Naomi Wolf

Wolf was born in San Francisco, to a Jewish family. Her mother is Deborah Goleman Wolf, an anthropologist and the author of The Lesbian Community. Her father was Leonard Wolf, a Romanian-born gothic horror scholar at University of California, Berkeley and Yiddish translator. Leonard Wolf died from advanced Parkinson's Disease on March 20, 2019. Wolf has a brother, Aaron, and a half-brother, Julius, from her father's earlier relationship; it remained his secret until his daughter was in her 30s. She attended Lowell High School and debated in regional speech tournaments as a member of the Lowell Forensic Society.

Revisiting Beauty Myth in 2019 for The New Republic, literary critic Maris Kreizman recalls that reading it as an undergraduate made her "world burst open." It "remains one of the most formative books in (Kreizman's) life." However, as she matured, Kreizman saw Wolf's books as "poorly argued tracts" that made "wilder and wilder assertions" even, in 2014, spreading a conspiracy theory that the beheadings of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff by ISIS were "faked and staged." Kreizman "began to write (Wolf) off as a fringe character" despite the fact that she had "once informed my own feminism so deeply."

Wolf's book Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love was published in 2019, a work based on the 2015 D.Phil. thesis she had completed under the supervision of Trinity College, Oxford literary scholar Dr. Stefano-Maria Evangelista. In the book, she studies the repression of homosexuality in relation to attitudes towards divorce and prostitution, and also in relation to the censorship of books.

The book was published in the UK in May 2019 by Virago Press. On June 12, 2019, Outrages was named to the O, The Oprah Magazine' s "The 32 Best Books by Women of Summer 2019" list. The following day, the U.S. publisher recalled all copies from U.S. bookstores.

“Well, that’s how I got this, through that same sort of, uh, that same portal!"

Wolf appeared at the Hay Festival, Wales in late May 2019, a few days after her exchange with Matthew Sweet, where she defended her book and said she had already corrected the error. She stated at an event in Manhattan in June that she was not embarrassed by the correction, but rather felt grateful towards Sweet for the correction. but, as of October 2019, she has yet to do so. On October 18, 2019, it became known the release of the book by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the United States was being canceled. Wolf expressed the hope that the book would still be published in the US.

On 23 November 2018, Wolf married Brian William O'Shea, a disabled U.S. Army Veteran, private detective, and owner of Striker Pierce Investigations. According to a New York Times article published in November 2018, Wolf and O'Shea met in 2014 due to threats against Wolf after reporting on human rights violations in the Middle East. The couple live in New York City.

In January 2018, Wolf accused Yale officials of blocking her from filing a formal grievance against Bloom. She told The New York Times that she had attempted to file the complaint in 2015 with Yale's University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct, but that the university had refused to accept it. On January 16, 2018, Wolf said, she determined to see Yale's provost, Ben Polak, in another attempt to present her case. "As she documented on Twitter," the newspaper reported, "she brought a suitcase and a sleeping bag, because she said she did not know how long she would have to stay. When she arrived at the provost's office, she said, security guards prevented her from entering any elevators. Eventually, she said, Aley Menon, the secretary of the sexual misconduct committee, appeared and they met in the committee's offices for an hour, during which she gave Ms. Menon a copy of her complaint." This was reported and confirmed by Norman Vanamee who apparently met Wolf at Yale on this morning. In Town & Country magazine in January 2018, Vanamee returned to the story and wrote, "Yale University has a 93-person police department, and, after the guard called for backup, three of its armed and uniformed officers appeared and stationed themselves between Wolf and the elevator bank."

Wolf ultimately returned to Oxford, completing her Doctor of Philosophy degree in English literature in 2015. Her thesis, supervised by Dr. Stefano Evangelista of Trinity College, formed the basis for her 2019 book Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love.

During an interview for Time magazine in spring 2015, Bloom denied ever being indoors with "this person" who he referred to as "Dracula's daughter."

Promiscuities generally received negative reviews. In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called Wolf a "frustratingly inept messenger: a sloppy thinker and incompetent writer. She tries in vain to pass off tired observations as radical aperçus, subjective musings as generational truths, sappy suggestions as useful ideas". However, two days earlier in the Times Sunday edition, Weaver Courtney praised the book: "Anyone—particularly anyone who, like Ms. Wolf, was born in the 1960s—will have a very hard time putting down Promiscuities. Told through a series of confessions, her book is a searing and thoroughly fascinating exploration of the complex wildlife of female sexuality and desire." In contrast, The Library Journal excoriated the work, writing, "Overgeneralization abounds as she attempts to apply the microcosmic events of this mostly white, middle-class, liberal milieu to a whole generation. ... There is a desperate defensiveness in the tone of this book which diminishes the force of her argument."

Wolf returned to this general theme in an article in 2014 considering how modern Western women, born in inclusive, egalitarian liberal democracies, are assuming positions of leadership in neofascist political movements.

An error in a central tenet of the book — a misunderstanding of the term "death recorded" — was identified in a 2019 BBC radio interview with broadcaster and author Matthew Sweet. He cited a website for the Old Bailey Criminal Court, the same site which Wolf had referred to as one of her sources earlier in the interview. Sweet stated the following:

Over the last eight years, Naomi Wolf has written hysterically about coups and about vaginas and about little else besides. She has repeatedly insisted that the country is on the verge of martial law, and transmogrified every threat—both pronounced and overhyped—into a government-led plot to establish a dictatorship. She has made prediction after prediction that has simply not come to pass. Hers are not sober and sensible forecasts of runaway human nature, institutional atrophy, and constitutional decline, but psychedelic fever-dreams that are more typically suited to the InfoWars crowd.

[The FBI crackdown on Occupy] was never really about 'the terrorists'. It was not even about civil unrest. It was always about this moment, when vast crimes might be uncovered by citizens—it was always, that is to say, meant to be about you.

Wolf responded on her website: "I do find a great deal of media/blog discussion about serious questions such as those I raised, questions that relate to querying some sources of news stories, and their potential relationship to intelligence agencies or to other agendas that may not coincide with the overt narrative, to be extraordinarily ill-informed and naive." Specifically regarding Snowden, she wrote, "Why should it be seen as bizarre to wonder, if there are some potential red flags—the key term is 'wonder'—if a former NSA spy turned apparent whistleblower might possibly still be—working for the same people he was working for before?"

In a series a series of Facebook postings in October 2014, Wolf questioned the authenticity of videos purporting to show beheadings of two American journalists and two Britons by the Islamic State implying that they had been staged by the U.S. government and that the victims and their parents were actors. Wolf also charged that the U.S. was dispatching military troops not to assist in treating the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa, but to carry the disease back home to justify a military takeover of America. She further said that the Scottish independence referendum, in which Scots voted to remain in the United Kingdom, was faked. Speaking about this at a demonstration in Glasgow on October 12, Wolf said, "I truly believe it was rigged."

I began, nearly a year ago, to try—privately—to start a conversation with my alma mater that would reassure me that steps had been taken in the ensuing years to ensure that unwanted sexual advances of this sort weren't still occurring. I expected Yale to be responsive. After nine months and many calls and e-mails, I was shocked to conclude that the atmosphere of collusion that had helped to keep me quiet twenty years ago was still intact—as secretive as a Masonic lodge. Sexual encroachment in an educational context or a workplace is, most seriously, a corruption of meritocracy; it is in this sense parallel to bribery. I was not traumatized personally, but my educational experience was corrupted. If we rephrase sexual transgression in school and work as a civil-rights and civil-society issue, everything becomes less emotional, less personal. If we see this as a systemic corruption issue, then when people bring allegations, the focus will be on whether the institution has been damaged in its larger mission.

The West interprets veiling as repression of women and suppression of their sexuality. But when I traveled in Muslim countries and was invited to join a discussion in women-only settings within Muslim homes, I learned that Muslim attitudes toward women's appearance and sexuality are not rooted in repression, but in a strong sense of public versus private, of what is due to God and what is due to one's husband. It is not that Islam suppresses sexuality, but that it embodies a strongly developed sense of its appropriate channeling – toward marriage, the bonds that sustain family life, and the attachment that secures a home.

In the January 2013 issue of The Atlantic, law and business professor Mark Nuckols wrote: "In her various books, articles, and public speeches, Wolf has demonstrated recurring disregard for the historical record and consistently mutilated the truth with selective and ultimately deceptive use of her sources." He further stated: "[W]hen she distorts facts to advance her political agenda, she dishonors the victims of history and poisons present-day public discourse about issues of vital importance to a free society." Nuckols argued that Wolf "has for many years now been claiming that a fascist coup in America is imminent. ... [I]n The Guardian she alleged, with no substantiation, that the U.S. government and big American banks are conspiring to impose a 'totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent'."

In June 2013, New York magazine reported Wolf, in a recent Facebook post, had expressed her "creeping concern" that NSA leaker Edward Snowden "is not who he purports to be, and that the motivations involved in the story may be more complex than they appear to be." Wolf was similarly skeptical of Snowden's "very pretty pole-dancing Facebooking girlfriend who appeared for, well, no reason in the media coverage ... and who keeps leaking commentary, so her picture can be recycled in the press." She pondered whether he was planted by "the Police State".

Published in 2012 on the topic of the vagina, Vagina: A New Biography was much criticized, especially by feminist authors. Katie Roiphe described it as "ludicrous" in Slate: "I doubt the most brilliant novelist in the world could have created a more skewering satire of Naomi Wolf's career than her latest book." In The Nation, Katha Pollitt considered it a "silly book" containing "much dubious neuroscience and much foolishness." It becomes "loopier as it goes on. We learn that women think and feel through their vagina, which can 'grieve' and feel insulted." Toni Bentley wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Wolf used "shoddy research methodology", while with "her graceless writing, Wolf opens herself to ridicule on virtually every page." In The New York Review of Books, Zoë Heller wrote that the book "offers an unusually clear insight into the workings of her mystic feminist philosophy". Part of the book concerns the history of the vagina's representation, but is "full of childlike generalizations" and her understanding of science "is pretty shaky too". Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum decried the book's "painful" writing and its "hoary ideas about how women think." In The New York Observer, Nina Burleigh suggested that critics of the book were so vehement "because (a) their editors handed the book to them for review because they thought it was an Important Feminist Book when it's actually slight and (b) there's a grain of truth in what she's trying to say."

In early 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Global Intelligence Files, a trove of e-mails obtained via a hack by Anonymous and Jeremy Hammond. Among them was an email with an official Department of Homeland Security document from October 2011 attached. It indicated that DHS was closely watching Occupy, and concluded, "While the peaceful nature of the protests has served so far to mitigate their impact, larger numbers and support from groups such as Anonymous substantially increase the risk for potential incidents and enhance the potential security risk to critical infrastructure." In late December 2012, FBI documents released following an FOIA request from the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund revealed that the FBI used counterterrorism agents and other resources to extensively monitor the national Occupy movement. The documents contained no references to agency personnel covertly infiltrating Occupy branches, but did indicate that the FBI gathered information from police departments and other law enforcement agencies relating to planned protests. Additionally, the blog Techdirt reported that the documents disclosed a plot by unnamed parties "to murder OWS leadership in Texas" but that "the FBI never bothered to inform the targets of the threats against their lives."

In a December 2012 article for The Guardian, Wolf wrote:

On October 18, 2011, Wolf was arrested and detained in New York during the Occupy Wall Street protests, having ignored a police warnings not to remain on the street in front of a building. Wolf spent about 30 minutes in a cell. She disputed the NYPD's interpretation of applicable laws: "I was taken into custody for disobeying an unlawful order. The issue is that I actually know New York City permit law ... I didn't choose to get myself arrested. I chose to obey the law and that didn't protect me."

It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall [2011]—so mystifying at the time—was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves—was coordinated with the big banks themselves.

Separately, a formal complaint was filed with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights on March 15, 2011, by 16 current and former Yale students—12 female and 4 male—describing a sexually hostile environment at Yale. A federal investigation of Yale University began in March 2011 in response to the complaints. Wolf stated on CBS's The Early Show in April: "Yale has been systematically covering up much more serious crimes than the ones that can be easily identified." More specifically, she alleged "they use the sexual harassment grievance procedure in a very cynical way, purporting to be supporting victims, but actually using a process to stonewall victims, to isolate them, and to protect the university." Yale settled the federal complaint in June 2012, acknowledging "inadequacies" but not facing "disciplinary action with the understanding that it keeps in place policy changes instituted after the complaint was filed. The school (was) required to report on its progress to the Office of Civil Rights until May, 2014."

Shortly after the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested in 2010, she wrote in an article for The Huffington Post that the allegations made against him by his two reputed victims amounted to no more than bad manners from a boyfriend. His accusers, she later wrote in several contexts, were working for the CIA and Assange had been falsely incriminated.

On December 20, 2010, Democracy Now! featured a debate between Wolf and Jaclyn Friedman on the Assange case. According to Wolf, the alleged victims should have said no, asserted that they consented to having sex with him, and said the claims were politically motivated and demeaned the cause of legitimate rape victims. In a 2011 Guardian article she objected to Assange's two accusers having their anonymity preserved. In response, Katha Pollitt wrote in The Nation that the "point is a little bizarre: doesn’t Wolf realize that anonymity applies only to the media? Everyone in the justice system knows who the complainants are."

The End of America was adapted for the screen as a documentary by filmmakers Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, best known for The Devil Came on Horseback and The Trials of Darryl Hunt. It premiered in October 2008, and was favorably reviewed in The New York Times by Stephen Holden Variety magazine, and Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times.

Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries (2008) was written as a sequel to The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. In the book, Wolf looks at times and places in history where citizens were faced with the closing of an open society and successfully fought back.

Wolf has commented about the dress required of women living in Muslim countries. In The Sydney Morning Herald in August 2008, she wrote:

In The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (2007), Wolf takes a historical look at the rise of fascism, outlining 10 steps necessary for a fascist group (or government) to destroy the democratic character of a nation-state. The book details how this pattern was implemented in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and elsewhere, and analyzes its emergence and application of all the 10 steps in American political affairs since the September 11 attacks. Alex Beam wrote in The New York Times: "In the book, Wolf insists that she is not equating [George W.] Bush with Hitler, nor the United States with Nazi Germany, then proceeds to do just that."

Wolf's The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from my Father on How to Live, Love, and See (2005) is an account of her midlife crisis attempt to reclaim her creative and poetic vision and revalue her father's love, and her father's force as an artist and a teacher.

Wolf concluded by speculating that in a world of "real gender equality," passionate feminists "might well hold candlelight vigils at abortion clinics, standing shoulder to shoulder with the doctors who work there, commemorating and saying goodbye to the dead." In an article for New York magazine on the subtle manipulation of George W. Bush's image among women, Wolf wrote in 2005: "Abortion is an issue not of Ms. Magazine-style fanaticism or suicidal Republican religious reaction, but a complex issue."

Wolf's first marriage was to journalist David Shipley, then an editor at The New York Times. The couple had two children, a son and daughter. Wolf and Shipley divorced in 2005.

I certainly sincerely apologize if one of my posts was insensitively worded. I have taken that one down. ... I am not saying the ISIS beheading videos are not authentic. I am not saying they are not records of terrible atrocities. I am saying that they are not yet independently confirmed by two sources as authentic, which any Journalism School teaches, and the single source for several of them, SITE, which received half a million dollars in government funding in 2004, and which is the only source cited for several, has conflicts of interest that should be disclosed to readers of news outlets.

In 2004, in an article for New York magazine, Wolf accused literary scholar Harold Bloom of a "sexual encroachment" in late Fall 1983 by touching her inner thigh. She said that what she alleged Bloom did was not harassment, either legally or emotionally, and she did not think herself a "victim", but that she had harbored this secret for 21 years. Explaining why she had finally gone public with the charges, Wolf wrote,

Wolf suggested in a 2003 article for New York magazine that the ubiquity of internet pornography tends to enervate the sexual attraction of men toward typical real women. She writes, "The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as 'porn-worthy.' Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, according to Wolf, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention." Wolf advocated abstaining from porn not on moral grounds, but because "greater supply of the stimulant equals diminished capacity."

Misconceptions (2001) examines pregnancy and childbirth. Most of the book is told through the prism of Wolf's personal experience of her first pregnancy. She describes the "vacuous impassivity" of the ultrasound technician who gives her the first glimpse of her new baby. Wolf laments her C-section and examines why the procedure is commonplace in the United States, advocating a return to midwifery. The second half of the book is anecdotal, focusing on inequalities between parents to child care.

In an interview with Melinda Henneberger in The New York Times, Wolf said she had been appointed in January 1999 and denied ever advising Gore on his wardrobe. Wolf said she had mentioned the term "alpha male" only once in passing and that "[it] was just a truism, something the pundits had been saying for months, that the vice president is in a supportive role and the President is in an initiatory role ... I used those terms as shorthand in talking about the difference in their job descriptions".

Promiscuities (1997) reports on and analyzes the shifting patterns of contemporary adolescent sexuality. Wolf argues that literature is rife with examples of male coming-of-age stories, covered autobiographically by D.H. Lawrence, Tobias Wolff, J.D. Salinger and Ernest Hemingway, and covered misogynistically by Henry Miller, Philip Roth and Norman Mailer. Wolf insists, however, that female accounts of adolescent sexuality have been systematically suppressed. She adduces cross-cultural material to demonstrate that women have, across history, been celebrated as more carnal than men. Wolf also argues that women must reclaim the legitimacy of their own sexuality by shattering the polarization of women between virgin and whore.

Wolf was involved in Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election bid, brainstorming with the president's team about ways to reach female voters. During Al Gore's bid for the presidency in the 2000 election, Wolf was hired as a consultant to target female voters, reprising her role in the Clinton campaign. Wolf's ideas and participation in the Gore campaign generated considerable media coverage and criticism. According to a report by Michael Duffy in Time, Wolf was paid a salary of $15,000 (by November 1999, $5,000) per month "in exchange for advice on everything from how to win the women's vote to shirt-and-tie combinations." This article was the original source of the assertion that Wolf was responsible for Gore's "three-buttoned, earth-toned look."

Her career in journalism began in 1995 and has included topics such as abortion, the Occupy Wall Street movement, Edward Snowden and ISIS. She has written for media outlets such as The Nation, The New Republic, The Guardian and The Huffington Post.

In an October 1995 article for The New Republic Wolf was critical of contemporary pro-choice positions, arguing that the movement had "developed a lexicon of dehumanization" and urged feminists to accept abortion as a form of homicide and defend the procedure within the ambiguity of this moral conundrum. She continued, "Abortion should be legal; it is sometimes even necessary. Sometimes the mother must be able to decide that the fetus, in its full humanity, must die."

In Fire with Fire (1993), Wolf writes on politics, female empowerment and women's sexual liberation. The New York Times assailed the work for its "dubious oversimplifications and highly debatable assertions" and its "disconcerting penchant for inflationary prose," nonetheless approving of Wolf's "efforts to articulate an accessible, pragmatic feminism, ... helping to replace strident dogma with common sense." The Time magazine reviewer Martha Duffy dismissed the book as "flawed," although she commented that Wolf was "an engaging raconteur" who was also "savvy about the role of TV – especially the Thomas-Hill hearings and daytime talk shows – in radicalizing women, including homemakers." She characterized the book as advocating an inclusive strain of feminism that welcomed abortion opponents. In the UK, feminist author Natasha Walter writing in The Independent said that the book "has its faults, but compared with The Beauty Myth it has energy and spirit, and generosity too." Walter, however, criticized it for having a "narrow agenda" where "you will look in vain for much discussion of older women, of black women, of women with low incomes, of mothers." Characterizing Wolf as a "media star", Walter wrote: "She is particularly good, naturally, on the role of women in the media."

Via Wolf's first book The Beauty Myth (1991), she became a leading spokeswoman of what has been described as the third wave of the feminist movement. Such leading feminists as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan praised the work; others, including Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers, criticized it. Her later books include the bestseller The End of America in 2007 and Vagina: A New Biography. Critics have challenged the quality and veracity of the scholarship in her books, including Outrages (2019). In this case, her serious misreading of court records led to its publication in the U.S. being cancelled.

In 1991, Wolf gained international attention as a spokeswoman of third-wave feminism from the publication of her first book The Beauty Myth, an international bestseller. It was named "one of the seventy most influential books of the twentieth century" by The New York Times. She argues that "beauty" as a normative value is entirely socially constructed, and that the patriarchy determines the content of that construction with the objective of maintaining women's subjugation.

Likewise, Christina Hoff Sommers criticized Wolf for publishing the estimate that 150,000 women were dying every year from anorexia. Sommers states that she tracked down the source to the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association who stated that they were misquoted; the figure refers to sufferers, not fatalities. Wolf's citation for the incorrect figure came from a book by Brumberg, who referred to an American Anorexia and Bulimia Association newsletter and misquoted the newsletter. Wolf accepted the error and changed it in future editions. Sommers gave an estimate for the number of fatalities in 1990 as 100–400. The annual anorexia casualties in the US were estimated to be around 50 to 60 per year in the mid-1990s. In 1995, for an article in The Independent on Sunday, British journalist Joan Smith recalled asking Wolf to explain her unsourced assertion in The Beauty Myth that the UK "has 3.5 million anorexics or bulimics (95 per cent of them female), with 6,000 new cases yearly". Wolf replied, according to Smith, that she had calculated the statistics from patients with eating disorders at one clinic.

Wolf attended Yale University receiving her Bachelor of Arts in English literature in 1984. From 1985 to 1987, she was a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford. Her initial period at Oxford University was difficult for Wolf as she experienced "raw sexism, overt snobbery and casual antisemitism". Her writing became so personal and subjective that her tutor advised against submitting her doctoral thesis. Wolf told interviewer Rachel Cooke, writing for The Observer, in 2019: "My subject didn’t exist. I wanted to write feminist theory, and I kept being told by the dons there was no such thing." Her feminist writing at this time formed the basis of her first book, The Beauty Myth.

In her New York Times review, Claire Dederer suggested it was inappropriate to consider "Wolf as a political theorist, and instead call her a memoirist. She does her best writing when she's observing her own life." Her capability as a memoirist is not "self-indulgent. It seems vital, and in a sense radical, in the tradition of 1970's feminists who sought to speak to every aspect of women's lives."

Naomi R. Wolf (born November 12, 1962) is an American liberal progressive feminist author, journalist, and former political advisor to Al Gore and Bill Clinton.