Have you experienced this "Derisive Term for White Women Spreads on the Far Right" or is the NYT pushing it at us to foment contempt for conservatives?

I'm reading "After Renee Good Killing, Derisive Term for White Women Spreads on the Far Right/Vocal Trump supporters are demonizing Renee Good, her partner and their allies, with some even using an acronym: AWFUL, or Affluent White Female Urban Liberal" by Clyde McGrady.

I hadn't seen this term, and I read all sorts of things every day, so that makes me think this term isn't really a thing... though I've certainly noticed that people of the right are passing around a lot of videos of highly emotional left-wing white women.

But then I asked Meade, and he had heard the term and it seems to be catching on. 

Needless to say, I don't like the term. I don't like expressions of contempt and I don't like commentators  trading on the idea that women are over-emotional. I also don't like freaking out and yelling in public (or at home), but you can say just that, without contributing to sex-based hatred. 

Despite that NYT headline, McGrady's column isn't really about the term AWFUL. It's more about the phenomenon of going after activist liberal white women:

Conservatives say there is good reason to key in on such women. [Erik] Erickson, in a lengthy Substack post on Thursday, called Ms. Good’s death a “tragedy,” but one that Ms. Good and “her lesbian partner” had brought on themselves....

Writing on social media, [Naomi] Wolf said liberal men, “disproportionately estrogenized” and “physically passive,” had left liberal women sexually frustrated and eager for a fight....

So, there are things like that. But, interestingly, Trump himself is not going after women: 

When Mr. Trump was told in an interview with CBS News that Ms. Good’s father was a supporter of his, the president responded, “I would bet you that she, under normal circumstances, was a very solid, wonderful person. But, you know, her actions were pretty tough.”...

"In her most recent post, she argued that 'vaccinated people’s urine/feces' (sic) needed to be separated from general sewage supplies/waterways until its impact on unvaccinated people via drinking water was established."

From "Naomi Wolf banned from Twitter for spreading vaccine myths/Many social media users applaud termination of author’s account, but some have said move is a blow to freedom of speech" (The Guardian).

"Stay home Patrick of Tennessee. We don’t need maga anti-vaxers spreading pestilence across our country. As a matter of fact, don’t even leave your trailer park."

"Board the doors shut and stay inside with your AR-15. I think all of these anti-vaxers should be required to have ‘do not resuscitate’ tattooed on their foreheads." 

Says the top-rated commenter on a Washington Post article, "‘Vaccine passports’ are on the way, but developing them won’t be easy/White House-led effort tries to corral more than a dozen initiatives." 

The commenter is responding to this: 

There is evidence vaccine passports could motivate skeptical Americans to get shots. Several vaccine-hesitant participants at a recent focus group of Trump voters led by pollster Frank Luntz suggested their desire to see family, go on vacation and resume other aspects of daily life outpaced fear of the shots, particularly if travel companies and others moved to require proof of vaccination....

Some attendees dissented and warned that requiring a credential would backfire. “I would change my travel plans,” said a man identified as Patrick of Tennessee.

Is the developing opinion that only troglodytes resist vaccine passports? Because I just noticed this:

This is the absolute end of the line for human liberty in the West and if you don’t understand why, ask a techie. Once you agree to this platform any functionality can be loaded into it turning off and on access to society, goods, information, movement, based on your behavior. https://t.co/PtxbtqVfw1

— Dr Naomi Wolf (@naomirwolf) March 28, 2021

Don't conflate resistance to vaccine passports with resistance to getting vaccinated. That's what I think the WaPo commenter did. Patrick of Tennessee objected to "requiring a credential," not to getting vaccinated.

ADDED: I think Wolf may be an anti-vaxxer, so her warning isn't scary.

SO: Let's look at the Guardian article she links to, "Give pause before you raise a glass to the prospect of a vaccine passport/The prime minister’s ‘papers for pints’ scheme is nothing less than a national ID card by stealth." 

Obviously, that's the UK, and in the U.S., the "passports" would probably be handled at the state level, like our other IDs. I can imagine the question of vaccine passports in the U.S. getting swirled up into the voter ID drama. Is getting an ID oppressive or something everyone should gladly, willingly do? 

The NYT is very gentle with Naomi Wolf — the "prominent author" who was humiliated in an on-air interview.

I'm reading "After an On-Air Correction, Naomi Wolf Addresses Errors in Her New Book" in the NYT. During a BBC interview, Wolf got the humiliating news that the term "death recorded" did not mean what she assumed, that a death penalty was carried out, but the complete opposite, that the judge determined that the person should not be executed.

I see that a spokeswoman for the U.S. publisher of the book — “Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love" — is saying there was an "unfortunate error" but "we believe the overall thesis of the book ‘Outrages’ still holds."

How can the publisher say "the overall thesis of the book ‘Outrages’ still holds"? Or, to be precise, they still "believe" it holds? The only way I can make sense of that is to perceive Houghton Mifflin Harcourt not a publisher of works of history, but in the business of ideology and propaganda, where the believing is all that really matters. Of course, the "overall thesis" survives. In ideology and propaganda, your overall thesis is the foundation and you're going to continue to build upon it, no matter how many efforts collapse. Just throw out those bad materials and go get some different materials and rebuild on the same foundation. Could something be wrong with the foundation? The question isn't even comprehensible in the business of propaganda.

Though readers want to rely on the publisher's imprint, the publisher's spokeswoman says — in so many words — don't rely on us. She says it "employs professional editors, copyeditors and proofreaders for each book project," but "we rely ultimately on authors for the integrity of their research and fact-checking."

But enough about the publisher's mealy mouthpiece. The NYT headline says Naomi Wolf responded. During the interview, Wolf said “Well, that’s a really important thing to investigate.” But the headline says after the interview. I see that Wolf wouldn't respond to the NYT's request for comment. So what is the Times talking about?

On Twitter, however, she said she is correcting parts of her book as a result of the discussion. And she and Mr. Sweet inadvertently offered a lesson on how to gracefully handle these sorts of situations on social media. Mr. Sweet explained the errors in Ms. Wolf’s book in a lengthy Twitter thread, while Ms. Wolf thanked him for calling her attention to the misunderstanding.

The NYT is being as kind to her as possible, I think. Here's how it describes her:

A prominent author who has written several works of feminist and cultural criticism, Ms. Wolf is known for books such as “The Beauty Myth” and “Vagina: A New Biography.”

She's "prominent." She gets on the talk shows. But why? Were any of the books that made her "prominent" based on good scholarship? Where are the serious scholars — the principled, devoted historians and philosophers — who didn't get on the shows because Naomi Wolf made books that had an attention-getting, stimulating "overall thesis"? It's an unresearched thesis of mine that such people exist. And now, I'm seeing...

A lot of people gleefully trashing Naomi Wolf, and her latest book does seem based on a big misunderstanding.

But, really, Wolf is just the Id of much modern historical scholarship: It too tells just-so stories to bolster the political orthodoxies of a small group of academics. https://t.co/D8yPOfsj7B

— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) May 24, 2019

Here's how Wolf presents herself on Twitter:

Dr? What is her doctorate? I looked it up on Wikipedia:

Now, it's time to feel empathy for Naomi Wolf...

Full interview from Radio 3's most recent 'Arts & Ideas'. Full context of the excerpt starts at 19:00, excerpt itself starts at 24:30.https://t.co/szwLrxVSvE

— Edmund Hochreiter (@thymetikon) May 23, 2019

They say there's a black hole out in space, but what about the black hole of your mind?

1) If this is the worst problem brilliant young women face, hallelujah
2) Several people have pointed out the comment comes from a woman. Yet here's this tweet a day last, unchanged https://t.co/GQlC0W1NBN

— Cathy Young (@CathyYoung63) April 12, 2019

UPDATE: Naomi Wolf has now deleted the tweet that used to display along with Young's ridicule of it. Wolf had shown the picture of the young woman whose work led to what is presented as a picture of a black hole along with comments that included "That's so cool" and something like "She's so cute." Wolf asserted that the "That's so cool" comments were from women and show how women react and "She's so cute" came from a man and that's a problem. It turns out the "She's so cute" commenter, with the first name Shaun, actually was a woman, the Wolf premise of Wolf's expansive generalization was embarrassingly wrong. Wolf subsequently put this up, so you can see she doesn't accept the push-back about the generalization:

"We did not want to make this pink-washed. This is not a girl’s condom."

"It’s not just like, ‘Hey, I’m the guy, I bring the condom.’ It’s people involved together making decisions for their sexual health."

Said Bruce Weiss, Trojan’s vice president of marketing, explaining a new product with "more gender-neutral purple packaging" and "a carrying case that could slip easily (and discreetly) into a purse," quoted in a NYT article titled "XOXO Campaign: Will It Spell Profit or Trouble for Condom Maker?"

The "trouble" is, we're told, that in today's "unforgiving environment,"* Trojan could get criticizes for seeming to shift responsibility onto the woman when it — like the condom — belongs on the man.

Fortunately for Trojan, the NYT extracted a quote from Naomi Wolf, who enthuses:

“It wonderfully addresses women as adults who can take responsibility, not victims of whatever the guy happens to have in his pocket or not,” Ms. Wolf said. “It addresses women as adults who are thinking about their sexual health.”

Victims of whatever the guy happens to have in his pocket — great phrase.

_________________

* E.g., the reaming given to Pepsi for seemingly trivializing Black Lives Matter. 

Trump-Pence post-coital...

... logo.

That's the first time I've seen fit to use the word "post-coital" on this blog, though it did appear — once — in a quote:

"I realised one day, as I gazed out on the treetops outside the bedroom of our little cottage, that the usual post-coital rush of a sense of vitality infusing the world, of delight with myself and with all around me, and of creative energy rushing through everything alive, was no longer following the physical pleasure.... I felt I was losing somehow, what made me a woman, and that I could not face living in this condition for the rest of my life."

Recognize the distinctive authorial voice? It's Naomi Wolf.

That post ends — aptly! — with this:



"Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed [the physical act of love]. Luckily, I was able to interpret these feelings correctly."

Here's the Wikipedia article, "Post-coital tristesse":

Post-coital tristesse (PCT) or post-coital dysphoria (PCD) is the feeling in humans of melancholy, anxiety, agitation or aggression after sexual intercourse (coitus). Its name comes from New Latin postcoitalis and French tristesse, literally "sadness". Many people with PCT may exhibit strong feelings of anxiety lasting from five minutes to two hours after coitus.

The phenomenon is traced to the [ancient] Greek doctor Galen, who wrote, "Every animal is sad after coitus except the human female and the rooster." The philosopher Baruch Spinoza in his Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione writes "For as far as sensual pleasure is concerned, the mind is so caught up in it, as if at peace in a [true] good, that it is quite prevented from thinking of anything else. But after the enjoyment of sensual pleasure is past, the greatest sadness follows. If this does not completely engross, still it thoroughly confuses and dulls the mind."...

We'll see how Trump and Pence do. 

"I think maybe we need not to condemn Naomi Wolf but..."

"... to consider the possibility that she's having a psychotic break."

ADDED: Examples of things Wolf has been saying:

Author and former Democratic political consultant Naomi Wolf published a series of Facebook posts on Saturday in which she questioned the veracity of the ISIS videos showing the murders and beheadings of two Americans and two Britons, strongly implying that the videos had been staged by the US government and that the victims and their parents were actors.

Wolf published a separate Facebook post, also on Saturday, suggesting that the US was sending troops to West Africa not to assist with Ebola treatment but to bring Ebola back to the US to justify a military takeover of American society. She also suggested that the Scottish independence referendum, in which Scots voted to remain in the United Kingdom, had been faked....

AND: Naomi defends herself:

"I am not asserting that the ISIS videos have been staged," she wrote in a Facebook post. "No one can yet know anything for sure about the ISIS videos as they have simply not been independently analyzed, according to the news outlets which we have contacted for more information about the verification process."

Actually, I don't think her demands for better journalism are crazy. How do we know the videos are not staged? Who is verifying it? If we were being played by a government that was trying to manipulate us, would we notice? Do we know how to defend ourselves from disinformation?

PLUS: Operation Mincemeat.

"Just so we’re clear on this: I still love football. I love the grace and the poise of the athletes."

"I love the tension between the ornate structure of the game and its improvisatory chaos, and I love the way great players find opportunity, even a mystical kind of order, in the midst of that chaos. The problem is that I can no longer indulge these pleasures without feeling complicit...."

From a NYT Magazine essay asking the question: "Is It Immoral to Watch the Super Bowl?" The question-asker is Steve Almond. Am I supposed to know who he is? (Is it immoral not to know?) There's no note about the author on the page and the name isn't a hot link. What's his moral authority?

Perhaps he wants his ideas judged by the strength of this one text, like an anonymous pamphleteer, but I Google his name and see that he's a short-story writer and that he was an adjunct professor in creative writing at Boston College who resigned in protest when Condoleezza Rice was brought in to do the school's commencement address. Moral authority noted.

"I'm drawing my own conclusions... My job is to notice echoes and notice resonances.... Scientists are not supposed to do the same thing that cultural critics do."

Quotes from Naomi Wolf — author of that tome about the vagina — introduced by NYT writer Lauren Sandler with the hilarious sentence: "Looking at her bookshelves stacked with works by Abbie Hoffman, Jane Fonda and John Stuart Mill, she defended her research."

I knew the vagina monologued, but I wasn't really thinking about it resonating and echoing.

Another Wolfism:

“This is a time in which everybody is on the verge of a global awakening from a certain kind of torpor,” she said, eyes sparkling. “That’s why there’s this doubling down on the power struggle over the vagina. But this is a moment for women. We are going to have to reclaim the vagina as central to everything.”

Eyes sparkling... you just know Sandler wants you picturing that Norma-Desmond-slithering-down-the-staircase look of madness. Ready for my closeup. Closeup on my vagina!

It's central to everything!

"A few days after reviews began appearing, [Naomi] Wolf set sliced bananas and strawberries upon a coffee table (cut fruit had never before looked so vulval)..."

"... and took a seat on the deep, plush couch in the yellow-painted living room of her sunny West Village apartment. She was wearing a flowing black wrap over a loose knit tank, tan strappy heels and a tight smile."

Catty observations on the food, the decorating, and the fashion of the famous feminist who opened her home — if not her vagina — to the NYT reporter.

Flowing black wrap and a loose knit tank... you know what that means! Naomi is striving to put her vagina in the newspaper, and mean old Lauren Sandler is calling her fat in so many words.

"Forty-one years after Germaine Greer issued her infamous directive, the ladies seem to have complied."

What Greer said, leading off this NYRB review of Naomi Wolf's presumably idiotic book "Vagina: A New Biography" was: "Lady, love your cunt."

To be sure, not every iteration of vagina pride represents an unambiguous advancement for the feminist cause. It is a matter of dispute whether Eve Ensler’s twee flights of fancy about vaginas that smell like “snowflakes” are really good for the sisterhood. And whatever Greer was hoping for when she enjoined women to “boast of…their venery,” it is safe to say that it was not “vajazzling,” the modern trend of affixing crystals to the shaven pudendum.

One might reasonably argue that the occasional outburst of snowflakery is a tolerable price to pay for liberation. But Naomi Wolf would counsel against such complacency. In her new “biography” of the vagina, she warns that her subject is in danger of being trivialized by its cultural ubiquity. The vagina, properly understood, is, “part of the female soul” and the medium for the “meaning of life itself.” In order to free female sexuality from patriarchal calumny, pornographic distortion, and some of the damaging myths of second-wave feminism, it is essential, she argues, that women reclaim the “magic” of the vagina and restore it to its rightful place at “the center of the universe.”

A WaPo writer "searching for the 'authentic America'" is delighted to travel to Madison, Wisconsin.

"We’d always heard about that mythically quirky place called Madison, a free-spirited land with far fewer chain stores and BlackBerry addicts than Washington," enthuses Emily Wax. Man, living in Washington, D.C. really lowers your standards of authenticity.

Influenced by the 2011 documentary “Wisconsin Supper Clubs: An Old-Fashioned Experience,” Wax goes to the restaurant called Old Fashioned, which is fairly new, and not one of the funky old places I think of as "supper clubs." She eats some fried cheese curds and says she has no idea how to tell whether cheese curds are especially good. (Answer: They squeak. Except they don't squeak if they're fried.)

She drinks the cocktail called an Old Fashioned, and then on another day she has another Old Fashioned and proclaims "How Madison!" On another day, "my husband and I headed for a romantic dinner at the sexy, dimly lit Tornado Steakhouse," which supposedly "has a wonderful menu."

And so did she achieve it, that sense of authenticity infusing the city, of delight with mythical quirkiness all around her, of free-spirited energy rushing through everything alive? Myself, I'm over-indulging in deep-fried prose tonight and wondering if I need to see a surgeon to get my neural pathways reconnected. I'm losing it somehow, as I gaze out on the treetops of Madison.

"To my astonishment and dismay, while my orgasms were as strong and pleasurable as ever, something very different was happening after sex, to my mind."

Said feminist attention-seeker and erstwhile Al-Gore-adviser Naomi Wolf.

"I realised one day, as I gazed out on the treetops outside the bedroom of our little cottage, that the usual post-coital rush of a sense of vitality infusing the world, of delight with myself and with all around me, and of creative energy rushing through everything alive, was no longer following the physical pleasure."

Something is infusing my world right now, I'll tell you that.

"I felt I was losing somehow, what made me a woman, and that I could not face living in this condition for the rest of my life."

May I suggest wearing earth-toned clothing? Oh... no... I see... you found the solution in surgery.

[New York gynaecologist Dr Deborah] Coady told her it could be a problem with the pelvic nerve - her area of expertise - being compressed and [causing] numbness....

She was referred to Dr Jeffrey Cole, an expert in muscular-skeletal medicine who x-rayed her back and found a crumbling of her vertebrae, even though she had never experienced pain or back problems....

Dr Cole told her: ‘All women’s wiring is different. That’s the reason women respond so differently from one another sexually. The pelvic nerve branches in very individual ways for every woman. These differences are physical’.

He added that men’s sexual wiring is much more uniform.

Yes, once again we learn that we women are so fabulously multidimensional and men are so simple. So let me tell it to you straight: Cough up the tax money to pay for the fancy diagnostics of our neural misalignments and the surgery to reconnect us so we can have  "the ‘blended’ clitoral and vaginal orgasms" that will return women to "the sense of deep emotional union, of post-coital creative euphoria, of joy with oneself and one’s lover… and the sense that all was well in some existential way, that [Naomi Wolf] thought [she] had lost for ever." And don't be raising any of your war-on-women objections. 

Of course, she has a new book. It's called "Vagina: A New Biography."

Is it really the story of her vagina? Seems more like the story of a few of her vertebrae. But it's all connected. Elaborately. Complexly. Mysteriously. Now, shut up while I gaze upon the treetops outside the bedroom of my little cottage and contemplate the extent of my euphoria.

ADDED: She's writing the kind of claptrap that feminists used to quote for the purpose of mockery.

IN THE COMMENTS: In Wolf's cogitations, Scott Bradford hears something familiar: "I first became aware of it, Mandrake during the physical act of love.... Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily, I was able to interpret these feelings correctly."

"Jolie's image is not just a mirror of one woman but also a looking glass for female fantasy life writ large."

Naomi Wolf raves inanely about Angelina Jolie. Excerpt:

[Jolie] managed the almost unheard-of task of turning the home-wrecker label into a wholesome, family-friendly triumph. There was little Maddox, who was growing up and clearly enjoying tossing footballs with his mother's new boyfriend. Jolie had managed to head off the scarlet letter by giving a boy an ideal masculine counterpoint....

[S]he took for her own pleasure the male seen as the most desired of the tribe, Brad Pitt, who is always ranked at the top of indexes of male beauty and virility. As for the constraints of social convention — ahem, he was still married? You can have a variety of feelings about this, but Jolie's evident disdain of that social constraint certainly, for better or worse, put her in the same self-entitled category as those men who have traditionally taken what they wanted and let the emotional chips fall where they may.

"Ideal masculine counterpoint"... you mean in terms of ideal "male beauty and virility"? A boy needs a role model... if he is to grow up to fit the traditional "self-entitled category" that we admire so much... at least in a woman... or whatever....

Why does Naomi Wolf regret working for Al Gore?

Was it because her advice that he wear "earth tones" and establish that he is an "Alpha Male" brought him and her ridicule that continues to this day? No! It's that she took money to work for the Gore campaign. And it's a "big mistake for any writer" to take money from a candidate:

[B]ecause you can't then say whatever you want to say whenever you want to say it. That was the great luxury of being a freelance writer and beholden to nobody--which I had been, up until then.

Writers have to be free to criticize anybody and criticize the powers that be and to always be transparent with their readers. So since I was formally signed up with the campaign rather than volunteering as I had in '96

The problem with "earth tones" and "Alpha Male" wasn't that her advice was silly or embarrassing, it's that "the evil Republican National Committee... completely invented " it, and she "wasn't in a position, contractually, to hit back."

So it was very frustrating, when I'm used to being able to speak up, to not have a voice when the Bush Team was doing such a brilliant job of what we have subsequently learned is their specialty: creating imaginative lies and saturating the media with them.

This is from a Huffington Post series called "My Favorite Mistake," which I think is supposed to be about your own mistake (and how much you learned from it). Obviously, there is an immense temptation to identify something good you tried to do and to use the occasion to condemn your nemesis. Wolf succumbed.

My mistake was being so naive about how profoundly evil my enemy is.

"It is an iconic turning point and it will be remembered as the moment at which America either fought back or yielded."

The tasing of Andrew Meyer unleashes the mind of Naomi Wolf:

Today's news shows a recognizable shock moment in the annals of a closing society. A very ordinary-looking American student....

Ordinary-looking? What difference does that make? Shouldn't we feel better when what looks like an over-intense police response is applied to the sort of person that we usually suspect gets all the privileges?

It is an iconic turning point...

It's not enough to be just iconic or just a turning point anymore. It's a turning point among turning points. Few turning points reach icon status. But this -- this is that turning point.

... and it will be remembered as the moment at which America either fought back or yielded.

Actually, it won't. (I can see into the future at least as well as Wolf.)

This violence against a student is different from violence against protesters in the anti-war movement of 30 years ago because of the power the president has now to imprison innocent U.S. citizens for months in isolation.

What was the war in 1977? I am getting all mixed up now. So, let's see. Police employed by the University of Florida apply force to a student who physically fights them, and it has something to do with the President's use of detention in the war on terror. Oh, the Wolf mind is aswirl with notions.

...That taser was directed at the body of a young man, but it is we ourselves, and our Constitution, who received the full force of the shock.

Actually, we didn't and it didn't. And Meyer will have the opportunity to sue the police, relying on the Constitution. So the Constitution is still there. And it's not obvious that he'll win.

There is a chapter in my new book, The End of America, entitled "Recast Criticism as 'Espionage' and Dissent as 'Treason,'" that conveys why this moment is the horrific harbinger it is.

So the tasing of Andrew Meyer is a harbinger -- a horrific harbinger -- it predicts something in the future, and your book -- written before the tasing -- itself predicted this prediction? Wolf's fortune-telling powers astound.

I argue that....

Blah blah blah... buy my book.

...strategists using historical models to close down an open society start by using force on 'undesirables,' 'aliens,' 'enemies of the state,' and those considered by mainstream civil society to be untouchable; in other times they were, of course, Jews, Gypsies, Communists, homosexuals.

Bush is Hitler. If you haven't caught on by now, Andrew Meyer will finally make you see.

Then, once society has been acculturated to that use of force, the 'blurring of the line' begins and the parameters of criminalized speech are extended -- the definition of 'terrorist' expanded -- and the use of force begins to be deployed in HIGHLY VISIBLE, STRATEGIC and VISUALLY SHOCKING WAYS against people that others see and identify with as ordinary citizens.

Oh, yeah. That's happened. That's why they -- who? -- "strategists"? -- or, well, at least the university police -- are moving in on the very ordinary-looking people now.

Long rave about Nazis cut.

We have to understand what time it is. When the state starts to hurt people for asking questions...

Does any rational person think Meyer was tased for "asking questions"?

... we can no longer operate on the leisurely time of a strong democracy -- the 'Oh gosh how awful!' kind of time. It is time to take to the streets. It is time to confront those committing crimes against the Constitution.

It's time to stop using the word "time" in every sentence.

The window has now dropped several precipitous inches and once it is closed there is no opening it without great and sorrowful upheaval.

Yeah, I have a window like that. Try some WD-40.

... I was scared when I wrote The End of America....

Scared and out of my mind.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade provides the lyrics:

Campus police and Bushhitler coming
We're finally on our own
This summer we felt the horrific harbinger
One tased in Florida

Gotta get down to it
Shutting our microphones down
Shoulda been done long ago

What if you knew him and
found him tased on the ground?
How can you run
when you know it's an iconic turning point?

Women are so very competent, so why do we stare at the screw-ups?

Naomi Wolf ponders the complexities of why we care what happens to Paris Hilton. Why, she asks, when real women manifest "high levels of competence, idealism and all-around effectiveness," do we obsess over pop culture screw-ups? Wolf considers one possibility, in the most interesting paragraph of her essay, and then embraces her preferred answer, that women these days are doing so well handling all their responsibilites that we "sometimes we get tired of our own competence" and want the "escapism" of fantasizing about the alternative of "letting it all go to pieces and having someone else clean up the mess."

But let's look at the paragraph where she allows herself to says something that doesn't fit quite so neatly into her praise for the wonderful, hypercompetent women of today:

On some deep level, there's a generalized feeling that women's vulnerability equals the guarantee of receiving a reliable supply of their love and care. There's an anxiety that if women become too strong, too independent, we won't be able to count on them to nurture and they won't need love. Because men, children and (not to put too fine a point upon it) the whole edifice of human civilization depend on women's willingness to nurture, it's scary to take a step into the unknown -- to see if women will continue to love if they're really free to choose whether to do so. (We will, of course, but it will take a generation or so of proof for everyone to calm down about it.)

Oh, no! A scary thought! Wolf immediately inserts a parenthetical denying that the liberation of women could actually upset something significant. And don't think she's the one who's scared by the cause and effect she was able to envision.

It's your problem: Calm down. Surely, you don't want to be among the retrograde characters who are going to take "a generation or so of proof." What's with these people not instinctively seeing how good progress simply must be? They actually need to see and observe the consequences of social change before they can join me and all the other good people who know that this will all work out for the best?

But let's think about these deep feelings. What if many of the most competent, strong, and independent women choose to not to form families? What if the ability to do everything for yourself gives rise a preference for remaining free of all of the extra burden of taking care of the needs of others? What if ambition to excel in public life causes many women to embrace the simplicity and freedom of an independent private life? These are perfectly rational questions, not mere hysteria or antifeminism. Wolf tries to package the questions away into the matter of whether women will "continue to love," which is a crude simplication. Oh, yes, Naomi, love, love, love. We'll always want to love.

And then it's back to the boosterism: Women are soooooo competent.

***

Of course, there's a much easier way to explain our obsession with celebrity screw-ups. Why do we stare at a car wreck instead of constantly marveling at all the cars that proceed expeditiously along the highway without incident? What's with all this news from a war zone when there so many peace zones? Why does the newspaper have an obituary page instead of running notices telling us that people are not dead yet?

Over at Yglesias, they're talking about a Naomi Wolf article from 4 years ago.

I mean, Matt thought it was new, because some other blog wrote about it as if it were new. (I picked it up via Memeorandum.) He's all concerned about Naomi's tired old whine that pornography has wrecked man's capacity to appreciate real, in-the-flesh women, or, as Naomi puts it: "The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women." (The onslaught of Naomi Wolf's prose is responsible for the deadening of this female's interest in reading in relation to third wave feminists.) Anyway, I'm so glad Matt fell for this one, because some of the comments over there are pretty funny.