressed similar sentiments, with one saying she'd give up her right arm for a post-baby bod that looked so darn good - no cottage-cheese thighs in sight.

With the recent talk and criticism of skinny actresses, stick-thin models and a just-given-birth Angelina Jolie with insect-like arms, it seems when it comes to the media's assault on women, we just can't win ...

On the same day as Britney's fat debacle, a story on ex-porn star Jenna Jameson ricocheted through cyberspace, with media outlets tut-tutting over her appearance at New York Fashion Week. She appeared in a cleavage-enhancing tartan mini-dress looking an apparent shadow of her former self.

No wonder we're all so confused.

I admit she does look alarmingly thin, yet having recently read her autobiography, How To Make Love Like A Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale, and then her MySpace blog where she talks of her nasty divorce that's been weighing heavily on her, her drastic weight loss appears a little more understandable.

"I worked extremely hard for years to secure my success," she writes, "and I have been forced to fight for everything I busted my ass for. This has definitely affected my weight. It really hurts that my fans and everyone else have taken it upon themselves to be so horrible, screaming eat a burger! Or we want the old Jenna back! I'm sure everyone out there has gone through tough times, and this is when I need support. I wish I could enlighten everyone with what is exactly going on in my divorce and business, but I can't because of legal proceedings."

According to Naomi Wolf, the added pressure on modern women can be blamed on the rise of feminism. In her zeitgeist-defining tome The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, published in 1990, Wolf talks of how feminism was meant to bring us more freedom than ever before with more legal and reproductive rights, education and affluence. But instead it backfired.

Women today feel more trapped by societal pressures than ever before with the rise in eating disorders and cosmetic surgery, with a whopping 30,000 women telling American researchers they'd rather lose 10 to 15 pounds than achieve any other goal.

The result? "A secret 'underlife' poisoning [women's] freedom," writes Wolf. "It is a dark vein of self-hated, physical obsessions, terror of ageing, and dread of lost control."

A decade on, her hypothesis sounds even more relevant.

Yet the findings of a recent poll by More magazine may come as a surprise. The survey found that men "can't handle beautiful women". In other words few men would want to get naked with a woman that had the "perfect body", with a sobering 88 per cent reasoning there'd be way too much pressure on them to bed such a creature.

On the skinny side of things, men weren't too turned on by Angelina's new bony look either, with a measly 6 per cent saying that skinny women are desirable.

The majority of blokes preferred a woman with wobbly bits as opposed to 12 per cent of gents who liked a woman dedicated to diet and exercise.

Yet despite most women acknowledging the fact that too skinny is out and body confidence is in, the study found women still continue to think of their body shape every 12 minutes while 80 per cent admitted their lives would improve if they were happier with their body.

While walking down the street in my daggy gym gear feeling somewhat self conscious about my less-than-taut bits, I actually found some solace in the fact that the poll stated men don't actually mind a little bit of blubber.

But when I overheard a bunch of women laughing at the latest Britney-in-underwear-on-stage pic in a gossip magazine, all the self consciousness came flooding back.

And so I continue to wonder, dear readers: is there really any hope for the rest of us?

What do you think? Should Britney have worn what she did? Has feminism freed us or made us more trapped in our image? What do men think of it all? Would men put up with such criticism? Is it true men "can't handle beautiful women" as the poll suggests?

PS. From my experience of writing this blog, I know that smoking is a huge turn-off for both men and women when it comes to dating. So I was thrilled to learn that the great folks at RSVP and Nicabate have come together to create a brilliant anti-smoking initiative and was honoured when they asked me to be a part of it. Hence I'll be doing a few guest stories for the site. I encourage you to take a look at it here, make comments and hopefully together we can get as many smokers to quit as possible ...

The following excerpt is from Naomi Wolf's latest book, End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007) and is used by permission of the publisher. In this timely call to arms, Wolf compels us to face the way our freedoms are under assault, and that each of the ten classic steps used by dictators to close down open societies are underway in the United States today.

ARBITRARILY DETAIN and RELEASE CITIZENS

The Press Department of the Foreign Ministry judged that ... I was urging the "spread of counterrevolutionary developments in the GDR." Because of the role I was clearly playing "in the ideological war of imperialist media against the GDR" I should be placed on the list ... -- Timothy Garton Ash

Protest has been lively in our nation throughout most of our history because being free means that you can't be detained arbitrarily. We have also felt free in the security of our homes, believing that the state can't break in and go through our possessions. All that is changing.

The List

In 2002, I began to notice that almost every time I sought to board a domestic airline flight, I was called aside by the Transportation Security Administration and given a more thorough search. When this was happening on nine flights out of ten, I asked the officials about the special search. They told me that the search was due to the quadruple "S" that routinely came up on my boarding pass. There are several reasons why one might receive a quadruple "S" on one's boarding pass if one doesn't fit a terrorist profile: buying a ticket at the last minute, for instance, or paying in cash. But those circumstances didn't apply to me. I kept asking, but not getting real answers.

This stepped-up search became so routine as I traveled that companions who were flying with me began to simply say, "I'll meet you at the gate," even before we got through the security line.

On yet another preboarding search, I asked yet again. The TSA agent searching me, a young woman, said pleasantly, "You're on the list."

"The list?" I asked. "What list?" Her supervisor abruptly ended our exchange, took over from her, and then moved me on.

Indeed, the TSA Administration does keep a "list." The American citizens on the list who do not fit a terrorist profile range from journalists and academics who have criticized the White House to activists and even political leaders who have also spoken out.

These TSA searches and releases would be trivial in a working democracy. In the 1960s, peace activists found it merely irksome to be trailed by FBI agents, and in the 1980s those who organized The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) on college campuses were even amused sometimes to find, on submitting a Freedom of Information Act request, that there was a file open on them. But once the first steps in a fascist shift are in place, being on "the list" is not really funny any more.

When you are physically detained by armed agents because of something that you said or wrote, it has an impact. On the one hand, during these heightened searches of my luggage, I knew I was a very small fish in a very big pond. On the other hand, you get it right away that the state is tracking your journeys, can redirect you physically, and can have armed men and women, who may or may not answer your questions, search and release you.

Our faith in nonarbitrary "safe" detention helps to make us Americans. When I was twenty, I joined a group of graduate students who traveled from Oxford to London to get arrested. We all went over to the American embassy: There we sat, self-consciously, on the chilly concrete steps, with our "U.S. OUT OF EL SALVADOR" banner unfurled on our knees. A police van arrived. Bored British police officers took us away. We were locked up for a few hours and then, of course, released.

"Silly season," one of the bobbies commented civilly as he signed the paperwork that let us go. I wasn't scared to speak out because I was in a democracy and the rule of law protected me.

That kind of experience of accountable detention and release is eroding in America. Activists are not being beaten. But they are being watched, and sometimes intimidatingly detained and released.

In America, people are not supposed to be detained because of their political beliefs. But Senator Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy, the liberal senator from Massachusetts who is a thorn in the side of the Bush administration, was detained five times in East Coast airports in March, 2004. Democratic Congressman John Lewis of Georgia has also been subjected to extra security measures.

I saw this item on Newsbusters earlier today, and they have it transcribed and framed nicely but a few points remain to be made about it. The gist is that Al Gore's former wardrobe specialist, Naomi Wolf, appeared on Mornin' Joe to hawk her new book, the terrifyingly titled The End of America: A Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot. She is, as the title implies, prophesying the end of democracy as we know at the hands of the Bushfuerher.
No, really. She makes the Nazi connection plain, ripping through Godwin's Law with abandon. And Scarborough goes right along with it.

Like too many liberals, Wolf starts with a premise ― Republicans are evil and George W. Bush is more evil than most Republicans ― and works backward from that conclusion to find or manufacture evidence to support it. It's not science, but it is political science.
It always intrigues me that people consistently leave the Soviets out of their "evidence of encroaching totalitarianism" analogies. The Soviets were no less totalitarian than the Nazis, and had several decades more practice at it than their German socialist counterparts, and Stalin's body count was either equal to or higher than Hitler's. Why don't the Commissars rate?
It also intrigues me that here, Wolf not only sheepishly giggles through an interview about a creeping police state that she either really believes or cynically says is just around the corner, but that she also plays fast and loose with the facts concerning Jose Padilla. She states twice that what happened to him can happen to any American. The fact is, as Wolf surely knows if she spent more than half a minute looking into the case, is that Padilla was apprehended on the evidence given up by captured al Qaeda handler Abu Zubaydah and he had filled out a terrorist job application form while in an al Qaeda post. I guess if you're on Zubaydah's rolodex and he can tell US authorities where you're traveling and when you're traveling there and that you're on a scouting mission for the terrorist group, and if you've filled out al Qaeda's human resources paperwork, then yeah, what happened to Padilla can happen to you too. Otherwise, no, Naomi, it can't happen to any American.
She and Scarborough also trade kisses over roving wiretap authority, which Joe at least mentioned began under Clinton and before 9-11. But again, the two consistently miss the point that from what we know of the Bush wiretaps, they were limited to incoming calls from known terrorist sources. Why is this not a reasonable thing to do, since we know that a cell on US soil perpetrated 9-11 and there are very probably more cells lurking about either getting ready to attack or awaiting orders?
Wolf states a couple of times in the interview that she believes the threat of terrorism is real. But she consistently opposes all efforts to actually stop terrorists from attacking Americans and turns the bulk of her ideological guns on the Bush administration, not the terrorists. And, by writing books and going on national TV to "expose" the creeping Bushreich, Wolf is evidence herself that America is becoming no such thing. The same goes double for those Loose Change half-wits, who seriously believe that a government that will kill 3,000 of its own people in broad daylight in its largest city won't slip a switchblade into its most strident critics in the dead of night. It's absurd. Joe Scarborough prides himself on being an independent thinker. Apparently that extends to not uttering a peep of protest, and indeed tending to concur, when a left-wing guest flatly accuses the Bush administration of using Nazi tactics to suppress democracy.

At about 7:45 A.M. EDT today, Naomi Wolf was a guest on "Morning Joe," there to promote her new book, the pretentiously-entitled The End of America: A Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot. The operating thesis of this alarmist screed is that the Bush administration represents a clear and present danger to democracy.

View video here.

According to Wolf, President Bush's minions are using the very same tactics employed by totalitarian regimes in the past.

NAOMI WOLF: What's happening is that the American people, again across the political spectrum, this is not a partisan issue [rig-h-h-t] really get it [arrggh, there she goes again] that something profound and dangerous is happening . . . what's happening in America is really much more recognizable if you look at other times and places where leaders have closed down open societies. And what I found through my reading, for the research I did for "The End of America," it's really scary but it's important for us to face so that we can, you know, basically save the country in time, what is clear that in every historical situation in which a leader is seeking to close down an open society, to put pressure on a democracy, to weaken it, to shift it toward a more repressive regime, or even to crush a pro-democracy uprising in a society that isn't free, they take the same ten steps, and that these ten steps have been taken systematically by the Bush administration, and we're really so close to a tipping point at which it will be difficult to redeem democracy unless we act now.

A bit later, Wolf made her Nazi analogy explicit.

WOLF: Congressional Democrats are saying to us off the record "we want to stand up for the Constitution but we're scared of being painted as soft on terror." What Americans really have to understand is that every time a leader has sought to close down an open society, they have invoked an external or internal threat, like terrorism, and often that threat can be real. I mean, you saw this happening in Italy in the 20s, in Germany in the 30s, in East Germany in the 50s, in Prague in the 60s, in China in the 80s. Again and again leaders that are trying to push through things that make it hard to recover democratic practice terrify the population and often the threat is real. So I really think it's important for our leaders to get some perspective because right now people are so traumatized by the threat of being cast as soft on terror that they are scared to stand up for the Constitution.

So here was Wolf, comparing George W. Bush to Adolph Hitler, and rather that uttering a word in dissent, Scarborough largely bought into her theory.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Of course they're scared to lose their seats. Because again, there is fear out there that if you do stand up on a lot of these issues it would be seen as not supporting the Constitution but opposing the war on terror.

A bit later . . .


WOLF: We're in a situation now where after the first American citizen that you or I might identify with is called an enemy combatant and held in these kind of conditions, you and I would be having a very different kind of conversation the day after the news of that.

SCARBOROUGH: Oh yeah, And that's the thing that bothers me so much.

Scarborough went on to add a pox-on-both-their-Republican-and-Dem-houses disclaimer. But Joe takes non-partisanship too far in failing to protest allegations by a hyper-partisan member of the paranoid left that the President of the United States is acting like a Nazi.

Early life
Wolf was born in San Francisco, California in 1962. She attended Lowell High School and debated in regional speech tournaments as a member of the Lowell Forensic Society. She matriculated 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 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."

Wolf, in April 2007, wrote an article published in The Guardian, a UK paper, describing the 10 step slide towards fascism that the United States has taken.[3] This article is an adaptation from her latest book "The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot" which will be published in September 2007.


[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 anti-pornography emphasis of such second-wave feminist writers as Andrea Dworkin, Wolf suggested in 2003 that the ubiquity of Internet pornography tends to make males less libidinous toward typical real females.[4] She later followed up on this theme with the assertion that Saturday-night parties with significant alcohol consumption tended toward an increase in one-night stands, which she refers to as "hooking up".[5]

In 2004, sensing that society was finally ready to deal constructively 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.[6]

According to a 2006 interview with Torcuil Crichton in the Sunday Herald, Wolf claimed to have channeled 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.[7]


[edit] Criticism
The release of The Beauty Myth coincided with Camille Paglia's release of Sexual Personae, which made a 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 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."[8]
Christina Hoff Sommers criticized Naomi Wolf for publishing the now debunked figure which claimed 150,000 women were dying every year from anorexia (Sommers claims that 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."[9]

According to Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, in Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, Sommers criticism was exaggerated:"it's not even close to being as low as Sommer's estimate of than one hundred deaths per year (which shows that the critic's statistics are also fallible).In fact, there is no definitive number, because casualties of eating disorders are rarely listed as such on their death certificates. The cause of death is more accurately defined by some complication of the disease; for example, heart failure, malnutrition, or pneumonia."

The Beauty Myth continues to enjoy a strong reputation amongst academics and many of its ideas strongly impact work on Gender studies not just in the narrow confines of American or European feminism but even within historical studies.[10].

Also, Naomi claims in the early chapters of The Beauty Myth that the Maori, the "Native" tribes of New Zealand worship/celebrate a fat vulva. In fact, this may not be true of this culture.


[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, with whom she has two children, Rosa and Joseph.[11] The two divorced in 2005.


[edit] See also
Porn creep


[edit] Selected books
The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (1990) ISBN 0060512180
Fire with Fire (1994) ISBN 0449909514
Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood (or a Secret History of Female Desire) (1998) ISBN 0449907643 ISBN 0099205912 ISBN 0517454475
Misconceptions (2001)
The Tree House (2005)
The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green September, 2007) ISBN 978-1933392790


What Wolf and the Loose Change guys have in common, I believe, is narcissism. Neither can face the 21st Century reality of global jihad and terrorism, so both rewrite the story to cast themselves as heroes. It's what gets them through the night. And in Wolf's case, it's what helps her sell books.

As for Joe, he just ought to know better. At some point, some cable host is going to earn some serious spurs just by calling all these Nazi analogies what they really are: obscene.