Naomi Rebekah Wolf (born November 12, 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 misinformation related to vaccination.
Early life and education Naomi Rebekah Wolf was born on November 12, 1962 in San Francisco, California, to a Jewish family.Wolf, in an interview on The Alex Jones Show podcast October 22, 08 @ 2:40:38 into the program: "Well, you know, I'm Jewish and so, you know, I think there's this very deep reaction in people with my ancestry because my dad's family was largely wiped out by the Holocaust, a sensitivity to travel restrictions because for people of my ethnicity there's a giant divide between people who got out before the border hardened during the National Nazi Socialist regime and those who waited a little too long. So I watch with concern when I travel, the growth of the [US] watchlist which is growing by 20,000 names a month." Her mother is Deborah Goleman Wolf, an anthropologist and the author of The Lesbian Community. Her father was Leonard Wolf, a Romanian-born scholar of gothic horror novels, faculty member at San Francisco State University, and Yiddish translator. Leonard Wolf died from Parkinson's disease on March 20, 2019. Wolf has a brother, Aaron, and a half-brother, Julius, from her father's earlier relationship; it remained a secret until Wolf was in her 30s.
Wolf attended Lowell High School and debated in regional speech tournaments as a member of the Lowell Forensic Society. She attended Yale University, receiving her Bachelor of Arts in English literature in 1984. From 1985 to 1987, she was a Rhodes Scholar at New College, University of Oxford. Wolf's initial period at Oxford University was difficult, as she experienced "raw sexism, overt snobbery and casual antisemitism". Her writing became so personal and subjective that her tutor advised against submitting her doctoral thesis. Wolf told interviewer Rachel Cooke, writing for The Observer, in 2019: "My subject didn't exist. I wanted to write feminist theory, and I kept being told by the dons there was no such thing." Her writing at this time formed the basis of her first book, The Beauty Myth.
Wolf ultimately returned to Oxford, completing her Doctor of Philosophy degree in English literature in 2015. Her thesis, supervised by Stefano Evangelista of Trinity College, formed the basis of her 2019 book Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love. The thesis (which the journal Times Higher Education called "error-strewn") was subject to significant corrections of its scholarship, prompting several articles in the UK higher education press.
Political consultant Wolf was involved in President Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection bid, brainstorming with Clinton's team about ways to reach female voters. Hired by Dick Morris, she wanted Morris to promote Clinton as "The Good Father" and a protector of "the American house". She met with him every few weeks for nearly a year, according to the book Morris wrote about the campaign, Behind the Oval Office. Wolf managed to "persuade me to pursue school uniforms, tax breaks for adoption, simpler cross-racial adoption laws and more workplace flexibility." The advice she gave was without payment, Morris said in November 1999, as Wolf was fearful the knowledge of her involvement in the campaign might have negative consequences for Clinton.
During Al Gore's bid for the presidency in the 2000 election, Wolf was hired as a consultant. Her ideas and participation in the campaign generated considerable media coverage. According to a report by Michael Duffy and Karen Tumulty in Time, Wolf was paid a salary of $15,000 (by November 1999, $5,000) per month "in exchange for advice on everything from how to win the women's vote to shirt-and-tie combinations." Wolf's direct involvement in the Time article was unclear; she declined to be interviewed on the record.
In a New York Times interview with Melinda Henneberger, Wolf said she had been appointed in January 1999 and denied having advised Gore on his wardrobe. Wolf said she had 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". Wolf told Katharine Viner of The Guardian in 2001: "I believe his agenda for women was a really historic agenda. I was honored to bring the concerns of women to Gore's table. I'm sorry that he didn't win and the controversy was worth it for me." She told Viner the men in Gore's campaign, at the equivalent level, were paid more than she was.
Works The Beauty Myth (1991)
In 1991, Wolf gained international attention as a spokeswoman of third-wave feminism after the publication of her first book, The Beauty Myth, an international bestseller.Project Syndicate "The Next Wave." Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. New York: Bantham Doubleday Dell Publishing, 1991; p. 281: "The beauty myth can be defeated only through an electric resurgence of the woman-centered political activism of the seventies—a feminist third wave—updated to take on the new issues of the nineties ... I've become convinced that here are thousands of young women ready and eager to join forces with a peer-driven feminist third wave that would take on, along with the classic feminist agenda, the new problems that have arisen with the shift in Zeitgeist and beauty backlash." The New York Times named it "one of the seventy most influential books of the twentieth century". She argues that "beauty" as a normative value is entirely socially constructed, and that the patriarchy determines the content of that construction with the objective to maintain women's subjugation.
Wolf proposes the concept of an "iron maiden", an intrinsically unreachable norm that is then used to physically and mentally punish women for failing to achieve and adhere to it. She condemns the fashion and beauty industries for exploiting women, but also writes that the beauty myth pervades all aspects of human life. Wolf believes that women should have "the freedom to do anything we choose with our faces and bodies without being penalized by an ideology that uses attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments about women's looks to psychologically and politically destroy us." She claims that the "beauty myth" has targeted women in five areas: labor, religion, sex, violence, and hunger. Finally, Wolf advocates for a relaxation of conventional beauty norms.The Beauty Myth, pp. 17–18, 20, 86, 131, 179, 218. In her introduction, she scaffolds her work upon the achievements of second-wave feminists and offers the following analysis:
Accuracy Christina Hoff Sommers criticized Wolf for publishing the estimate that 150,000 women were dying every year from anorexia. Sommers said she traced the source to the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association, which said it was misquoted; the figure refers to sufferers, not fatalities. Wolf's citation came from a book by Brumberg, who referred to an American Anorexia and Bulimia Association newsletter and misquoted the newsletter. Wolf acknowledged the error and changed it in future editions. Sommers gave an estimate for the number of fatalities in 1990 as 100–400. The annual anorexia casualties in the U.S. were estimated to be around 50 to 60 per year in the mid-1990s. In 1995, for an article in The Independent on Sunday, British journalist Joan Smith recalled asking Wolf to explain her unsourced assertion in The Beauty Myth that the UK "has 3.5 million anorexics or bulimics (95 per cent of them female), with 6,000 new cases yearly". Wolf replied, according to Smith, that she had calculated the statistics from patients with eating disorders at one clinic. Caspar Schoemaker of the Netherlands Trimbos Institute published a paper in the academic journal Eating Disorders demonstrating that of the 23 statistics cited by Wolf in Beauty Myth, 18 were incorrect.
Reception Second-wave feminist Germaine Greer wrote that The Beauty Myth was "the most important feminist publication since The Female Eunuch" (Greer's own work), and Gloria Steinem wrote, "The Beauty Myth is a smart, angry, insightful book, and a clarion call to freedom. Every woman should read it." British novelist Fay Weldon called the book "essential reading for the New Woman".Kim Hubbard, The Tyranny of Beauty, To Naomi Wolf, Pressure to Look Good Equals Oppression , People, June 24, 1991. Betty Friedan wrote in Allure magazine that "The Beauty Myth and the controversy it is eliciting could be a hopeful sign of a new surge of feminist consciousness." Camille Paglia, whose Sexual Personae was published the same year as The Beauty Myth, derided Wolf as unable to perform "historical analysis" and called her education "completely removed from reality".Paglia, Camille. Sex, Art, and American Culture. New York: Random House, 1992. p. 262 These comments touched off a series of debates between Wolf and Paglia in the pages of The New Republic.Naomi Wolf. "Feminist Fatale". The New Republic. March 16, 1992. pp. 23–25Naomi Wolf and Camille Paglia. "The Last Words." The New Republic. May 18, 1992. pp. 4–5 Caryn James wrote in The New York Times:No other work has so forcefully confronted the anti-feminism that emerged during the conservative, yuppified 1980's, or so honestly depicted the confusion of accomplished women who feel emotionally and physically tortured by the need to look like movie stars. Even by the standards of pop-cultural feminist studies, The Beauty Myth is a mess, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. James also wrote that the book's "claims of an intensified anti-feminism are plausible, but Ms. Wolf doesn't begin to prove them because her logic is so lame, her evidence so easily knocked down." In The Washington Post, Marilyn Yalom called the book "persuasive" and praised its "accumulated evidence". Revisiting The Beauty Myth in 2019 for The New Republic, literary critic Maris Kreizman recalls that reading it as an undergraduate made her "world burst open", but as she matured, Kreizman saw Wolf's books as "poorly argued tracts" with Wolf making "wilder and wilder assertions" over time. Kreizman "began to write [Wolf] off as a fringe character" even though Wolf had "once informed my own feminism so deeply."
Fire with Fire (1993)