Mental midget Naomi Wolf has been a long embarrassment to feminism and we've called her out here before ["Naomi Wolf: The Feminist Myth (Ava and C.I.)" and "The Political Whoring of Naomi Wolf " -- the latter was a group piece]. But if we called that crazy nut job out every time she deserved it, we'd do little else. So when she made an ass out of herself awhile back and then an ass out of herself in the fall trying to explain why she didn't believe she was an ass, we looked the other way. We realize that life is much more difficult for Naomi Wolf these days because Judith N. Shklar is dead and therefore has stymied Naomi's best efforts at plagiarism. But then, last week, The Washington Post ran a column by Dalya Hassan and we started worrying that if we didn't weigh in, a 'trend' would take hold.
Naomi decided to weigh in on religious garb. When?
You'd think that would be the least confusing aspect to it. But with air head Naomi -- thought to be the model for Elizabeth Berkley's Nomi in Showgirls -- that's another part of the confusion. At her Facebook page on September 8, 2009, she wrote:
Over the weekend, a piece I wrote some months ago for my global syndicate, Project Syndicate -- a terrific organization that makes sure that op-eds from all points of view get disseminated to outlets in the developing world, in order to reinforce habits of democracy and debate -- got picked up and twisted in what I can only call Fanaticland and distorted beyond recognition.
Counting was never one of Naomi's skills. The column she's referring to, "Behind the veil lives a thriving Muslim sexuality," was published by The Sydney Morning Herald on August 30, 2008 -- which would be over a year before and not "some months" before.
As a writer, Naomi is pathetic and, yes, smutty. It's why the Real Press had a problem with her as an adviser for Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign. That didn't justify falsely claiming she picked out Gore's clothes, it did, however, explain some of their objections to her. Naomi just can't stay away from the smut. It's why so many feminist stay away from Naomi.
Naomi's like a pin-up -- after the years have set in -- always determined to convince her public that she's still sexually desired. It's embarrassing to watch.
And that's at the heart of the response to her column.
As always, Naomi doesn't get it. In her lengthy Facebook post, she makes the case that people are misinterpreting what she wrote. What she did, she insists, is actually listen to Muslim women -- apparently everyone before Naomi was only pretending to listen -- and, like Christopher Columbus, she's made a discovery!!!! Women like the burka, they really, really like it.
She insists, in her Facebook note, that there are more important issues for the West ("with all its resources and potential for positive dialogue") to focus on. To which the obvious response is, "Uh, you're the one who wrote the burka column. Not us. You're the one who decided to focus on that and not bride killings, legal subjugation, lack of access to potable water, etc."
In her Facebook post, Naomi offers those topics as topics feminists should be focused on instead of the burka. As though the whole world was writing about the burka while she was churning out one column after another on the infant mortality rate in the Muslim world.
In her Facebook post, Naomi offers those topics as topics feminists should be focused on instead of the burka. As though the whole world was writing about the burka while she was churning out one column after another on the infant mortality rate in the Muslim world.
Naomi is the male-defined woman and she repeatedly demonstrates that in her writing. In her Facebook post, she's quoting Homer from The Simpsons and, careful feminists quickly grasp, she will resort to quoting animated male characters before she'll ever quote an actual woman.
Naomi insisted, "The point I made is that many women I have heard from who actually have a choice, chose to wear a headscarf and modest clothing" -- The point Naomi needs to grasp is that a pleasure cruise through the upper strata of the Muslim world doesn't make her an expert on anything. "and that instead of assuming we know what this means to them, we should be willing to actually listen" -- But, Naomi, you weren't listening. You were rushing off like the looniest Thomas Friedman in the psyche ward trying to turn a small, non-scientific sample into 'the way it is'. She details the exalted posts of the non-average women she spoke to.
She then writes this laughable line: "I am standing by my own longterm commitment as a feminist to a core principle that has always ultimately served me well: WHEN IN DOUBT LISTEN TO WOMEN."
Like the woman in college who was gang-raped by your boyfriend's frat house? The one whose shoes were displayed the next morning in the dining room when you came down for breakfast? The woman you couldn't defend because you were afraid you'd be called a "lesbian"? (Naomi documents these tales -- seemingly unaware of how non-feminist they are -- in her book Promiscuities.)
In her Facebook post, Naomi reveals something she left out of her column: When meeting with Muslim feminists, she found many women (more?) refusing to wear the hijab or other items. She also reveals that they expressed "fatigue" over the Western interest "with what we wear instead of what our real problems are?"
"I am standing by my own longterm commitment as a feminist to a core principle that has always ultimately served me well: WHEN IN DOUBT LISTEN TO WOMEN."
She writes that in her Facebook post. In the same post where she justifies writing (another) column on the burka by stating Muslim feminists were tired of and offended by the Western focus on what Muslim women wear. Muslim feminists expressed distaste for the topic and Naomi "WHEN IN DOUBT LISTEN TO WOMEN" Wolf decides the topic to write about is the burka?
She believes in listening to women . . . except when she doesn't.
Naomi laments that her "Behind the veil" "is being twisted by those who know better" and this is bad "for the wellbeing of real American discourse and debate".
Muslim feminists asked her to write about anything other than the burka ("Why don't you focus on the amazing things Muslim women are doing -- and let them speak for themselves? Pretty much universally, they let me know that bride burnings, illiteracy, domestic violence, and legal oppression were at the top of their lists of priorities, and that they saw the West's preoccupation with the hijab as somewhat tiresome and beside the point given these life-and-death concerns.") but the real problem with American discourse and debate is that Naomi's bad column on the burka is being 'twisted'?
And, get this, who's twisting it? Jews for Jesus Naomi decides it's a conspiracy "underwritten by the Israel lobby". Pop another pill, Naomi.
Was her column misinterpreted or twisted?
No.
She went to the smut well as she always does. That's only more clear at Project Syndicate where the headline for the column is, get this, "Veiled Sexuality." [Note: For those who may doubt that the column was published in 2008, check the dates on the comments at that Project Syndicate link.]
In her usual mis-mash of 'trends' and male paranoia (a hallmark of Wolf's bad writing), the original column bemoaned how "sexual imagery on every street corner" (no, she doesn't get out of New York very often) has "reduced [the] libido" of "healthy young men" -- it's a "growing epidemic."
As two who know Naomi, allow us to decode that hysterical claim. Having gone to yet another loft party stag, Naomi stayed extra late and managed to lure a drunken 23-year-old male home. Whether he was gay or straight with discriminating tastes, he turned her down and instantly she had a new "growing epidemic."
If you doubt that's how she writes, you've never read one of her books -- memoir after memoir, posing as critical studies of our society which only serve to make Anais Nin look reticent in retrospect.
Feminism has long explained how most religions see wives as the property of husbands. The only one who apparently has never heard of that is Naomi which is how she comes to gush: "The bridal videos that I was shown, with the sensuous dancing that the bride learns as part of what makes her a wonderful wife, and which she proudly displays for her bridegroom, suggested that sensuality was not alien to Muslim women." Training a woman to use her own sexuality to please a man? That's liberating?
In a typical for Wolf and telling for our times passage, she yammered:
I experienced it myself. I put on a shalwar kameez and a headscarf in Morocco for a trip to the bazaar. Yes, some of the warmth I encountered was probably from the novelty of seeing a Westerner so clothed; but, as I moved about the market – the curve of my breasts covered, the shape of my legs obscured, my long hair not flying about me – I felt a novel sense of calm and serenity. I felt, yes, in certain ways, free.
Is this supposed to be written by Joey Heatherton or a feminist thinker? Who but an aging sex kitten would feel the need to emphasize "the curve of my breasts . . . the shape of my legs"? She's always got to go smutty.
Grasp that, in 1963, Gloria Steinem donned a bunny uniform to explain the ugly realities women forced to dress in male-defined ways endured while, in 2008, Naomi donned male-defined and proscribed dress and tried to sell it as liberation and sexy.
Which brings us back to Dalya Hassan. Naomi tried to sell male dictated wardrobes as liberation, Hassan showed up to insist she'd found "silver linings" to the hijab, "It protects my hair from sandstorms and rain, and it has pleased my husband, a reminder that sometimes we do things we don't like out of love."
Once upon a time they bound women's feet and, we're sure, you can find some idiots who will insist it was "sexy" (like Wolf) or "romantic" (like Hassan).
Women, as much as men, have the right to explore any kinks they want to in their own lives. And they don't even have to keep it in the privacy of the bedroom -- certainly, if voyeurism is your kink, you need public exposure. But what they do have to do is stop selling their own fetishes as liberation and good for all women.
----------Illustration is Isaiah's The World Today Just Nuts "'Feminist' Naomi Wolf speaks."