But Vagina doesn’t merit much more than a shrug. Wolf’s actions on Assange definitely merited our anger. People were making fun of the book before it was even released, myself included. The feminist response to Vagina has been mostly confined to laughter (which, well, guilty in my defense, did you read the bit about reassuring your nipples?) and cruel put-downs. Yet one wonders whether the rapid and total change in her reputation – many women confessed that, prior to those statements, they’d considered her a role model for writing The Beauty Myth, that they were “heartbroken” by her choices – was fully merited. Wolf’s response to the Assange allegations was a disgrace, and her attempt to rewrite history only disgraces her further. 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. 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. 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. 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.” Which makes it odd that the book itself is getting so much negative attention. None of that is interesting, but none of it is inflammatory. 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. Silly, essentialist, willfully ignorant of the existence of trans people: Sure. The science is straight from Cosmo the idea that sex is pleasurable is not exactly groundbreaking.Īnd yet the book isn’t rabidly offensive. To be fair, Wolf also advances the breathtakingly original hypothesis that being happy can sometimes get you laid, as set forth in this experiment on page 34 : “If you have a lover or husband who is willing… wait for a moment until he or she has said something really reassuring and admiring of you as a woman then let him or her touch your nipple.” The nipple, Wolf argues, will be more responsive than it would be if your lover had, say, just uttered the word “cuntini.”Īside from the general impression that it would be a real chore to engage in dirty talk with Naomi Wolf (she’s a big Anais Nin fan at one point, we’re instructed to read Nin while “pay attention to your vaginal pulse”) nothing’s new here. And yet it takes about 333 pages, in hardcover, for Wolf to spit that out. Not that you should ever use such coarse terms around Naomi, who is apparently so linguistically and metaphorically refined that when a friend used the word “cuntini” to describe vulva-shaped pasta (it’s a long story) and served her some innuendo-laden salmon fillet, her “heart contracted” to such an extent that she “could not type a word of the book – not even research notes – for six months.” Wolf prefers florid, purple, highly euphemistic accounts of how unlocking the “Jade Gate,” via the “Goddess Array,” can lead to a “sense of deep emotional union, of postcoital creative euphoria, of joy with one’s self and with one’s lover, of confidence and volubility and the sense that all well in some existential way.”Īll of which means: Getting laid makes you happy. Which leads us directly into the other half of Vagina: the daring assertion that getting laid makes you happy. Speaking of the brain: Wolf is also amazed, at length, by the fact that there are chemicals up there, and that those chemicals can make you have feelings. Wolf, for example, is stunned to learn that nerves– even the pelvic nerve! Where orgasms come from!–are connected to the brain. ![]() ![]() ![]() Half of Vagina is comprised of sloppily recycled medical information that wouldn’t surprise a sixth-grade health class. 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.īut let’s cover the book first.
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