The Quality of Yale Graduates Is Somewhat Lessened As of Late

 

(Photo found here.)

Alright, now I'm pissed. Naomi Wolf is really on my shitlist. I've been reading The Beauty Myth and I am disgusted with her bullshit. And I'm only 90 pages in, for fuck's sake! It starts in the first chapter in which she clearly demonstrates her ignorance of science and her excellent grasp of fallacious logic. How in the name of Jehovah did this woman graduate from Yale? She ignores facts she deems inconvenient, uses false statistics, and posits statements with no proof. The chapter on women's magazines is fucking ridiculous and she commits the sin of omission. She blathers on about the power of advertisers and their power over content in Cosmo, etc. and she makes it seem like the phenomenon is restricted to such periodicals. Fuck - all she does is reiterate the arguments of the likes of Bed Bagdikian and Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman without bothering to mention that the problem is epidemic in the mass media generally and not just women's magazines. So maybe what's happening is the result of greed as opposed to a desire by all of us evil men to keep women down. Another classic: she trumpets that anthropologists have finally disproven the idea that males are by their nature polygamous and cites research about higher primates (excepting we humans). What kind of fucking bullshit sweeping generalization is this? Certain primates exhibit a certain characteristic thusly all animals are so. Oh my fuck. Lady, I knew this was bullshit in 6th grade yet you, a Yale graduate, fail to grasp this basic bit of logic. And Wolf obviously knows nothing about science. One of the chief characteristics of science that distinguishes it from, say, religion or superstition, is that it is self-correcting. So when she quotes Darwin, the reader is supposed to assume that he was right about every fucking detail of natural selection and that it has not been in anyway modified over the course of the past 153 years to accommodate newly discovered facts and observations. Nice appeal to authority. You know what? I knew about that logical fallacy in the 6th grade too.

And what about women's responsibilities for the state of affairs she criticizes? Holy Mary Mother of Jesus! She explicitly says that she is not espousing a conspiracy yet only men are responsible for the situation despite the fact that women permeate nearly all the power structures she claims are out there oppressing women. Wolf mocks the notion that men are hapless and can't control their sexual urges while she supports the notion that women are hapless and can't help but be taken in by this "beauty myth". Everyone is a fucking dunce in her world. Then there's the way she modifies her definition of "beauty" to suit her tastes, which really irritates the living fuck out of me. One minute it is not just a notion of physical appearance and the next time around it is.

I can't wait to get to her claim that 150,000 human females die each year from anorexia. Fellow feminist Christina Hoff Summers has shown this to be bullshit. Wolf's comeback? OK, so some of the statistics are false but, hey, the rest is all good. They don't put lying in lists of logical fallacies because it's understood that falsehoods require no explanation as to why they're wrong. And we're not just talking, well there were only 149,999 so I rounded up, we're talking more like one hundred (100) deaths from anorexia.

While I think that the problems Wolf discusses are serious and need to be addressed, she is not the person to do it. Her methods are...unsound. Intellectual malfeasance and there's no excuse for this.