Tuesday, June 09, 2009
The Naomi-Wolf-Is-Smart Myth
I guess the editors at Harper's Bazaar decided to smarten up a cover full of pronouncements about summer's sexiest dresses and looking chic at any price by getting Naomi Wolf to write the latest installment in the canon of Angelina Jolie worship. Naomi Wolf raving about the Baby Collector's beauty in a fashion magazine is particularly awesome, considering Naomi Wolf made her name trashing the fashion and beauty industry for being a tool of the patriarchal hegemony meant to keep us ladies too busy being insecure.
In case you actually had some sort of life and desire for fun and not a bunch of feminist grousing in 1990, you may have missed Naomi Wolf's book The Beauty Myth. This book became notorious for heralding the birth of third-wave feminism, which is basically the idea that feminists need to start being really intellectually condescending about the same bullshit feminists have always been super bitchy about. All the women's studies types thought this was great except that hot bitch Camille Paglia, who started a beef because she thought (correctly) that The Beauty Myth made feminists seem really annoying and stupid due to the fact that Naomi Wolf is both. Naomi Wolf spends most of the book blabbing on about how our concept of beauty is all a giant patriarchal conspiracy designed to keep women in place and punish them for breaking free from male domination. Currently, I think Naomi Wolf needs to lighten the fuck up, but then again I may just be bitter that back in the day, her ideas and intellectual influence were largely responsible for THIS lamentable fashion misstep (and many, MANY like it):
Think of how many skanky titty shirts I could have purchased with the stacks I was dropping for ill-fitting fleece and bulky wool Cosby sweaters at Eddie Bauer and REI! Be assured that I was wearing a pair of dark brown suede Birkenstock clogs and a pair of Woolrich socks on my feet, to top off this ill-fitting and shapeless ensemble. Subverting the patriarchy Naomi Wolf-style is not a pretty sight and it barely got me laid. Thanks a lot, Naomi Wolf. Team Paglia.
Anyway, now I have another reason to hate Naomi Wolf besides her indirect effect on my regrettable style choices in high school. She wrote this article for a fashion and beauty magazine about how stupid, obnoxious Angelina Jolie is the perfect woman, "bosomy and wasp-waisted, with that curtain of hair and those crazy pillowy lips, she is an obvious male sex fantasy." Naomi Wolf goes on to gush that through deft PR, image management, and Brad Pitt-fucking, Angelina has transcended the banality of being a mere mortal to achieve the status of female archetype. She also manages to work in an insinuation that the patriarchy killed Princess Di and that Angelina Jolie has become the dominant female "ego ideal." The entire article is one lengthy, excessively devoted fan letter bearing the nauseating title "Why Women Want Angelina Jolie's Life."
If Naomi Wolf could pull her clueless academic head out of her own ass, she might take note that I do NOT want Angelina Jolie's life, and I bet there are a lot of other women who don't either. Brad Pitt seems like an asshole with stupid tattoos, and I would hate all those kids running around. Not to mention that with all the media whoring Angelina so graciously includes her children in those brats are going to grow up to be absolute monsters. In approximately eight years, TRUST that Maddox Jolie-Pitt is going to be the Paris Hilton for the next generation: attention-seeking, disgustingly overindulged, and one of the most loathsome individuals on earth. No fucking thank you to being legally and morally responsible for unleashing that upon the Hollywood club scene and the world.
Even moreso than a brood of spoiled tyrants, I do not want a life where I'm constantly reminding everyone what a big hypocrite I am. I wouldn't want to bring a swarm of photographers to document me getting off a private jet to "help" starving refugees in Chad by merely standing in their presence and posing. I also wouldn't want to run around giving impassioned speeches against poverty and chastising everyone else in the world for not doing their part, and then go with my common-law dickbag movie star boyfriend to drop half a million dollars on a gold couch. In fairness, Angelina is more visible than me and can thus raise more awareness about important issues like poverty and civil upheaval in Chad and Sudan. I'd just like to know how much of that raised awareness has fixed things in Darfur. Angelina Jolie pretends to do shit when in reality she just promotes herself and her haughty-ass persona. Sorry, but I'd rather actually do shit and back up my haughtiness with substance rather than duplicitous media skankery.
Then again, I can see why Naomi Wolf appreciates Angelina Jolie's self-promoting fakery, since she's been using the same scam for years to get the academic types to think she's not an intellectual lightweight. She makes her name declaring that fashion, beauty, and the cult of female celebrity are forms of patriarchal subjugation, and then twenty years later she writes in a fashion magazine about how a female celebrity's beauty has entranced modern women everywhere, most certainly including herself. Naomi Wolf's scholarly credentials involve specializing in wrapping the same overbearing, tired whining about the patriarchy in a thin veneer of hypocritical bullshit and selling it to people stupider than her (like me aged 15). Feminism deserves better than this vapid slag telling us that Angelina Jolie is the best thing to happen to women since vibrators were invented. STFU, Naomi Wolf!
Labels: celebrities, feminazism, media whores, ranting, retard rage, scathing indictments, sluts
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