Post: #1

Naomi Wolf, feminist hack, has a new book out soon called Vagina: A New Biography. I don’t plan on reading it, but here’s a critical review that I liked.

Pride and Prejudice

Despite the name, Wolf's book is not much of a history of the vagina.

Quote:What now remains of the original, “biographical” project—a fifty-seven page overview of some of the “dramatic shifts” in historical attitudes toward the vagina—is a shoddy piece of work, full of childlike generalizations and dreary, feminist auto-think: the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians worshiped the vagina, the post-Pauline Christians were really horrid about it, male modernists objectified it, and so on.

Instead, she focuses on the importance of the cunt and orgasm in spiritual well-being.

Quote:But according to Wolf, the chemicals released in “high,” or transcendent, female orgasm, are the vehicles of “very profound human truths.” They allow a woman to glimpse the greater, shining reality of “a Universal or Divine Feminine.” They give her the surety that “all is well with the universe” and that she exists “in a state of a kind of perfection.” When a woman is deprived of these chemicals because she is having no orgasms—or merely “culturally perfectly adequate” orgasms (my italics)—she becomes a stranger to her “inner Goddess” and her capacity for self-love and joy is depleted.

Throughout her book, she picks and chooses from scientific research to support her mysticism, while ignoring everything that doesn't.

Quote:It is striking that when confronted with an evolutionary story that does not suit her prejudices—the idea, for example, that a cross-cultural male preference for a certain female waist-to-hip ratio might be an adaptive preference for fertile-seeming women—she is happy to reject it, without further elaboration, as “sexist.” Yet offered a no less controversial theory that happens to support her a priori convictions, she is all naive fascination. To support her view that vaginal orgasms are superior to the clitoral kind, she cites the phenomenon of “uterine upsuck” as proof that vaginal orgasms are evolutionarily “superefficient.”

The research that she does use she uses poorly.

Quote:“Serotonin,” Wolf writes, “literally subdues the female voice, and dopamine literally raises it.”

Wolf literally does not understand the meaning of “literally” and her grasp of the scientific research she has read is pretty shaky too. By repeatedly confusing correlates with causes, she grossly exaggerates what neuroscience can reliably tell us about the functions of individual brain chemicals.

Also, there’s this anecdote from the book that makes me want to send her boxes of pasta on a biannual basis.

Quote:She herself suffered six months of writer’s block as a result of attending a dinner party at which her host served vagina-shaped pasta and called it “cuntini.”

And then, there are the enlightening (or is it empowering?) sexual practices Wolf prescribes for her followers.

Quote:Toward the end of Vagina, Wolf offers two inspirational instances of the sort of “Goddess-focussed” sexual practice she wishes to promote among her readers. The first is the “sacred sexual healing” administered by Mike Lousada, a self-described “somatic therapist,” who provides massage, masturbation, and intercourse to “erotically suffering” women in his north London studio. The second is a weekend Tantra workshop in Manhattan, at which female attendees get to select the male attendees who will give them “sacred spot massage” in their midtown hotel rooms on Saturday night.

What a crock of shit. Is anybody brave enough to read the whole thing?

Post: #2

Always knew she was a hack, but this is way out there. The orgasm talk reminds me of Wilhelm Reich's orgone mumbo-jumbo, long-since debunked many times over: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgone

Sounds like this Mike Lousada has found himself a solid niche among sexually frustrated feminists. Someone should get him over here to drop a datasheet. Apparently he charges women 95 GBP per session, presumably involving compliments, cuddling and orgasms. According to one article I found he sees around ten women a day.

Here he is:


And in action:

Post: #3

Feminism devolved into incoherent mumbo-jumbo and thinly intellectualized delusion a long time ago. It is an irretrievably fragmented "movement" that has ceased to have real meaning and is groping for an issue, even if that means inventing one out of fat air (e.g., fictions like "rape culture" and silly stunts like "slut walks"). Whatever real goals and clear agendas existed, once upon a time, are now buried in the distance past.

Honestly, giving them enough rope to hang themselves is probably the best strategy at this point. Tumblr and books like this are evidence that they're doing exactly that.

Post: #4

Zoe Heller has done some good book reviews:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/books/...gewanted=1

Quote:Still, fair is fair: no woman before Bentley has felt quite zealous enough about what she calls ''emancipation through the back door'' to write an entire book in its praise. Bentley credits sodomy with having resolved the lifelong psychosexual problems that resulted from not being loved enough by her father. (In one luridly Freudian episode of this book, Bentley pere is described punishing his 4-year-old daughter for some minor infraction by angrily smearing a banana on her face and in her hair.) By giving herself up to ''this forbidden pathway,'' Bentley writes, she has not only found her self, she has discovered ''Paradise,'' she has experienced ''eternity in a moment of real time,'' and she has gotten to know God ''experientially.'' That's not all. She is also pretty sure that anal sex is responsible for piercing her yang, forcing her yin to the surface and releasing decades of anger stored in her lower intestine.

Bentley's inclination to various kinds of self-abasement found early expression in her childhood fascination with the lives of the saints, and later on in her career as a ballet dancer. (All that pain and discipline, all that bowing and scraping before the God-like Balanchine.) But neither these interests nor a busy history of sexual experimentation ever fully satisfied her masochistic yearnings. Only, she claims, when she met a man prepared to focus his attention on her neglected orifice did she enter the realm of bliss. For the just under three years that she and her sodomizer -- a man referred to throughout the book by the regrettable moniker ''A-Man'' -- enjoyed regular bouts of earth-moving sex, Bentley maintained a detailed journal of her experiences. She also kept a tally of how many times she was anally penetrated and made mathematical calculations about the average number of anal episodes she was having per year, week and day. She fetishized the accouterments of her sexual obsession -- dedicating herself to finding the best and most economical lubricants, the most sex-friendly boudoir-wear. In a manner befitting a woman who was experiencing a spiritual as well as sexual awakening, she also preserved her lover's used condoms, much as an acolyte might hoard religious relics.

Post: #5

Dear Naomi, You're nearly 50. Your SMV is about kaput. So, you are thought of even less than your previously low rating.

I hear you have a daughter that will be 18 next year. Pics please.

Post: #6

Naomi Wolf is still, even at 49, much hotter than most feminists half her age:



Would definitely bang.

Post: #7

(09-08-2012 09:38 PM)dragnet Wrote:  Naomi Wolf is still, even at 49, much hotter than most feminists half her age:



Would definitely bang.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Naomi_...stival.jpg

Post: #8

^^^ 2008 photo.

She's huge:

Post: #9

Naomi Wolf has gone full conspiracy theory retard: http://www.vox.com/2014/10/5/6909837/nao...y-theories

Post: #10

(09-08-2012 11:35 PM)Roosh Wrote:  ^^^ 2008 photo.

She's huge:

Post: #11

(10-07-2014 10:00 PM)Basil Ransom Wrote:  Naomi Wolf has gone full conspiracy theory retard: http://www.vox.com/2014/10/5/6909837/nao...y-theories

I don't blame her for skepticism. Maybe she's not calling it right, but when looking at the world, can anyone doubt that we are living in a world of conspiracies now?

She's a good civil liberties advocate, has written a lot about the loss of freedom in the USA and its transmogrification into a police state. She's also been tough on nanny-state feminists.

If she's in favor of freedom, she's ok enough for me. WB, too.