The humiliation of Naomi Wolf: a warning to modern polemicists
The American scholar, feminist and all-round over-the-top progressive rabble rouser, Naomi Wolf, used to have my respect. Her brilliant first book, The Beauty Myth, published in 1980, is one of the most convincing arguments for why female beauty culture isn’t good for women and could, if one were feeling so inclined, even be seen as a patriarchal plot to keep our confidence in check so we don’t advance too far. Mad, but great.
Sadly, Wolf has gone downhill since, each book a more outlandish attempt to hijack different types of evidence to advance her political ends than the previous one – Vagina:
A New Biography, phy,
r Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation nalisation of Love, Wolf has excelled herself with by far her most unorthodox presentation of scholarly “evidence” to date.
In support of her argument that Victorian Britain was a brutal and illiberal regime in which homosexuals were murdered by the state in droves, Wolf insisted that her research unearthed proof of executions for sodomy after 1835, thought to be the last year such a punishment was carried out. Crucial to this revelation was her location of records of “death recorded” for some men. When Victorian scholar Matthew Sweet, who interviewed her on BBC Radio 3 about the book, probed her
understanding of “death recorded”, it turned out that Wolf had wrongly assumed it meant execution, rather than pardoning, the accurate (if confusing) meaning.
The intelligentsia’s cheeks went bright red along with those of Wolf, who had found out on live radio that her book was based on major inaccuracy.
I don’t exactly feel bad for Wolf, but I did see the humiliation as a warning bell. Polemical politics and a taste for stark binaries have eclipsed reasoned, well-researched debate. Wolf isn’t alone as a public figure with an extreme set of politics trying to marshal the facts to suit them – she was just unlucky.
The thing about the modern world is that as we seek to tear strips off one another, we have vast reams and reams of data, fake and otherwise, at our o fingertips. It’s actually not very hard to construct arg arguments, the more polemical the better as far as the internet is concerned, c based on dub dubious evidence. Google any pro proposition that comes into you your head and you’ll find some kin kind of “study” or forum to bac back it up.
T The Wolf humiliation was also a reminder of how easy it is to be slapdash, but also, rea reassuringly, that there are still some limits to what one can get away with. Facts do s still count. Just.