It is a common assumption that one cannot be feminist and beautiful. Feminists especially seem to believe this. Naomi Wolf is a beautiful, vocal feminist, which offends everyone, except the media.
Wolf, 43, is at the Oxford Union tonight to plug her latest book, The Treehouse (Virago), a memoir of how, as they built a treehouse for her daughter, she bonded with her father. The subtitle, Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love and See, refers to her father’s transformation in her eyes from archetypal patriarchal figure (bad) to “wild old visionary poet” (good) who makes her realise that passion and imagination mean more than politics and intellectualism.
Wolf grew up in 1960s San Francisco. Her father was a poet with a vampire obsession, her mother wrote a book about lesbianism. Wolf soon realised that “not everyone’s mom wore kaftans and hung out in dyke bars”. She studied English literature at Yale, then at Oxford. “They were years of wearing the same straight-leg black jeans that every other young Marxist in Europe was wearing; years of . . . thinking about ‘structures of oppression’ , hunched against the electric fire.” In 1991 she published The Beauty Myth, a critique of our obsession with looks and of the beauty industry. Germaine Greer called it “the most important feminist publication since The Female Eunuch”. Wolf became a media darling, which irked feminists. Zoë Heller wrote: “It was galling, somehow, to be told to disregard Western conventions of female beauty by a woman who happened to exemplify those conventions.”
Wolf married David Shipley, a journalist, had two children and published three more books. She made headlines in 1999, when she advised Al Gore, in return for $15,000 a month, to stop acting as “beta male” to Clinton’s “alpha male” if he wanted to be “top dog”. The sexist insults intensified: Wolf was a “big-haired cutie”, a “flashy Culture Babe”. In 2004 she accused the Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom of having sexually harassed her 20 years earlier. Camille Paglia, a Bloom protégée, retorted that Wolf had spent her life “bobbing her boobs in men’s faces”.
Wolf has always reacted robustly to attacks by the sisterhood. But since her latest upset, separating from her husband, she is lying low. On her father’s advice she is re-engaging with literature and disengaging from politics. “It is only in silence and solitude that you can listen to what’s wrong and what is supposed to be right,” she says. But a publicity tour can’t hurt.