Naomi wolf video11/7/2023 ![]() ![]() His fear, and his bravery, is not in doubt. He was a great reformer, according to Henry James, and, to Wolf, one of the first modern gay activists.Įven if Symonds did not write under the threat of execution, there was still, at the time, the risk of blackmail, imprisonment, disgrace. He circulated explicit poems among his friends, corresponded with Walt Whitman, collaborated with the sexologist Havelock Ellis and wrote a memoir that he left to be published posthumously. Symonds, a lifelong invalid, wrote relentlessly about the naturalness of same-sex desire. She argues that 1857, the year Symonds turned 17, was one of the pivotal years of history, when a confluence of social factors - ideas about disease and contagion, a nascent women’s rights movement - whipped up a storm of “hysterical moral aversion” to homosexuality, culminating in the state’s encroachment on private life, those arrests and the executions that Sweet contested. The book grew out of Wolf’s 2015 doctoral dissertation at Oxford, on the poet John Addington Symonds. Wolf took the news on the chin, and later expressed her gratitude: “It’s such an important story and I welcome the chance to correct these two out of hundreds of citations and make it perfect.” Her publishers regretted the error but stated they believed the overall thesis still held.ĭoes it? In a very general sense. It was a surprisingly cordial interaction, however. “I can’t find any evidence that any of the relationships you describe were consensual,” he pointed out. Sweet said he could find no evidence that anyone had ever been executed for sodomy in Victorian Britain, and furthermore, that Wolf mistakenly regarded sodomy in the court records as referring exclusively to homosexuality when, in fact, it was also used for child abuse. What Wolf regarded as evidence of executions - the notation of “death recorded” on court records - indicated, in fact, the opposite, that the judge had recommended a pardon from the death sentence. “Several dozen executions? I don’t think you’re right about this,” the host, Matthew Sweet, said, very politely filleting one of Wolf’s central claims. She spoke passionately about discovering “several dozen executions” of men, including teenagers, accused of having sex with other men. ![]() Wolf was a guest on a BBC radio program, publicizing her new book, “Outrages,” a study of the criminalization of same-sex relationships in the Victorian era. Recently, we had the opportunity to witness such a revelation in real time. Always the books are lit by a strange messianic energy, shored up by dubious data and structured around a moment of crisis and revelation as some veil - some long-held notion - falls away. The method has worked too efficiently, and at every stage of her life - as a young woman protesting beauty standards (“The Beauty Myth”) through motherhood (“Misconceptions”) and, later, the aging of her parents (“The Treehouse”), as she has grappled with her ambition (“Fire With Fire”) and her sex life (“Vagina”). That her advice can contradict itself from book to book doesn’t appear to distress her (she fluctuates between regarding women as all-powerful sorceresses and abjectly dependent). Over the years her batty claims have included that a woman’s brain can allow her to become pregnant if she so desires, even if she is using birth control that women’s intellects and creativity are dependent on their sexual fulfillment and, specifically, the skillful ministrations of a “virile man” and that writing a letter to a breech baby will induce it to turn right side up. Predictable controversy ensues grouchy reviews and much attention. She audits herself for some speck of dissatisfaction, arrives at an epiphany - one that might contravene any number of natural laws - and then extrapolates a set of rules and recommendations for all women. Naomi Wolf’s long, ludicrous career has followed a simple formula. ![]()
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