I guess ms. wiggins is confusing naomi wolf with naomi klein, of "shock doctrine" capitalism fame?



Speaking of capitalism, betty is entirely right that WOLF'S neo-liberal (she was a presidential advisor for god's sake) leanings are showing, in that she seems to have an inability to even grasp at what radical politics means, which is to view people in terms of classes rather than individuals. Why else would she write a piece on the mere presence of *individual* women in fascist movements when statistically those movements *as a whole* are OVERWHELMINGLY male?



I can't personally speak for Klein's penchant toward masochism (she is a burqa defender, after all), but her inclusion of the poetry of sylvia plath, romanticizing of "brutes", plath being a depressed writer who eventually-committed suicide, strikes as particularly-desperate.



Here's some more Plath poetry:



Now they want to make a film

For anyone lacking the ability

To imagine the body, head in oven,

Orphaning children



[...] they think

I should give them my mother's words

To fill the mouth of their monster,

Their Sylvia Suicide Doll





Misnaming aside, betty's incredulousness at klein's implications that radical feminist assertions as to women's nature are somehow disproved by the behavior of women in white male supremacist colonialist capitalism, is spot-on. Maybe it's that klein can't conceptually-grasp what so-called "second wavers" (the 'waves' designation refers to a time period, atually there are radicals today and there were liberals then) were even talking about, which was an assertion of a world WHOLLY-ABSENT of the institutions created by male power into which women assimilate (in the case of fascism and all totalitarian contexts, women learn to live and breathe allegiance because they are *as a class* particularly vulnerable to consequence for rebellion; in the case of every day conservatism, because there is particular reward *as individuals* for taking up the banner of a party inevitably hostile to women's interests- the same reason the Republican party snaps and props up african americans- their prominent appearance there is precisely *because* a neutral front is badly-needed).



Most disturbing here is this so-called "feminist" seems to be equivocating between a "feminist face" and a "woman's face", as is so-common the case with liberals for whom liberation of a sex caste has taken backseat to western lifestyle protectionism- fascists definitionally are opposed to the interests of women as a class, and even their less-extreme neoliberal cohorts seem uninterested in confronting male power.



Wolf has fallen down the postmodern rabbithole with this one.

No one ever remotely-asserted individual women cannot be Fascists in Fascists environments. From the very first paragraph: "...if women held the decision-making power in society". They don't. Women do not head banking and trade cartels, they do not control cultural institutions such as the media, and they own a 1-digit percentage of global wealth.



A sad article for Project.