00:05:48.240As soon as this book comes out, it was a runaway bestseller. It did super well. A lot of like
00:05:53.560second wave feminists said that like this was the beginning of like a new generation of feminists1.00
00:05:56.940like taking up the mantle. But immediately, the reviews started to notice a couple of discrepancies.0.90
00:06:04.340So one of the numbers that people pull out is that in the book, Wolf says that, you know,
00:06:10.620eating disorders are really common in America and 150,000 women every year die of anorexia.
00:06:18.180I read about this claim after her sort of downfall in 2019.
00:06:23.680There were a lot of those like circling back to the beauty myth. Yeah.
00:06:25.940And so she, you know, she basically is claiming that anorexia has this massive death toll and the actual number is like low three figures, something like that, right?
00:06:36.360You know, I mean, evening surgeries are so hard to track because it's all self-reported.
00:06:39.140And then, you know, dying of anorexia is difficult to kind of measure because, you know, sometimes people just like have heart attacks, right?
00:06:44.120Like not everybody with anorexia is like super thin.
00:06:46.200So it's difficult to – it's difficult to track.
00:06:49.280But it's so easy to say that it's not 150,000 people.
00:06:53.100Like I think if you're like in your 30s, at a certain age, you probably have a friend, some acquaintance within two degrees of separation from you that has died in a car accident.
00:07:04.020The numbers that she's quoting here are four times higher than the number of people killed in car accidents every year.
00:07:09.840So like if this was true, you would have like numerous acquaintances who had died of anorexia.
00:07:15.680So it's like it just is not plausible at all.
00:07:17.940The defense of her that I will give is that this is actually a mistake that her source made.
00:07:23.700So there's a 1988 book called Fasting Girls that she is relying on for the sort of the statistics on the prevalence of eating disorders.
00:07:31.760And so this book is relying on a newsletter from the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association, which was like the major eating disorders association at the time, which said 150,000 people have anorexia.
00:08:08.380But then, so what she says is, you know, by the time this starts getting pointed out in reviews, she claims that she had already found it and fixed it. It's only the first edition of the book where that number was in it. And like that was removed, fixed, republished. But then I got this book. So I got it from Amazon and I looked at like, what does the text say now? And so I'm going to send you what it says now. So this is the updated text.
00:08:35.060This does not include any mortality statistic.
00:08:38.880The number of women with the disease has increased dramatically throughout the Western world starting 20 years ago.
00:08:44.240Dr. Charles A. Murkowski of Gracie Square Hospital in New York City, an eating diseases specialist,
00:08:49.340says that 20% of American college women binge and purge on a regular basis.
00:08:54.640Roberta Pollock's side in Never Too Thin agrees with the 5% to 10% figure for anorexia among young American women,
00:09:01.860adding that up to six times that figure on campuses are bulimic.
00:09:06.300If we take the high end of the figures, it means that of 10 young American women in college,
00:09:11.520two will be anorexic and six will be bulimic.
00:09:40.160The thing is, you don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater here.
00:09:42.880That, like, eating disorders are extremely prevalent in America and extremely damaging.
00:09:46.820And, like, some of the criticism of this book at the time, like, had this weird misogyny to it, where they're sort of like, this lady says that eating disorders exist.
00:09:54.200I guess preaching to the choir here, but there's also an image in people's minds when you talk about certain things like eating disorders where you're thinking about someone whose life is consumed by it.
00:10:09.880And if you wanted to say that that was like 60, 80 percent, then I think that's quite defensible.
00:10:13.680But to say that bulimia and anorexia, you know, very discrete disorders are reaching those numbers, it's just not true.
00:10:20.340Yeah. I mean, the National Eating Disorders Association says it's between 10% and 20% of college women have some form of eating disorder. So 20% is the high range, right? And when you look at bulimia specifically, this is within a 12-month time span, 7% of college students report binging and 1% report purging.
00:10:39.440So these are thankfully pretty rare behaviors, right?
00:10:42.740But again, it's like these are real problems, but it makes it so hard to defend Wolf and0.96
00:10:48.740to defend this book because it's like you can't get basic shit like this this wrong.0.98
00:12:59.420Wrong. No, I, I was thinking something so feminist that I thought the world wasn't ready for it.
00:13:07.020God, this is so bleak that someone that like is sort of credited with advancing feminist thought
00:13:13.080is just like, you got alpha males and beta males. Are you an alpha or a beta? I know.
00:13:20.080I know. In this picture, in this picture, you are leaning in towards Tipper. You want to be
00:13:24.480straight up. She leans towards you. We will get into this. But the central question with this is
00:13:28.700Like, how much of a conspiracy theorist was Wolf before all of this, like, anti-vax stuff?
00:13:33.620And also, like, how much of a conservative was she?
00:13:36.020Because she's sort of casting herself as a feminist and she's talking about, like, the dangers of beauty standards, people kind of cast her as his leftist.
00:13:43.000But a lot of her ideas were fairly conservative to begin with.
00:13:45.340Yeah. I mean, there's always been that sort of tension between the second and third waves of feminism, right, where it's like, how do you how do you talk about like female independence within the sort of patriarchal superstructure? Right. So what does this mean for whether we should be doing what we want when what we want to do is maybe informed by these patriarchal norms?
00:14:07.560Exactly. Klein tells the rest of the story kind of out of order because she's doing it thematically. But I am putting the pieces back in order. So after the beauty myth comes out in the 1990s, basically at the height of her powers, Wolf goes to I believe it's Oxford where Klein is studying. And Klein is she hasn't become a writer yet. She's not famous. I think Wolf is a little bit older than her.
00:14:30.780And so she is just a student journalist and she is assigned to go cover Wolf giving a talk at her campus.
00:14:38.940So I'm going to send you this excerpt from Klein's book.
00:14:43.660This is the ending anecdote of the book.
00:14:45.980You're just you're destroying Klein's narrative structure.
00:14:48.980I know she's she's listening to this livid.0.90
00:14:51.160But because I think this this moment is so fucking deranged and I think it's supposed to be kind of a twist.0.70
00:14:57.100But I think it's actually like kind of important for like everything comes afterwards.0.63
00:15:30.780i've never said anything even remotely close to this in any form holy shit that is one of the0.95
00:15:36.860most fucking wild things to say to a human being it's something that is purely designed to unsettle0.94
00:15:43.440the person's equilibrium and like establish dominance in some way it actually seems like0.98
00:15:47.660something like weird like something a man would say to another man is being like i'm the alpha
00:15:51.220in this exchange it is really fucking weird which we know that's something she believes in right
00:15:55.700Yeah, exactly. It's consistent. Yeah. And like, I guess Klein then describes it like she sort of at the time thought this was like edgy and cool. It was like a way that sort of, I don't know, kind of, I don't know how to put this, but sort of manipulative people do this like instant intimacy with you.0.83
00:16:11.980like you're sort of sharing a secret and they're doing it by saying something kind of shocking.
00:16:16.240Klein says that at the time, Klein had had a really bad week apparently because she had written
00:16:20.620something pro-Palestinian for the student newspaper and was just getting like yelled at from like all
00:16:25.740corners of the campus. And so she was like, what she was reading in me was like some form of trauma.
00:16:31.540Like I was projecting some form of trauma and she read it as like sexual trauma. So then they become
00:16:36.900friends and they're like pen pals for a while. Okay. So all of this is sort of getting at the
00:16:42.380fact that like Wolf had like little inklings of some conservative beliefs and also just being0.99
00:16:48.120kind of a fucking weirdo. Right. Fairly early. And like her work was really shoddy from like1.00
00:16:52.320basically day one of her career as a public intellectual. So then in the early 2000s,
00:16:58.480she starts to sort of go off the rails. Klein says, in the new millennium, something changed
00:17:04.720in Wolf. Maybe it was Gore's electoral loss or George W. Bush's electoral theft and the way some
00:17:10.140of the post-vote recriminations focused on her controversial campaign role. Perhaps it was
00:17:14.460something more personal. An unraveling marriage with two young kids, she's made reference to
00:17:18.360a year of chaos right after I turned 40. Whatever the cause, Wolf's soaring profile dropped
00:17:23.240significantly in the early and mid-2000s. In 2007, she publishes a book called The End of
00:17:29.760America, Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, which is about how the Bush administration was
00:17:35.280basically tilting toward a fascist regime. I read a review of it in Reason, God help me,
00:17:41.580where it says, Wolf commits a bewildering series of mistakes that demonstrate not even a rudimentary
00:17:47.120understanding or familiarity with the subject of fascism. Readers are told that Hitler was
00:17:51.580a propaganda master because he was trained as a visual artist. He was not. Nor did Nazi
00:17:56.800propaganda minister joseph goebbels develop the practice of embedding journalists it's very it's
00:18:02.840it's like a weird mirror image of liberal fascism where she's just like do you know who else had
00:18:08.060embedded journalists i love people who are able to identify increasingly innocuous things that nazis
00:18:13.540did and be like you know you know who else did this yeah nazis took showers you know who else
00:18:18.580loved a salad yeah every now and then so it seems like the conspiracism really ramps up around the
00:18:25.260Occupy Wall Street stuff in 2011, you know, after the police cracked down on the protesters.
00:18:30.480She says this is like a new era of fascism in America. She then publishes a book in 2012 called
00:18:36.520Vagina, a new biography. There's a 2019 article in New York Times called Naomi Wolf's Career of
00:18:43.400Blunders Continues, where they say, vagina so profoundly misrepresented the workings of the1.00
00:18:50.240brain i'm not sure science writers have recovered this is a very troubling interpretation of science1.00
00:18:55.740i can't find the data behind her claims beverly whipple the scientist who discovered the g-spot
00:19:00.940said upon reading it hold on there's one lady who discovered the g-spot well we all we all know men
00:19:05.860have never found it huge l for dudes huge l for dudes well so what is the science that is being0.51
00:19:12.000proffered in the book vagina i i was like i don't want to look this up but then i was curious i0.78
00:19:17.760guess she's saying that like vaginas can feel grief you can tell someone's like internal mental0.82
00:19:23.080state by like measuring various things in their vagina kind of like a mood ring or something0.84
00:19:28.480i just don't think that's true i do think it's true that just sounds right to me i think it was
00:19:34.760something where like again her heart is in the right place like yeah reclaiming destigmatizing
00:19:38.940gray michael you do not have to read that i'm trying this is classic hobbs he's like you know0.99
00:19:46.520you're like look the we have to admit the vagina is magical well there's a whole thing where gay0.99
00:19:54.280men pretend to be grossed out by vaginas and i don't want to do that but i am genuinely like0.99
00:19:58.880very bewildered by the whole thing sure so when she's like vaginas feel grief i'm like i don't0.99
00:20:03.020know does my penis feel grief okay sometimes yeah all right no i i i sort of assumed that like the0.97
00:20:09.100title of the book was like a little bit of shock value right vagina monologues like yeah we're0.99
00:20:13.200crossing that sort of social boundary and just saying vagina to get your attention. But it's0.99
00:20:19.500actually pretty cool to write a book that's like vaginas can think.1.00
00:20:23.560Yeah. See, you've reached the Hobbes singularity.1.00
00:20:29.160So then the next decade, it seems like she sort of falls deeper into conspiracy land. I'm going
00:20:35.260to send you a excerpt from Klein's book. In the decades since Occupy, Wolf has connected the dots
00:20:41.520between an almost unfathomably large number of disparate bits of fact and fantasy.
00:20:46.040She has floated unsubstantiated speculations about the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden,
00:20:50.480saying he is, quote, not who he purports to be, hinting that he is an active spy.
00:20:55.720About U.S. troops sent to build field hospitals in West Africa during the 2014 Ebola outbreak,
00:21:01.380she has said this was not an attempt to stop the disease's spread,
00:21:04.040but a plot to bring it to the United States to justify mass lockdowns at home.0.99
00:21:09.040OK, that's just right wing shit. I remember that.0.99
00:21:13.920About ISIS beheadings of U.S. and British captives, she has said these were possibly not real murders, but staged covert ops by the U.S. government starring crisis actors.
00:21:23.580About the results of the 2014 Scottish referendum on independence, which the no vote won by a margin of more than 10 percent, she claimed the results were potentially fraudulent based on an assortment of testimonies she collected.
00:24:56.020when that initial when she's like well that's an important thing to invest someone should look
00:25:01.380into this just devastating i'm i'm just i'm i'm retreating from public life if i'm in her shoes
00:25:07.960it's game over it's so dark how he's like oh i went to the old bailey website right
00:25:13.360found the correction like the first place you would go for like super basic fact checking0.92
00:25:19.080dude like i fucking googled it is how is how he found out naomi oh naomi like fundamentally you're0.96
00:25:27.700not a fucking historian you're way out of your depth you why are you doing this it's it's even0.97
00:25:32.520worse than this peter because this book is a adaptation of her phd thesis she went back to0.99
00:25:39.420school as an adult oh god bless this is what's so fucking fascinating to me and like a weird
00:25:43.820like systemic breakdown how did nobody else read this like didn't she do a phd defense0.99
00:25:49.640of this in front of other academics she has a supervisor and her supervisor claudine gay0.83
00:25:55.740when this popped up this was like the first time that the average person
00:26:00.560who's like moderately well read heard any real detail about her yeah yeah but when
00:26:08.080it pops up in the context of her career, it's sort of like, well, yeah. Well, of course.
00:26:15.400The death recorded part of this interview is the part that I think gets the most attention.
00:26:19.620But that thing at the end, right before the little sound effect, is in some ways potentially worse.
00:26:25.980The whole book is about how consensual relations between gay men were prosecuted and gay men were
00:26:31.700executed for their consensual relationships. A lot of the examples are actually child molesters.0.90
00:26:36.560Right. Like a lot of these people were like monsters. And you're saying it was like homophobic to put them in jail. Like, I'm sure the prison system was very bad back then. But it's like, you need to find real cases of this. You can't have like one guy, I think, had sex with like a horse or something. And it's like, whatever you think about that, it's not a consensual human relationship, Naomi. It shouldn't be part of your book.0.73
00:26:58.800Yeah. The only word they can say is nay.
00:27:04.020You have to have stolen that from something, Peter.