Naomi Wolf
For more on Naomi
Wolf, see the Nov. 4 "."
Naomi Wolf begins The Beauty Myth , her 1991
treatise on how the beauty industry thwarts female progress, with a bitter
salvo against image consultants. As proof that women's employers value looks
over capabilities, she cites the then-growing ranks of consultants hired by
women to polish their professional appeal. Wolf ends the book with a call to
reject "the insistence that a woman's appearance is her speech" and "political
manipulation" based on looks.
Eight years later, Wolf has become an image
consultant herself. As Time reported earlier this week, Vice President
Al Gore paid Wolf thousands of dollars a month for advice on presentation, from
the tones of his speeches to the color tones of his wardrobe. The Washington
Post relayed that Wolf "has long contended that earth tones are more
'reassuring' to audiences' " and that she is "the person behind Gore's recent
wardrobe change."
Wolf's non-sartorial
advice to Gore--and to President Clinton before him, as an unpaid adviser--is
even stranger. She coached each to emphasize his manly strengths, relying on
hoary, tired gender stereotypes. She reportedly told Gore that he is the "beta
male" who must fight Clinton's "alpha male" for dominance. And as an adviser to
the Clinton White House, she informed the president that the nation was
searching for a "good-father role model" to "build a house" for the country. "I
will not let anyone or anything touch the bedrock," Wolf wrote in one memo for
him. "I will DEFEND/PROTECT the foundation." This came only three years after
the publication of her book Fire With Fire , in which she savaged
Republican spin doctors for positioning George Bush as "the reassuring
arch-patriarch."
Bill Clinton and Al Gore are not her only charges. Wolf is
now a full-time coach; earlier this year, she and five other "remarkable women"
founded the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, devoted to training
twentysomething women "to assume positions of power and influence." But the
institute's programs don't cover political, economic, or legal issues. Instead,
the short retreats teach participants "how to be financially literate; how to
speak and present; how to write a business plan; fundraise; and run for
elective office; how to write a book or magazine article proposal; how to
mentor and be mentored; how to start a community organization; and how to be a
philanthropist."
How did Wolf start out as
Betty Friedan and end up as Dick Morris? The road wasn't as long or twisted as
it might seem. In fact, the advice she dispensed to Al Gore--safe, poll-tested
ideas mixed in with a few fancifully nutty ones--is remarkably similar to the
instructions she's been giving to women for years. For Wolf has never been a
wonk or an ideologue. While she's dabbled in journalism and teaching, she isn't
really a reporter or an academic either. She began her career by being a
success--a Rhodes scholar with a splashy book--and has been tutoring others in
how to succeed ever since. Wolf is a master cheerleader, and she acts like one:
upbeat, entertaining, sweetly sexy, sharply aware of image, and endlessly
trilling about victory.
Wolf's three books are breathless, hyperbolic tracts on
What Holds Women Back. The Beauty Myth , written while Wolf was at
Oxford, is an angry protest at how the cosmetics, plastic surgery, and magazine
industries have sabotaged feminism. Wolf holds the beauty biz accountable--at
least in part--for the pay gap, female poverty, censorship in the free press,
fear of aging, sexual unhappiness, rape, and eating disorders. But she doesn't
suggest abandoning the visuals; she wants them to be more attainable and
uplifting. "Our movement forward as individual women, as women together ...
depend now on what we decide to see when we look in the mirror," she writes. No
wonder she has spent so much time thinking about what color Al Gore's suits
should be.
In Fire With
Fire , as Wolf settles into her persona as pep-talker, she tells women
essentially the same thing she told Gore: Drop the victim-loser image, stop
playing second fiddle, and use romantic archetypes to visualize the path to
glory. "To imagine and enjoy winning ... had long been alien to female
consciousness," she writes. Because "history moves in response to narratives,
dream images, heroes, heroines, and myths," women need to think of themselves
as latter-day incarnations of "Diana, avenger of insult; Sheba, a responsible,
politically influential sovereign; and Nike, the feminine spirit of victory."
In other words, as alpha females.
Even before Wolf joined Clinton's team, she was coaching
feminists on how to save the women's movement through Morris-like
triangulation. In Fire With Fire , she argues for editing the stridency
out of feminism and emerging with a vaguely uplifting, centrist message. If
Clinton is a New Democrat, she is a New Feminist. "Many U.S. women don't think
[feminism] addresses their concerns, or don't like images of it that they see,"
she announces. In order to accommodate them, the women's movement should
de-emphasize specific political causes--abortion, rape, homosexual
rights--because they're "issues that may or may not include [some women],
rather than a theory of self-worth that applies to every woman's life." Wolf
wants to expand the size of the feminist tent, and she wants to do so by
redefining its ideology as the simple pursuit of success for women.
Wolf first began advising
Clinton when her husband, David Shipley, worked as a White House speechwriter.
When the president's woman troubles started, Wolf hit the spin circuit. The
Lewinsky affair was a tricky issue for most liberal feminists, who were caught
between protesting sexual harassment and supporting the president they had
elected. Wolf did both, by turning the issue into an object lesson on women's
professional success. "The people who should be looking into these allegations
is not a partisan prosecutor but the EEOC," she opined on the talk-show
circuit. "What is clear is that when there is a situation where a worker is
advanced as allegedly Lewinsky was with special help, getting jobs, it goes to
a sex discrimination situation in the workplace--were the other interns and the
other women, the women at Revlon, the women at U.N., who may have been at the
copy machine, nights and weekends, trying to raise their kids and move up to
that job that was allegedly offered to Ms. Lewinsky."
Wolf sees the telling of her own personal experiences as a
triumph for all women. Her third book, Promiscuities , is a memoir in
which she single-handedly "retrieve[s] [the] secret struggle for womanhood" by
narrating her own sexual coming of age. "By telling my story and asking other
women to tell theirs, I wanted to elucidate the emotional truths that emerge
from a particular generation's erotic memory," she explains. She bills her
stories as tough to tell: In a Tikkun magazine piece on her coming out
as a spiritual person, she testifies that "it's taken me nine years to build up
enough credibility in the analytic/linear world that I can now speak and have
some expectation of being heard to a certain degree. It's been a long haul, and
very much a gendered haul." This from a woman whose first book was a best
seller, published in 14 countries.
Indeed, Wolf often expounds on the trauma--and the
necessity--of expressing herself in public. In all three of her books, Wolf
demands the need for positive role models in the media--of which, naturally,
she is one. It's a brilliantly self-justifying line of reasoning: I am on
television because I am a role model, and I am a role model because I am on
television. And a great marketing strategy: Buy my books, because they're good
for your daughter.
It's no wonder that Wolf has become a well-paid
political consultant. Who better to help a candidate extract weighty lessons
from his personal history, to teach him to tell voters that their own successes
depend on his own? At last, it seems, Wolf has found a forum where the personal
really is as political as she thinks it is.
