Naomi Wolf: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

Naomi Wolf, 56, is a progressive feminist author, political activist, and former political advisor to Bill Clinton and Al Gore. She rose to prominence with her 1991 book The Beauty Myth which established her as the leading voice of the third-wave feminism movement. She is also a journalist who’s contributed articles to The Nation, The New Republic, The Guardian, and The Huffington Post on topics including abortion, Occupy Wall Street, and Edward Snowden among others.

Both of Naomi’s parents were authors and scholars, Deborah Goleman was the author of The Lesbian Community and her father is the Romanian-born gothic horror scholar Leonard Wolf. She was previously married to journalist Dave Shipley and the couple has two children together, Rosa (24) and Joseph (19). They were divorced in 2005.

On Thursdaym, Naomi spoke with BBC’s Matthew Sweet to promote her book, “Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love,”. The premise of Naomi’s book is based on the execution of homosexuals for sodomy in the early 1800s, which host Matthew Sweet said never happened, “I don’t think you’re right about this,” he replied to Wolf. “Death recorded is what’s in most of these cases that you’ve identified as executions. It doesn’t mean that he was executed.” He went on to explain ““It was a category that was created in 1823 that allowed judges to abstain from pronouncing a sentence of death on any capital convict whom they considered to be a fit subject for pardon. I don’t think any of the executions you’ve identified here actually happened.”

Naomi initially defended her theory but has since admitted to the error. Despite the mistake, she claims that “the overall thesis of the book ‘Outrages’ still holds.”

Here’s what you need to know:

1. She Was Responsible for Al Gore’s Attempted “Alpha Male” Makeover Ahead of the 2000 Presidential Election

Prior to the 2000 election, Naomi Wolf was hired as a $15,000-a-month advisor by Al Gore’s presidential campaign. Wolf had told Vice President Gore he was the “beta” male to Clinton’s “alpha” male and she was hired to help change the public perception of Gore. Her official title during the campaign was “feminist advisor” which allegedly involved giving Al Gore tips on what accessories he was wearing and how to appear more aggressive.

Wolf told the New York Times in 1999 that her training Gore to be an “alpha male” was “Pure Imagination” that was created by something she mentioned in passing. ”The thing about writers is that we mention a lot of things in passing,” she explained. Wolf came under fire from the media for both her high monthly salary and undefined role in the campaign. She never fully explained what her responsibilities entailed on a day-to-day basis.

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2. She Was Arrested at An “Occupy Wall Street” Event in 2012

Naomi Wolf was a fervent supporter of Occupy Wall Street during the short-lived movement in the early 2010s. She wrote extensively about the movement as a journalist and spent a lot of her time covering the protests in NYC.

During one of those protests, she was detained and arrested for refusing to comply with an officer’s orders. The video above shows the entire arrest from start to finish.

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3. She Believes That Airplanes Are Polluting the NYC Skyline

Many of the posts on Naomi’s Twitter are photos of the New York City skyline with captions that reference weather change via sulfur dioxide emissions. “‘Accidental geoengineering’; the shell of sulphur dioxide from planes and other pollutants that always lingers over Manhattan except on rare windy days.” one post reads, “Creates microweather as eyewitnesses across nation report and now Nature magazine confirms in ⁦@nytimes⁩ . seen from NJ.”

She also posts the skylines from other cities as she’s traveling including Fayetteville and Cary, NC to point out the “manmade particulate” in the air and posits that airplanes are causing weather and climate changes. Most of her posts are from New York City and the author posts several times a week, sometimes several times a day about this topic. She will occasionally post more mainstream information about climate change including satellite images of Earth or EPA statements but a majority of the photos he posts on Twitter have to do with airplane chemicals affecting our weather.

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4. She Was One of the Leading Voice of the Feminist Movement in the 90s and 2000s

Naomi Wolf became the unofficial spokeswoman for third-wave feminism in the early 1990s with her book The Beauty Myth. In the book, Wolf argues that “beauty” is a social construct determined by the patriarchy with the goal of reproducing its own hegemony. Naomi Wolf argues that the fashion and beauty industries have made an unattainable standard of beauty that is then used to psychologically and physically punish women for their failure to achieve it. The book became an international bestseller and became a polarizing book amongst literary critics and scholars.

Her controversial ideas and feminist topis would come to define her early writing. 1993’s Fire with Fire deals with female empowerment and sexual liberation, 1997’s Promiscuities suggested teaching children masturbation and oral sex as alternatives to sexual intercourse, and Misconceptions discusses the modern assumptions and stigmas associated with childbirth. After a brief stint in writing about politics, she returned with 2012’s Vagina: A New Biography which was mostly panned by literary critics.

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5. She’s Been Called out for Her Research Before

This most recent interview gaffe isn’t the first time Naomi has been criticized for her research. The New York Times published a piece by Caryn James which called Wolf’s book The Beauty Myth “sloppily researched polemic as dismissible as a hackneyed adventure film … Even by the standards of pop-cultural feminist studies, The Beauty Myth is a mess.” The Library Journal panned her book Promiscuities by saying “Overgeneralization abounds as she attempts to apply the microcosmic events of this mostly white, middle-class, liberal milieu to a whole generation.”

The New York Times Book review lambasted her 2012 novel Vagina: A New Biography for its “shoddy” research and said the book “is undermined by the fact that she has rendered herself less than unreliable over the past couple of decades, with one rant more hysterical than another.”

Her recent BBC radio interview was her most public “call out” but not her first.