Who wants to play Naomi Wolf conspiracy theories? I’ll start: the urgent, insightful activist of The Beauty Myth was a sleeper agent all along, programmed by hefty brainwashing to detonate two decades later in a shower of credibility-shattering paranoia, thereby securing permanent patriarchal hegemony. Or try this one: some time in the last five years, the real Wolf was discreetly “neutralised” and replaced with an actor, who has worked tirelessly since then to make left-wing politics in general and feminism in particular look like a shower of clown shoes who will believe pretty much anything as long as it starts from the premise “America is bad”.
Fine, you don’t find my theories convincing. Maybe you’ll like Wolf’s own ones better. In recent days, she’s propounded the following: that US forces’ involvement in combatting the Liberian ebola outbreak is just a convenient front for the militarisation of Africa; that the Scottish referendum was fixed; that hostages executed by Isis are neither hostages nor executed nor anything to do with Isis, but performers enacting a shoddy tableau for the purposes of terrifying an unquestioning Western populace into docility. For a lot of people, the contrast with her earlier work is shocking – the question “what happened to Naomi Wolf?” has been asked a lot. Whatever happened, however, happened several years ago.
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