Why does Naomi Wolf regret working for Al Gore?

Was it because her advice that he wear "earth tones" and establish that he is an "Alpha Male" brought him and her ridicule that continues to this day? No! It's that she took money to work for the Gore campaign. And it's a "big mistake for any writer" to take money from a candidate:

[B]ecause you can't then say whatever you want to say whenever you want to say it. That was the great luxury of being a freelance writer and beholden to nobody--which I had been, up until then.

Writers have to be free to criticize anybody and criticize the powers that be and to always be transparent with their readers. So since I was formally signed up with the campaign rather than volunteering as I had in '96

The problem with "earth tones" and "Alpha Male" wasn't that her advice was silly or embarrassing, it's that "the evil Republican National Committee... completely invented " it, and she "wasn't in a position, contractually, to hit back."

So it was very frustrating, when I'm used to being able to speak up, to not have a voice when the Bush Team was doing such a brilliant job of what we have subsequently learned is their specialty: creating imaginative lies and saturating the media with them.

This is from a Huffington Post series called "My Favorite Mistake," which I think is supposed to be about your own mistake (and how much you learned from it). Obviously, there is an immense temptation to identify something good you tried to do and to use the occasion to condemn your nemesis. Wolf succumbed.

My mistake was being so naive about how profoundly evil my enemy is.

"It is an iconic turning point and it will be remembered as the moment at which America either fought back or yielded."

The tasing of Andrew Meyer unleashes the mind of Naomi Wolf:

Today's news shows a recognizable shock moment in the annals of a closing society. A very ordinary-looking American student....

Ordinary-looking? What difference does that make? Shouldn't we feel better when what looks like an over-intense police response is applied to the sort of person that we usually suspect gets all the privileges?

It is an iconic turning point...

It's not enough to be just iconic or just a turning point anymore. It's a turning point among turning points. Few turning points reach icon status. But this -- this is that turning point.

... and it will be remembered as the moment at which America either fought back or yielded.

Actually, it won't. (I can see into the future at least as well as Wolf.)

This violence against a student is different from violence against protesters in the anti-war movement of 30 years ago because of the power the president has now to imprison innocent U.S. citizens for months in isolation.

What was the war in 1977? I am getting all mixed up now. So, let's see. Police employed by the University of Florida apply force to a student who physically fights them, and it has something to do with the President's use of detention in the war on terror. Oh, the Wolf mind is aswirl with notions.

...That taser was directed at the body of a young man, but it is we ourselves, and our Constitution, who received the full force of the shock.

Actually, we didn't and it didn't. And Meyer will have the opportunity to sue the police, relying on the Constitution. So the Constitution is still there. And it's not obvious that he'll win.

There is a chapter in my new book, The End of America, entitled "Recast Criticism as 'Espionage' and Dissent as 'Treason,'" that conveys why this moment is the horrific harbinger it is.

So the tasing of Andrew Meyer is a harbinger -- a horrific harbinger -- it predicts something in the future, and your book -- written before the tasing -- itself predicted this prediction? Wolf's fortune-telling powers astound.

I argue that....

Blah blah blah... buy my book.

...strategists using historical models to close down an open society start by using force on 'undesirables,' 'aliens,' 'enemies of the state,' and those considered by mainstream civil society to be untouchable; in other times they were, of course, Jews, Gypsies, Communists, homosexuals.

Bush is Hitler. If you haven't caught on by now, Andrew Meyer will finally make you see.

Then, once society has been acculturated to that use of force, the 'blurring of the line' begins and the parameters of criminalized speech are extended -- the definition of 'terrorist' expanded -- and the use of force begins to be deployed in HIGHLY VISIBLE, STRATEGIC and VISUALLY SHOCKING WAYS against people that others see and identify with as ordinary citizens.

Oh, yeah. That's happened. That's why they -- who? -- "strategists"? -- or, well, at least the university police -- are moving in on the very ordinary-looking people now.

Long rave about Nazis cut.

We have to understand what time it is. When the state starts to hurt people for asking questions...

Does any rational person think Meyer was tased for "asking questions"?

... we can no longer operate on the leisurely time of a strong democracy -- the 'Oh gosh how awful!' kind of time. It is time to take to the streets. It is time to confront those committing crimes against the Constitution.

It's time to stop using the word "time" in every sentence.

The window has now dropped several precipitous inches and once it is closed there is no opening it without great and sorrowful upheaval.

Yeah, I have a window like that. Try some WD-40.

... I was scared when I wrote The End of America....

Scared and out of my mind.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade provides the lyrics:

Campus police and Bushhitler coming
We're finally on our own
This summer we felt the horrific harbinger
One tased in Florida

Gotta get down to it
Shutting our microphones down
Shoulda been done long ago

What if you knew him and
found him tased on the ground?
How can you run
when you know it's an iconic turning point?

Women are so very competent, so why do we stare at the screw-ups?

Naomi Wolf ponders the complexities of why we care what happens to Paris Hilton. Why, she asks, when real women manifest "high levels of competence, idealism and all-around effectiveness," do we obsess over pop culture screw-ups? Wolf considers one possibility, in the most interesting paragraph of her essay, and then embraces her preferred answer, that women these days are doing so well handling all their responsibilites that we "sometimes we get tired of our own competence" and want the "escapism" of fantasizing about the alternative of "letting it all go to pieces and having someone else clean up the mess."

But let's look at the paragraph where she allows herself to says something that doesn't fit quite so neatly into her praise for the wonderful, hypercompetent women of today:

On some deep level, there's a generalized feeling that women's vulnerability equals the guarantee of receiving a reliable supply of their love and care. There's an anxiety that if women become too strong, too independent, we won't be able to count on them to nurture and they won't need love. Because men, children and (not to put too fine a point upon it) the whole edifice of human civilization depend on women's willingness to nurture, it's scary to take a step into the unknown -- to see if women will continue to love if they're really free to choose whether to do so. (We will, of course, but it will take a generation or so of proof for everyone to calm down about it.)

Oh, no! A scary thought! Wolf immediately inserts a parenthetical denying that the liberation of women could actually upset something significant. And don't think she's the one who's scared by the cause and effect she was able to envision.

It's your problem: Calm down. Surely, you don't want to be among the retrograde characters who are going to take "a generation or so of proof." What's with these people not instinctively seeing how good progress simply must be? They actually need to see and observe the consequences of social change before they can join me and all the other good people who know that this will all work out for the best?

But let's think about these deep feelings. What if many of the most competent, strong, and independent women choose to not to form families? What if the ability to do everything for yourself gives rise a preference for remaining free of all of the extra burden of taking care of the needs of others? What if ambition to excel in public life causes many women to embrace the simplicity and freedom of an independent private life? These are perfectly rational questions, not mere hysteria or antifeminism. Wolf tries to package the questions away into the matter of whether women will "continue to love," which is a crude simplication. Oh, yes, Naomi, love, love, love. We'll always want to love.

And then it's back to the boosterism: Women are soooooo competent.

***

Of course, there's a much easier way to explain our obsession with celebrity screw-ups. Why do we stare at a car wreck instead of constantly marveling at all the cars that proceed expeditiously along the highway without incident? What's with all this news from a war zone when there so many peace zones? Why does the newspaper have an obituary page instead of running notices telling us that people are not dead yet?

Over at Yglesias, they're talking about a Naomi Wolf article from 4 years ago.

I mean, Matt thought it was new, because some other blog wrote about it as if it were new. (I picked it up via Memeorandum.) He's all concerned about Naomi's tired old whine that pornography has wrecked man's capacity to appreciate real, in-the-flesh women, or, as Naomi puts it: "The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women." (The onslaught of Naomi Wolf's prose is responsible for the deadening of this female's interest in reading in relation to third wave feminists.) Anyway, I'm so glad Matt fell for this one, because some of the comments over there are pretty funny.

"When he was the Naked Guy, he was completely sane."

The NYT Magazine has its end-of-the-year set of articles about various people who died in the past year. The one that caught my eye was the Naked Guy (Andrew Martinez):

[A]s a student at the University of California at Berkeley, Martinez... ate his meals nude. He went to parties nude. He even attended class nude....

It was easy to dismiss his behavior as a silly stunt, but to those who knew him, Martinez was guided by an endearing, if naïve, sort of undergraduate idealism. Raised in a family that refused to buy clothing with designer labels, he now argued that all clothes were a form of repression and that by not wearing them he was making people think about the coercive nature of convention. “Our purpose is to prove that people define normalcy in their own terms,” Martinez said at a “nude-in” he staged in 1992 at Berkeley, during which more than two dozen people disrobed.

The nude-in made the Naked Guy a media favorite. The feminist writer Naomi Wolf hailed Martinez for making himself “more vulnerable to the eye than women were.”

(Typical Wolfish bilge.)

[I]n the fall of 1992, the school instituted a dress code mandating that students wear clothing in public. Martinez quickly ran afoul of the rule, and after he showed up naked for a disciplinary hearing, he was expelled.

Things go very bad for Martinez after this point, and not just because the school kicked him out. The poor man, who became a media darling, really was mentally ill. He suffered for many years, and, in the end, killed himself.

Until his death, Martinez’s family and friends did their best to keep his mental illness a secret. This was at his request. “Andrew did not want people to know about his illness,” his mother said, “because then they would think he was crazy the whole time.” In his moments of lucidity, there was one thing he desperately wanted to convey: “When he was the Naked Guy,” one friend said, “he was completely sane.”

This is very sad, including the poignant way his mother and friend seem to think that if only he had been allowed to live amongst us in the nude, he would have kept it together.

Take this, brother, may it serve you well
Maybe it's nothing
What, what oh...
Maybe, even then, impervious in London
...Could be difficult thing...
It's quick like rush for peace because it's so much
Like being naked
It's alright, it's alright, it's alright, it's alright
It's alright, it's alright, it's alright, it's alright
It's alright
If, you've become naked
Block that kick, block that kick, block that kick, block that kick
Block that kick, block that kick, block that kick, block that kick
Block that kick, block that kick, block that kick, block that kick
Block that kick, block that kick, block that kick, block that nixon

An easy lesson about criticizing Hillary.

Naomi Wolf, riffing on Edward Klein's "The Truth About Hillary," makes an extended comparison of Hillary Clinton to the 19th century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Basically, there's a standard underhanded way to attack women, which was around in the 19th century and is still around today. There's an easy lesson here, and most respected writers have already learned it: if you want to attack a woman, don't taint your legitimate criticism with crap about how she's not feminine enough.