Naomi Wolf

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Naomi Wolf at the 2008 Brooklyn Book Festival

Naomi Wolf (born November 12, 1962 in San Francisco ) is an American writer and political activist. She studied English literature at Yale University and worked as a Rhodes Fellow at the University of Oxford . She was married to Bill Clinton's journalist and collaborator , David Shipley , with whom she has two children.

With the publication of her book The Myth of Beauty , she became the leading spokesperson for what later became known as the Third Wave of Feminism .

The myth of beauty

Her book The Myth of Beauty , published in 1990, is considered a feminist classic. Naomi Wolf is one of the founders of Third Wave Feminism. The New York Times called the book "one of the seventy most influential books of the twentieth century". In the book, Wolf argues that "beauty" is socially constructed as a normative value and that patriarchy determines the content of this construct in order to maintain the subordination of women. She also analyzes that the influence of mass media and advertising, despite the increased social power of women, exerts pressure on them to meet unrealistic standards of "physical beauty". This pressure leads to unhealthy behavior in women such as anorexia and bulimia. The pressure also affects women's ability to be effective and accepted in society.

Naomi Wolf's book The Myth of Beauty is still fundamental to feminist debates about the body, mass media and patriarchal control.

How do you destroy a democracy

In How to Destroy a Democracy ( The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot ), Naomi Wolf describes the strategies that fascist movements have used to seize power around the world and criticizes the collapse of democratic institutions in the United States . The book served as a template for the 78-minute documentary The End of America by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern (who also shot The Death Riders of Darfur ).

In a historical retrospective, Naomi Wolf examines the rise of fascism and outlines the ten steps a fascist group (or government) takes to destroy the democratic nature of a nation-state and undermine the freedoms that its citizens have exercised up to then:

The sequel Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries , which has not yet been published in German, examines how Americans defended themselves in their history against anti-democratic forces within, and asks to what extent the current young generation has the necessary skills.

vagina

In 2012, after the 46-year-old author was diagnosed with a disc disease in 2008 and underwent orthopedic surgery, Wolf published her monograph on the vagina . In her work, she examines the connections between female sexual organs and the overall organism as well as the relationship to social or medical assessments of women as a whole, and also brings her own experience from tantra groups to the table. Wolf sees a happy sex life as a prerequisite for female creativity and happiness.

Research error

In her first book, The Myth of Beauty , Wolf claimed that 150,000 women die from anorexia every year in the United States. Christina Hoff Sommers proved that the number was far exaggerated and actually amounts to 100–400 victims. It has been corrected in more recent editions of the book.

Wolf published the book Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love in 2019 . In the book, the author claimed that dozens of men were executed for homosexual activity in 19th century England. At the same time, she wanted to prove that legal discrimination against homosexuals began as early as the 1850s instead of around 30 years later, as has been assumed in research. In a radio interview with BBC journalist Matthew Sweet, the latter drew her attention to the fact that she had misunderstood the language of the court in the sources cited by her and that none of the convicted had actually been executed. Likewise, the court proceedings were not about voluntary sexual intercourse between men, but about pedophilia and sodomy .

Publications (selection)

  • The Myth of Beauty , Rowohlt, 1991.
  • The Strength of Women: Against Misunderstood Feminism , Droemer Knaur, 1993.
  • The End of Innocence or The Sexual Drama of Becoming a Woman , Rowohlt, 1999.
  • How to Destroy a Democracy: The 10 Point Program , Riemann, 2008.
  • Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries , 2008.
  • Vagina. A new biography. Virago Press, London 2012. ISBN 978-1-84408-688-7 .

Web links

Commons : Naomi Wolf  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rachel Cooke: Naomi Wolf: 'We're in a fight for our lives and for democracy' . In: The Observer . May 19, 2019, ISSN  0029-7712 ( theguardian.com [accessed February 23, 2020]).
  2. ↑ Naomi Wolf: The Myth of Beauty . Ed .: Rowohlt.
  3. ↑ Naomi Wolf: The Myth of Beauty . Ed .: Rowohlt.
  4. ↑ Florian G. Mildenberger on: Vagina. A new biography. Virago Press, London 2012. ISBN 978-1-84408-688-7 . In: Specialized prose research - Crossing borders. Volume 8/9, 2012/2013 (2014), pp. 585-589, here 585-587.
  5. ↑ https://books.google.de/books?id=EIUtJziqIqAC&pg=PA12&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
  6. ↑ http://www.scienceofeds.org/2012/06/07/naomi-wolf-got-her-facts-wrong/
  7. ^ After an On-Air Correction, Naomi Wolf Addresses Errors in Her New Book . In: The New York Times . May 4, 2019 ( nytimes.com ).
  8. ↑ Review: Florian G. Mildenberger in: Fachprosaforschung - Grenzüberreitungen. Volume 8/9, 2012/2013 (2014), pp. 585-589.
  9. ↑ Rejoicing report from Holy of Holies in FAZ from June 17, 2013, p. 28.
personal data
SURNAME Wolf, Naomi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and political activist
DATE OF BIRTH November 12, 1962
PLACE OF BIRTH San Francisco