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It wasn't really meant for me, considering the contours of my own midsection. But I nevertheless tried to read Naomi Wolf's excruciatingly bad 2012 book Vagina: A New Biography , more to confirm the unanimous critical opinion that it was an excruciatingly bad book than to explore the historic journey of the female sex organ.
But I surrendered rather quickly, hurling the book across the room when Wolf capped her introduction with this observation: "The vagina may be a 'hole,' but it is, properly understood, a Goddess-shaped one."
No thank you.
But unlike so many other readers of Vagina , I never scratched my chin wondering when Naomi Wolf, Rhodes scholar, presidential advisor, and feminist icon, transformed from an unreasonable writer to an unreadable crank. That's because I had reviewed Wolf's previous book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot , a slim volume brimming with the sort of crankery most of us stopped noticing during the Bush-era.
According to Wolf's heavy-breathing, best-selling book (over 100,000 copies), America's leaders-cum-putschists were secretly being fitted for brown shirts, snazzy jodhpurs, and shiny jackboots. We had gone from late-Weimar period to the 1933-torchlight-parade stage of fascist takeover. Washington D.C. was our Welthauptstadt Germania .
The End of America was an astoundingly lazy piece of writing, full of historical reference points that Wolf thought clever but clearly didn't quite understand. But because the warning was so important-Nie wieder Krieg! Nie wieder Faschismus! -a dumb book was made into an even dumber documentary film, which a deeply serious New York Times reviewer judged to be occasionally overblown but with "enough here to make you shiver. Could it happen here? Maybe. A little fear -- not the collective panic that followed 9/11 -- can be a useful thing." (Let's pause to observe that invocations...