Naomi Wolf gets slaughtered on Mumsnet (best and worst comments)

NAOMI Wolf has been chatting about her new book Vagina – A New Biography to the women on Mumsnet. Wolf has made a connection between brain and vagina. She might have also made a link between brains and arse.

Wolf says things like:

“Some people have a lower baseline autonomic nervous system and in lovemaking, something that heightens it like spanking or hair-pulling or some scenario that is threatening – as long as you are in control – that heightens some women’s autonomic nervous system, and in turn heightens their arousal and their orgasm.”

“When you understand that, it’s much less alarming.”

Got that? Says Naomi:

“One thing that has changed my life is knowing that women don’t get flooded emotionally when they are being stroked.That has allowed me to communicate with my partner because when we start to have a tense conversation he will stroke me and it calms me down.”

The book has vagina in the title because…

“…because that word is either so taboo or surrounded with negative connotations or draped in shame or medicalised, it’s really important to take it back”.

Helen Lewis looks at one scene in the book:

Alan invites the guests to make vulva-shaped pasta but then ruins everything by sweeping in to announce these shapes are called “cuntini”. But it gets worse. “I heard a sizzling sound. I looked to the kitchen: the sound was coming from several dozen enormous sausages, ranged in iron skillets on the big industrial stove. I got it: ha, sausages to go with the ‘cuntini’. I noticed that the energy of the mixed-gender crowd was now not simple.” Alan’s coup de grace is the addition of salmon fillets to the feast: “Again. I got it. I got the joke. Women are smelly.” The whole incident traumatises Wolf so much that she “could not type a word of the book – not even research notes – for six months”. There you have it, anti-feminists; all this time you’ve been calling us ugly and hairy and lesbian, and you could have just invited us over and made a delicious but insufficiently supportive buffet

Wolf has been on the telly, talking about Julian Assange. She wrote this open letter:

“Dear Interpol:

As a longtime feminist activist, I have been overjoyed to discover your new commitment to engaging in global manhunts to arrest and prosecute men who behave like narcissistic jerks to women they are dating.

I see that Julian Assange is accused of having consensual sex with two women, in one case using a condom that broke. I understand, from the alleged victims’ complaints to the media, that Assange is also accused of texting and tweeting in the taxi on the way to one of the women’s apartments while on a date, and, disgustingly enough, ‘reading stories about himself online’ in the cab.

Both alleged victims are also upset that he began dating a second woman while still being in a relationship with the first. (Of course, as a feminist, I am also pleased that the alleged victims are using feminist-inspired rhetoric and law to assuage what appears to be personal injured feelings. That’s what our brave suffragette foremothers intended!).

Thank you again, Interpol. I know you will now prioritize the global manhunt for 1.3 million guys I have heard similar complaints about personally in the US alone — there is an entire fraternity at the University of Texas you need to arrest immediately. I also have firsthand information that John Smith in Providence, Rhode Island, went to a stag party — with strippers! — that his girlfriend wanted him to skip, and that Mark Levinson in Corvallis, Oregon, did not notice that his girlfriend got a really cute new haircut — even though it was THREE INCHES SHORTER.

Terrorists. Go get ’em, Interpol!

Yours gratefully,

Naomi Wolf”

She went on Newsnight:

Suzanne Moore nails her:

She comes in a package that is marketed as feminism but is actually breathlessly written self-help. Her oeuvre, if I can use this word, is basically memoir, in which she struggles to tell some heroic truth that many others have already told us. The great trick is to present this material as new, and to somehow speak on behalf of all women when she is infinitely privileged and sheltered.

Hence feminism becomes simply a highly mediated form of narcissism devoid of any actual brain/politics connection. What we have here is Californication, with a little trot through some basic women’s studies linking female creativity with sexual awakening. Think Georgia O’Keeffe with bit of Anaïs Nin thrown in. Which is nice.

It gets dodgy when she drags in some neuroscience as evidence and appears more clueless than someone who has failed her chemistry GCSE but has two TED talks on her iPhone…

It’s like lesbianism never happened, nor class, nor vast swaths of feminist theory. The context of the vagina is the body, and bodies exist in culture. As do brains. So much of Wolf’s work is utter drivel – and I say this as someone in possession of the sacred feminine “force”. Which is connected to my mind. Woo! Which is why I can be this brutal (according to Wolf, nasty words about our vaginas hurt our actual brains). Now I have made that connection, thanks, I have entered a profound state of oceanic bliss. Because I am indeed an actual cunt.

On Mumsnet: