Naomi Wolf
The background
Feminist writer Naomi Wolf has divided critics – but certainly grabbed the headlines – with her new book, Vagina: A New Memoir. In it, the author of The Beauty Myth explores the importance of female sexuality, including her own problems with orgasm that turned out to be linked to spinal alignment. Wolf also looks at the way sexist language can impact women’s lives.
Irritating but an important message
There is much that is irritating about Vagina, wrote Sarah Vine in The Times (£): “The solipsism and self-regard, the distance from the lives of ordinary women which sets the teeth on edge, the glimpses into Naomi’s Martha Stewart meets Tina Brown lifestyle, the repeated references to a limited number of A-level set texts as proof of literary sophistication.” And yet, said Vine, there is an important message struggling to get out about how women’s sexual pleasure is linked to how they are treated by their partners: “[Wolf] argues, with really quite commendable courage, that being fulfilled as a woman means being treated like a lady. And if that isn’t a radical feminist message I don’t know what is.”
“Studies have shown that verbal threats or verbal admiration or reassurances can directly affect the sexual functioning of the vagina. One suggests that a stressful environment can negatively affect vaginal tissue itself,” wrote Naomi Wolf, in an extract from Vagina on the author’s website.
The trap of ‘yoni-centric feminism’
“Claims that the vagina is ‘not only co-extensive with the female brain but also is part of the female soul’ are frankly offensive to anyone who believes that the most politically important part of any woman’s body is still, is always, her brain,” wrote Laurie Penny in The Independent. According to Penny, Wolf’s book reflects an unfortunate reversal in the treatment of women’s liberation in public discourse: “Instead of making the personal political, the political has, slowly but surely, been permitted to collapse into the personal.”
Naomi Wolf’s book has, perhaps inevitably, spawned a spoof Twitter account.
NY taxi driver just suggested we take route through a TUNNEL. Typical thoughtless patriarchy. So upset I’m taking a month off.
— NaomiWolfVagina (@NaomiWolfVagina) September 3, 2012
Making sex unsexy
“There is a cringeworthy sense of too much information here. In a well-meant attempt to demystify the female orgasm and the clitoris with its 8,000 nerve endings, Wolf seems to have achieved the opposite effect,” wrote Viv Groskop in The Guardian. “All this talk of vertebra alignment, muscular-skeletal specialists and the vaginal canal is most off-putting.”
