

He laments her current outlook as "very sad", saying "I've seen her wade deeper into a conspiracist whirlpool." (Wolf did not respond to Insider's interview request or a list of questions. Benjamin Ramm, a liberal thinker and documentary maker, was an admirer of Wolf and thrilled when she endorsed as "timely and valuable" his 2011 paper Citizens: A Manifesto. One just messaged 'you're doing incalculable harm.'" she complained on Twitter, where she bombards her 142k followers with messages about vaccine side-effects, the profits of big pharma and the negative impact of masks on children. "I daily get texts from friends and former friends telling me to 'stop'. During recent weeks, as Wolf has aligned herself with figures from the political far right and turned on Joe Biden for taking America on a path to totalitarianism with his strategy for fighting Covid-19, her liberal allies have been aghast. James Keivom/NY Daily News via Getty Images Naomi Wolf was arrested during an Occupy Wall Street protest in 2011. (She happened upon the protesters while exiting a red-carpet event, she later wrote, and was advising them about their First Amendment right to use a megaphone.) "She was clever and a good speaker and very competent and she rode a big wave."Īs a public intellectual, Wolf was never far from the drama or the headlines, whether writing in 2004 that Harold Bloom, the famous literary critic and her college professor at Yale, had made unwanted sexual advances on her 21 years earlier, or getting arrested at an Occupy Wall Street protest in 2011 while dressed in an evening gown. " The Beauty Myth was a really big deal and it was really smart, it did land her a lot of fame and a lot of plaudits" says Rosie Boycott, feminist pioneer, member of Britain's House of Lords and co-founder of Virago, Wolf's publisher. It was a time when great significance was discerned by many in every word that Wolf wrote or uttered. With her apparently impeccable Democratic credentials she stood at the shoulders of Bill Clinton and Al Gore during their respective presidential campaigns, imparting her counsel as a trusted adviser. The book's global popularity was enhanced by the dazzle of the author's own persona as a product of Yale and Oxford who seemed to feel the pain of other women, in spite of her own obvious privileges. Wolf was the author of The Beauty Myth, a classic text that seemed to define the dichotomies of late 20th Century womanhood, and which became the first of her eight New York Times best-sellers. The great figurehead of 1990s " third wave" feminism, who bestrode the highest pinnacles of literature and politics to become an inspiration to a generation of young women, has morphed into something other than the Naomi they thought they knew. Many old friends and admirers of Naomi Wolf are horrified. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
