What we talk about when we talk about Naomi Wolf

I read The Beauty Myth when I was a senior in high school.  Wolf's book is a piece of pop feminism iconography, and no doubt contributed to my nascent feminism. I don't remember if I actively used the "F-word" then, but I don't remember personally tethering any ugly associations to the it either. The Beauty Myth let me stamp the scarlet "F" to my chest.

In the twenty years since it was published, Naomi Wolf has been banished into the hinterlands of "fallen feminists." Of Wolf's ousting Sady Doyle, in a recent post for In These Times, said:

To be blunt: This is just not how grown-ups think. And the increasingly Manichean slant of some contemporary feminists, in which one is either a perfect feminist who has never been wrong or a traitor who must be disgraced and expelled from the ranks, risks teaching us all to think less like like grown-ups. No-one is “a liar” or “a bad person.” People lie about some things, and are honest about others; people do bad things sometimes, and at other times they do good ones. This is the principle that allowed some feminists, myself included, to allow that Assange might be guilty, when other progressives were too much in love with WikiLeaks to admit that possibility. It should be the same principle that allows us not to make a punching bag out of Naomi Wolf.

I don't think anyone should be used as "punching bag," but Naomi Wolf is really bad for feminism. Or just bad at feminism. From rape apologia to the marginalization of LGBT people (Amanda Marcotte provided a litany of Wolf's shortcomings in the comments of the aforementioned link), she goes against some pretty basic tenets of feminism. This is less about scapegoating than acknowledging some pretty problematic bullshit. When your "oops, I screwed up" hurts, you know, actual people, maybe it's time to go sit in the cornfield. When you keep messing up, people are going to tell you that you keep messing up.

At the risk of sounding hypocritical, there has to be room for learning. I've heard more than one person say they've stopped participating in the feminist blogosphere for fear they're going to commit some  irredeemable screw-up,  only to be banished forever -- myself included. I think what bothers me most, though, is that I see a lot of the same mistakes being made over and over again -- the lack of intersectionality, the myth that all women are oppressed in the same way. I don't know what the answer is. Try to do better and move on.