The Napoleon of Hack Feminism: the Strange and Ultimately Depressing Career of Naomi Wolf

I have followed the career of Naomi Wolf more closely than I ought because she was one of my college classmates. I even had one class with her -- Myth, Science and Philosophy in Ancient Greece, with Heinrich von Stadten -- in which I often sat behind and to one side of her, giving me a great view of the way she tossed her amazing hair while asking questions only tangentially related to what I thought was going on in the class. A few years after graduating she wrote a book, The Beauty Myth (1990), which to my astonishment became a best seller. Not that it was so bad (I read about half of it), but it wasn't particularly good, either, and it was one of the least original tomes ever published. It was mainly a rehash of the century-old feminist notion that male ideas about beauty limit female freedom and self-understanding, along with a lot of angry rhetoric about the hegemony of the patriarchy. It also included certain absolutely false "facts," like a claim that 150,000 women were dying every year from anorexia. (The actual number is disputed but was probably around 100.) This from a woman who shamelessly traded on her own beauty to get attention from eminent male professors

But, ok, people sometimes write books that sell more copies than they should, and Wolf certainly worked hard on the talk show circuit and in all the feminist conferences and the like. A fluke, I thought; surely she would soon sink bank into the anonymity that her intellectual mediocrity deserved.

And this is where the story gets really weird. Since 1990 Wolf has published at least eight more books, each one more ridiculous than the last. Reviewing Promiscuities (1998) in the Times, Michiko Kakutani called Wolf

a frustratingly inept messenger: a sloppy thinker and incompetent writer. . . . She tries in vain to pass off tired observations as radical aperçus, subjective musings as generational truths, sappy suggestions as useful ideas.

Which I think is still the best summary of Wolf's writing. Wolf also got even more personal in Promiscuities than she had in The Beauty Myth, illustrating her arguments with pornographic scenes from her own sexual past. It was around this time that she accused professor Harold Bloom of groping her, which got her even more attention even though she more or less retracted the charge.

In the new millennium Wolf has veered around the political and religious landscape, becoming born again, flirting with 9-11 conspiracy theories, denouncing abortion, praising the Tea Party, and getting arrested at Occupy Wall Street. She had a baby by C-section and then lamented this in print, writing a diatribe against how common the procedure has become in America. Her latest book, Vagina: a New Biography, is getting mercilessly mocked all over the place. I have been reading reviews all day and have yet to find a positive one. She cites lots of "science," but what she says about it leaves scientists scratching their heads: "Naomi Wolf, you sound like you're on crack," one concluded. And this awful book, by a weak-minded and very strange person who does not understand that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street want different things, is getting a huge amount of attention. Magazines are mocking it, but they are mocking it on the front page. No matter how idiotic the things she says and writes, Wolf remains famous, and the idiotic things she says and writes are treated as if they were important merely because she says and writes them.

In Vagina Wolf performs her usual trick of insisting that her own sexual experience explains something profound about the lives of all women and even the nature of the divine. This brings me to why I find Wolf's career so depressing to contemplate: her success makes me suspect that narcissism is the surest route to fame. Wolf's ideas have only weak connections to any reality but the one in her own head, but that is the only one she cares about. She believes that she is a prophet who knows deep and important things that nobody else knows. I am not aware of any idea of hers that is not either false or commonplace, but to her it is all original and all true. Her belief in herself is the engine of her success, fueled by an absolute indifference to any information that might complicate her beliefs.

I find the career of Napoleon depressing for the same reason. He was, I am sure, an absolute narcissist who believed only in himself. He presented himself as the "man of destiny" who was bound by no rules and would shape all of Europe to his own purposes. To others he offered only the chance to be his followers. What galls me is that rather than being insulted by Napoleon's pretensions, thousands of intelligent, capable men became his followers in just the way he wanted. Following him, believing in him, fulfilled them in some way. Followerhood, one might call this, and it is one of the real banes of human life. Saddam Hussein, Hitler, Kim Il Sung -- they all achieved great power through this same basic mechanism of asserting their superiority over others, who responded by worshiping them. All of the people who have achieved this sort of success are, I believe, insane. It is their very brokenness that allows them to thrive so spectacularly, their indifference to others that makes them leaders. What is it about the rest of us that keeps us jogging along in their wakes?

You may perhaps find it a bit nutty to equate Naomi Wolf's fame with Napoleon's 20 years of war. But I insist that both flow from the same root, complete indifference to the rules of normal social intercourse. It may be possible to become a great leader or a successful public figure while still remaining the sort of person we want to have as a friend, but it is not easy. What would-be great men, or feminist heroines, usually do is to remove themselves from the normal run of society and treat all others as instruments of their ambitions. The truth, also, must bend to their wills. They say and do whatever advances their own agendas. And really it is not surprising that the do this. But it never ceases to surprise me that other people go along.