Naomi Wolf -- Now and then
The former feminist icon's latest book 'The Bodies of Others' is a reaction to the new post-covid world where technology and government have declared war on humans.
Naomi R. Wolf is an American liberal feminist author, journalist and intellectual who in her early days was a political advisor to Al Gore and Bill Clinton.
Thanks to her first book, “The Beauty Myth” (1991), Wolf became a leading spokeswoman of what has been described as the third wave of the feminist movement.
In the last two years — thanks to her reaction to the totalitarian tactics employed by most of the world’s so-called democracies in their war on the covid virus — Wolf has become an outspoken anti-vaxxer and a brave opponent of the kind of oppressive Nanny State she once cheered.
How far rightward she has moved was underscored on March 10, 2023, when she uncorked this brave, classy apology to conservatives for having believed all the lies in the legacy liberal media about Trump and the Russians, the Jan. 6 ‘insurrection’ and the war on covid.
Below is shocking proof that she has defected from the left-liberal camp and joined the rebels in the countryside who are resisting — or trying to resist — what she calls “the technocratic, transhumanist reset imagined” by the fascistic globalist elites who fly to places like Davos, Switzerland, to make plans for their New World Order.
This is how Wolf’s new book, “The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, Covid-19 and the War Against the Human,” is described on Amazon:
Our pre-March 2020 world is gone forever. Irretrievable. For in league with mass surrender to all-powerful technology, the “restrictions” against human assembly, speech and gathering, culture and worship brought on by pandemic panic have brought new cultural norms frighteningly at odds with traditional Western notions of freedom and independent thought. Indeed, in our fear of public ostracism and shaming and our ready abandonment of free, open, spontaneous, individualistic, egalitarian and tolerant expression, we in the West today live in a world of CCP-style regimentation and conformity. It is a world in which all human endeavor—all human joy, all human fellowship, all human advancement, all human culture, all human song, all human drama, all worship, all surprise, all flirtation, all celebration—is behind a digital pay wall. A world in which we must ask permission of technology to be human. This is a world we must challenge and change.
Here’s a link and a long quote from her interview in Epoch Times about ‘The Bodies of Others’:
We Need to Build an Alternative Society
The ultimate goal right now is to begin creating a whole alternative civil society. A “reset,” yes, but not the technocratic, transhumanist reset imagined by the globalists. We need to create uncorrupted science, uncorrupted journalism, uncorrupted medicine. We need governors, business leaders and heads of universities and so on to take a pledge to create uncorrupted institutions that are answerable to the people.
“By showing people how the legislative process got corrupted and providing, on my site, DailyClout, the way to draft your own laws and pass your own laws, I am also providing people with very concrete ways to protect their liberties and to know what to do in the future,” Wolf says.
“And, I feel remiss if I didn’t add, I personally had to give up my status as a media darling on the left, my friends, and my networks … when I began to do real reporting on this pandemic and on the mRNA vaccines. We are in a time where people will have to decide, ‘What am I here for on this planet?’ Know that if you cling to lies, and you cling to your professional status, your children will live as slaves and so will you.
It’s time to be brave, because if we’re a little bit brave now, we don’t have to be horrifically brave in the near future … I also think we’re in a massive spiritual moment, that we’re in a biblical moment, and that there’s a level of metaphysics over and above the material and the political assault on us in our reaction.
I’m just speaking for myself, but I do feel like this is part of the picture, the nature of the evil that is unfolded around us … The way the mRNA vaccines target the fetus, target the amniotic membrane, target lactation, this is an evil beyond what Nazis could accomplish. This is an evil of a Miltonic scale.
I’ve looked at it from all sides, and I’m just going to say this, I can’t account for it with purely human material processes. It’s got an element of sophistication and scale and grandeur that really seems beyond the human to me, and to have an element of massive existential evil.
I’m Jewish, so we don’t have a highly-developed notion of Satan, but the these seem to be malevolent forces that can accomplish things beyond what human beings can accomplish.
As a result, I have started to believe in God in a more literal way than I used to, because these malevolent forces seem to be directed at what is good. What is divine? The human face, which my tradition says is an image of God. The human body, which is made in God’s image. Love, which is a manifestation of the divine according to many religious traditions. The family.
It’s like all the things that are being targeted are what is divine about our human journey on this planet. I don’t know where to go with that, except that it seems we’re in a moment in which — in addition to all the other things we can do, and I’m just speaking for myself — I think we can pray.
We don’t have the ability just as human beings to get out of this. It’s too big. I believe that getting out of it requires an awakening that’s massive. And, for myself anyway, asking for divine help has worked before.”
And here, for a historical perspective, is the interview I had with Wolf in the early 2000s, when I was at the Pittsburgh Trib and she was a leading feminist concerned with women’s issues in society, the workplace and politics.
Naomi Wolf, ethical leader
Q: For those who only know you from your brief consulting job with Al Gore, describe yourself?
A: Ahhhhh…… Well, let’s go off the record. I can’t address political stuff except in general terms .…
Many people know about my work from the three books I published since ‘The Beauty Myth’ in 1991. My readers are particularly familiar with the fact that each of them has dealt with some aspect of American women's experience, particularly the challenges facing American women.
For example, the first one, ‘The Beauty Myth,’ was about how women are expected to live up to very rigid physical ideals. The second one was about the female electorate, fighting fire with fire and the importance of the women's vote.
The third one, ‘Promiscuities,’ was about growing up female in a very confusing time in terms of sexual mores. And the one coming out in the fall, the "The Other Side of the Miracle," is about becoming a mother in America.
It's true I've had a life committed to exploring women’s experience in America. Having said that, I do think there is an important value for women in America to raise their voices in the political realm and make their experiences and challenges be seen as more than individual problems and really call upon their representatives and their leaders to make the policies that support women through these life changes.
Q: Was the Gore experience a good one, a mistake, what?
A: Since I'm going to be speaking in Pittsburgh as president of the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, I actually can't make any partisan remarks, except to say I'm very proud and honored to have done what I could to support his run.
I really believe in him as someone who really cares a lot about women's issues and grappling with the challenges women in particular face trying to balance work and family, trying to help feed their kids on very often minimum wage or low-income jobs.
I think he cares about the things women have always expressed to me -- a strong social welfare net and strong Social Security and so on. I was very very happy to have been involved as a citizen and I think all citizens should be involved in raising their voices, no matter what political persuasion.
Q: What is it you want everyone to know about women and the way they are treated about culture and society?
A: There's so much to say about that. It depends on the issues. I guess something I've been talking about for 10 years is how powerful women are as a political force when they do raise their voices.
In “Fire with Fire” (“The New Female Power and How to Use It,” 1994), I talked about how in the wake of the Clarence Thomas hearings, some were starting to make issues of concern to them, like sexual harassment in the workplace, issues to be taken seriously in the national agenda.
At the time that book was written Bill Clinton had just been elected with a 5 percent gender gap. In 1996 he was re-elected with a 17-point gender gap. The gender gap is going to continue to be a really powerful force in determining our leadership for the foreseeable future.
What this has meant is that women's issues that had been marginalized -- like balancing work and family, family leave, being the sandwich generation (taking care of children and elderly parents at once), the feminization of poverty -- all of these are on the national agenda, and that's good.
Q: Who needs your message or arguments more, men or women?
A: I think we should move into the time when we no longer ask questions in that way, ha ha ha.
Q: I knew I was on thin ice there.
A: I really believe that quote-unquote 'women's issues' are a misnomer. More and more families are realizing these are really family issues and social issues. Men and women have to talk about them together and talk to their representatives together.
More and more studies show that when men don't have time to be hands-on dads, or have time to bond with a new baby, their kids suffer, their families suffer and their work performance suffers.
More and more studies show that family-friendly workplaces get the best out of men and women workers, which is not only good for American family structures, which are under assault, but also good for the American economy, which is slowing down.
I would say it helps all of us when we don't ghettoize womens' experience or African Americans' experience or any group's experience and really look at the whole picture.
Q: However, you've written three books, including one that the New York Times called one of the most important books of the century. Aren't they primarily aimed at women and read by women?
A: I wouldn't say that at all. They're certainly about women, ha ha. But again, I don't think they're about women without also being about men.
'The Beauty Myth' was about something women experience directly, but a lot of men read it as a way of better understanding their wives and partners.
'Fire with Fire' was about the women's electorate, but it was read by people in public policy of both genders who wanted to understand the gender gap. I don't think anyone can be successful politically without understanding women voters.
The book I published a couple years ago, “Promiscuities,: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood” (1998) was certainly read by women who identified with the stories about growing up in the sexual revolutuion. However, it was moms and dads that I heard from most across the country, because it's moms and dads who are equally concerned about how to raise their sons and daughters.
I was hearing from moms and dads -- ‘How do I teach my daughter to respect herself as she goes through this difficult transition to young womanhood?’ I was hearing from fathers — ‘How do I teach my son to treat young women with respect as he moves into adolescence and young manhood?’
I'm a mom, a mother of two small children. I really don't think there's any way to make the world better for girls without involving dads and sons.
Q: What's your definition of a perfect American woman, and also, a perfect man? Do you deal in these kinds of synopses?
A: Ha, ha, ha. Can anyone? Should anyone think in those terms? I mean, whenever you talk about "a perfect" something, you are talking about an ideology that's rigid, by definition.
If you look at women's history, the most pain women have experienced in the past, whether it was in the 19th century when the perfect middle-class woman was supposed to be languorously lying on a sofa, not contributing anything to society, all the way to Betty Friedan's 'Feminine Mystique' period, the 1950s, when the perfect woman was supposed to be completely consumed with domesticity and housework.
Those are stereotypes. I think we're getting better and better moving into the 21st century realizing that stereotypes don't help anybody. So to me, the ideal man or woman is the one actually questioning ideals, ha ha.
Q: Who then do you point to as role models or important?
A: That's a really different question, and I really love that question. I think a lot about it, especially in my capacity as president of this leadership organization that works with young people, especially young women.
Young people really need role models. Again, that's not a breakthrough idea, but what we do at the Woodhall Institute is we try to bring in ethical leaders as role models. People in arts and media, politics and law, community activists, business and entrepreneurship, who have been successful in the real world, in their own terms, and who have also taken the high road.
So young people can fill in this kind of vacuum that they say they have looking at the culture -- how not fulfilling, how not hopeful a lot of the role models put out to them are. A lot of young people say to us, 'The role models I see are sports figures and movie stars. What is there to aspire to on a deeper level.' They're really hungry for seeing people they can actually relate to, not in the distant past.
Q: Real people, not rock stars.
A: Yes. real people from their communities that they can ask really basic questions of, like, how can I get started doing what you did.
People like Edith Lederer, the first woman to cover Vietnam, and what she saw and heard and what it took for her to really show such courage, at a time when that was a very unusual path for a woman, all the way to Bernice Pulley, a 74-year-old African-American woman who was active in the Civil Rights Movement. She was a young woman just like them in the '40s who decided when she left college -- at time when the only jobs open to young African-American women was domestic work -- and got herself to Yale Divinity School and became the second African American woman to graduate from there. Those are women I admire.
Q: If you delivered a commencement speech today would it differ from the one you gave in 1992, and how?
A: It goes to the big message that I so much believe in: women tend to not realize to what extent they are active shapers of history. Therefore, they also tend not to realize how fragile their historical advances can be.
In '91, women were just waking up again. It was a time Susan Faludi called 'The Backlash.' The '80s were an atrocious time for women; they were atrocious politically. Here I can really express myself fully, in terms of how strongly I feel about how bad those days were for women.
It was a time when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission could not really function effectively. It was time when employers were not compelled to take sexual harassment issues seriously. It was a time when it was difficult for women entrepreneurs to get capital, to realize their dreams and contribute to the economy.
There were many awful stereotypes, including stereotypes of feminists and feminism, holding women back. The '90s have been a great time for women.
Again, you see this at the level of legislation. The economy in the '90s was really effective. There were important judgments against employers who were discriminating against women, so things got easier and better and fairer for women in the workplace.
Women made great strides forward in serving in the armed forces. We were conducting foreign policy worldwide, taking into account women in developing countries…
So here we are at another turning point. It has become much easier than it was in '91 that you care about women issues, that you want to be treated fairly, that you don't want to be subjected to harassment or sexxual assault or verbal abuse or physical abuse as a woman — those have become much more legitimate issues.
However, what I would say to the class of 2001, you are responsible for not letting us fly back. You are responsible for moving the ball forward and speaking up for yourself and your dignity.
Q: What is your next book going to be about?
A: It is about the experience of becoming a new mother in America.
Q: When you pitched it to your publisher, what did you say it was about?
A: It's very much a piece with the approach I brought to the other subjects that I've looked at. I do believe parenting and shaping young people are the most important jobs in society. I certainly believe we have a long way to go, in supporting mothers especially. I do believe new mothers are not informed or supported or recognized or respected the way they should be.
Q: By society in general?
A: I'm actually looking at the culture around pregnancy and birth. A lot of patronizing books are out there that don't give women the whole picture. The medical establishment has pressure that I wasn't aware of when I became a new mom -- pressures behind the scenes that are not good for women and babies, that lead to a lot of painful and traumatic and unnecessarily invasive birth experiences.
Q: When you come to speak on Monday, you're going to be talking about ethical leadership in the 20th century. What does that mean and how does it relate to your past work?
A: It actually relates to my present work, as co-founder of the Woodhall Institute, the organization that teaches young people how to be ethical leaders.
I guess it really came out of traveling to different college campuses and hearing young people really express their ethical despair. They had really no one to look up to. They admired individual people in their lives, but they didn't feel like the culture said it is OK to be idealistic and you can change the world and here's how.
So we looked at the biographies of people we thought of as ethical and we found that people like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, or Gandhi, or even your local business person who cares about not laying everyone off when the factory burns down. They all shared certain attributes in common.
We draw on different major spiritual traditions. The ethical leaders in the Old Testament and New Testament and Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam all share certain qualities.
So we really boiled them down and we found that ethical leaders believe in the essential equality and dignity of all people, from the person in the mailroom to the CEO. That all people need to be treated with a certain fundamental respect.
Ethical leaders -- and this is really fascinating looking at the work of Dr. King -- they don't see the world in terms of us and them. To ethical leaders, everyone is an 'us.'
They do something fascinating to me as a writer. They address even their enemies as if appealing to their nature. Dr. King did this in his work. There's no language to opposition in his work. It's all an invitation to love, an invitation to a higher way of looking at the world.
Ethical leaders are courageous. They have a kind of incredible courage. Rosa Parks did something really gutsy. She didn't have a lot of personal reasons where she drew that courage from.
Ethical leaders have a certain relationship to the truth. They have a very conscientious way of using language. To be truthful and not engage in harmful gossip.
Ethical leaders actually believe that their ability to be so courageous and have so much faith in their ability to change the world comes from a relationship to truth, or to facing truth. Those are broad generalizations about what they all share in common but we were struck by these commonalities.
Q: Rosa Parks, Gandhi, Martin Luther King are your good role models. Who are the bad examples?
A: We can all agree Hitler did something very classic that demagogues do. You can see versions of this in every country, unfortunately even in our own. You can see this in waves of anti-immigrationist sentiment in this country, a wave of rhetoric that posits an 'us and them' relationship.
Q: When you say goodbye to the people of Pittsburgh Monday night, what do you want them to remember from your talk?
A: I think the big short message is that to remember that each one of us are role models, though we're often unaware of how powerfully we're imprinting the younger generation.
We need to remember that little people and teenage people are watching us and that everything we do has consequences as it relates to young people. And to take seriously our own responsibility to be ethical leaders -- whether we're homemakers, or moms or dads or teachers or journalists or writers.
Ex-newspaperman Bill Steigerwald is the author of 30 Days a Black Man, which retells the true story of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette star reporter Ray Sprigle's undercover mission through the Jim Crow South in 1948. Sprigle's original series is in Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow. Steigerwald also wrote Dogging Steinbeck, which exposed the truth about the fictions and fibs in Travels With Charley and celebrated Flyover America and its people.