Naomi Wolf's book Vagina: self-help marketed as feminism

[struggle4progress]

6. Why the Uproar Over Naomi Wolf’s Vagina?

September 12, 2012
BY Sady Doyle

... And yet the book isn't rabidly offensive. Silly, essentialist, willfully ignorant of the existence of trans people: Sure. 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. None of that is interesting, but none of it is inflammatory. Which makes it odd that the book itself is getting so much negative attention.

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.”

This is entirely wrong. 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. 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. 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.

Wolf's response to the Assange allegations was a disgrace, and her attempt to rewrite history only disgraces her further ...