Why Does Anyone Take Naomi Wolf Seriously?

In October 2014, I wrote this of feminist writer Naomi Wolf, "Her words must be taken not just with a grain of salt, but a full shaker's worth." Unfortunately, this like many of my American Spectator pieces have been relegated to the dustbin of history. I can at least be grateful for Wikipedia.


However, much of that article was based on my first person encounter with Wolf in Cambridge back in October 2007 when she was promoting the idea that George W. Bush was planning to remain in office beyond his term and organizing a fascist takeover of America. My original account of that encounter remains online. Anyone who reads it should not be surprised at what happened to her yesterday during a BBC radio interview with Matthew Sweet to promote her new book Outrages: Sex, Censorship & The Criminalization of Love .


Already released in the U.K. and due to be released next month in North America, Sweet debunked Wolf's claim that Britain had been executing gay men for consensual sex after 1830. Sweet informed her she had misunderstood the term "death recorded. He explained death recorded “was a category that was created in 1823 that allowed judges to abstain from pronouncing a sentence of death on any capital convict whom they considered to be a fit subject for pardon.” Sweet added, “I don’t think any of the executions you’ve identified here actually happened.” Wolf gulped and said, "Well, that's a really important thing to investigate here. You can listen to their exchange here.


Of course, we all make mistakes. But it appears that Wolf has not learned from hers. Wolf achieved literary stardom in 1991 with The Beauty Myth. She claimed that 150,000 died in America every year of anorexia. Only as Christina Hoff Sommers demonstrated in Who Stole Feminism? the number was closer to 100.


In between these egregious errors, paranoid claims about President Bush's fascist takeover not to mention claims the ISIS execution videos were staged and that the U.S. government was plotting to spread Ebola, we must give pause and ask ourselves this question. Why does anyone take Naomi Wolf seriously?