Broken-Fingernail Feminism

Feminists have rarely given us much to envy. They often come to the picket line with disastrous personal lives -- divorces, a history of sexual abuse, or domestic violence -- or simply no personal life at all. The perception anyway is that public feminists all resemble Hillary Clinton in those old law-school photos, where her unpainted face is masked with gigantic Coke-bottle glasses and a mousy mop of hair that screams of frumpiness, and that these women have sacrificed beauty, sex, children, and material comforts for the cause.

Then there's Naomi Wolf. Indisputably beautiful and confidently so, the Rhodes scholar published her first bestseller at age 28, inspired the "Third Wave" feminist movement, became a staple on the college lecture circuit, and went on to counsel the president (and a would-be president) on the zeitgeist of the day. Her success extends to her personal life: Wolf has the perfect husband, former Clinton speechwriter and current New York Times editor David Shipley, and two presumably beautiful children. And, of course, she is rich. (In 1999, she claimed she took a pay cut to work for Al Gore's campaign at $15,000 a month.)

Yet despite her success, Wolf is deeply loathed by, well, just about everyone who has ever seen her book-jacket glamour shots. Camille Paglia has derided Wolf as the "yuppie feminist" and "the Dan Quayle of feminism -- a pretty airhead who has gotten any profile whatsoever because of her hair," and even Betty Friedan has dismissed her for largely ignoring the more pressing social issues of the day.

In smarty-pants Washington circles, Wolf-bashing is a local pastime -- even when most critics have never read any of her books. When word got out during the last presidential campaign that Wolf had been counseling Al Gore to be more "alpha-male," you could hear the pundits gleefully sharpening their knives. The Establishment immediately disparaged her as a purveyor of psychobabble (quoting embarrassingly from Wolf's book Promiscuities, in which she proclaimed, "I want to explore the shadow slut who walks alongside us as we grow up, sometimes jeopardizing us and sometimes presenting us with a new sense of authentic identity").

Yet when Wolf's new book, Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood, hit the shelves in late September, all over Washington, smart women and their shadow sluts were observed secretly running out to get a copy -- undeterred even by Arab Kamikazes.

What is it about Wolf that people find so annoying, and yet so absorbing that they continue to take her seriously? There's something contradictory about the undisputed leader of Gen X feminism. Wolf often seems like a women's magazine, full of earnest advice for the modern professional woman, but like Cosmo or Glamour, she is read by the female intelligentsia as a kind of a shameful treat and then immediately dismissed as a trivial pursuit. There's no doubt she's surpassed Gloria Steinem as the feminist we love to hate.

From her media platform, Wolf, 39, has promoted a feminist theory less concerned with abortion, rape, and other forms of victimization and instead more focused on the experiences of educated, middle-class women who love their husbands and are doing pretty well for themselves. Over the past decade, she has spelled out her vision in four books -- The Beauty Myth, Fire With Fire, Promiscuities, and now, Misconceptions -- that have mixed her own personal memoir with social criticism of some issues which even she acknowledges women are prone to dismiss as not especially important in the big scheme of things, such as dieting, body image, and sexual desire. And she has been savaged for it.

Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful

Various theories have been offered as to why Wolf provokes such strong feelings in people. The most common hypothesis is that Wolf is the pretty feminist in a world where feminists aren't supposed to be pretty. She really couldn't win on that front, given that her first book was The Beauty Myth. If she had been unattractive, the book would have been dismissed as sour grapes. If she was, as turned out to be the case, a bombshell who took to flipping her long hair around in photo shoots, she was simply proof of her thesis that our culture rewards beautiful women -- and who could feel sorry for her about that?