The latest example comes courtesy of Marxist and feminist Naomi Wolf. The thesis of her latest book is that Occidental Culture has a history of violently censoring differing forms of love in order to preserve the supposedly oppressive patriarchy. (When reading differing forms of love, understand that this is feminist double-speak, meaning fornication, adultery, homosexuality and other forms of sexual deviancy.) There’s just one problem: it’s all based on a gross misreading of history.
In one particular instance, Wolf misinterpreted the UK legal phrase “death recorded” to mean that homosexuals were routinely executed in the United Kingdom for the crime of being homosexuals. During a BBC radio interview, a Dr. Matthew Sweet exposed Wolf’s error by confronting her about the redefinition. The exchange is as follows:
Wolf: I found, like, several dozen executions, uh, but that was again only looking at the old daily records in the crime tables…
Sweet: I don’t think you’re right about this…I was really surprised by this…death recorded is what’s in most of these cases that you’ve identified as executions. It doesn’t mean that he was executed. It was a category that was created in 1823 that allowed judges to abstain from pronouncing a sentence of death on any capital convict. I don’t think any of the executions you’ve identified there actually happened. [Emphasis Mine]
As of this writing, Wolf’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has decided to pause the release of the book in the US due to her premise being exposed as fraudulent and faulty. However, Wolf continues to double-down on her claims, stating that she immediately made “the necessary changes” and opposes the hold the on the book’s release. Nothing like good ol’ damage control to squelch the fact that a demagogue routinely demagogues.
Wolf is no exception to the long line of charlatanry displayed by her forerunners, such as Betty Friedan. Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was one massive communist propaganda missive, written to convince American women into thinking that the traditional gender role for women is a “comfortable concentration camp”. Friedan was heavily influenced by the teachings of Communist USA Party member Dorothy Wolf Douglas, who taught that the Nazi’s held to traditionalist and therefore oppressive views of religion, marriage and children. Douglas contrasted this with what she taught was the condition of women in the USSR, being equal to men and also claiming that they didn’t suffer the same oppression women in Germany experienced. Friedan took this ahistorical trope and claimed that women in America suffered similar oppression to those in Nazi Germany. Her book helped to move along the religion of man-hating in the US and other places in the West.
Feminism as well as the so-called “LGBT movement” are all one big push to continue to grow the legacy of shaming masculinity, by convincing the public that manliness is “toxic” and that it ought to be replaced by absolute femininity. Wolf is just another example of how feminists distort history in order to accomplish this goal.
Jiovanne Del Cristo 