Okay, can I just say how irritating I find and have always found Naomi Wolf? She has a talent for repackaging ideas that most educated people have deemed chestnuts for the past twenty years and selling them to the mass media as if they were new. Hence The Beauty Myth. I pre-ordered that book back when it came out in the Pleistocene era, thinking I was about to read something new about women and appearance from this Yale-educated Rhodes scholar, and instead it was the same stuff available in the middlebrow press for the previous bazillion years (I recall a much more entertaining article in the WaPo about fifteen years ago that talked about body type in relation to political climate, por ejemplo). This as opposed to Susan Faludi's Backlash, which came out within a year or two of The Beauty Myth, IIRC, and had legitimately interesting things to say and relied more on actual punditry.

Just decided to take a look at her WaPo article on Paris Hilton. Why did I bother? I could have written the damn thing for her. Paris, so La Wolf claims, is this generation's version of Zelda Fitzgerald, apparently, a regressive throwback as women have gained so much power. Hello? What exactly happened in 2007 that made us need Paris Hilton? What threatening signs of women's power have appeared on the horizon recently? What a reductive, simplistic argument. Take a look:

Most American women are becoming ever more comfortable with their capabilities
as they break into new professional roles, learn how to do electrical wiring or
automobile maintenance, tackle life insurance, IRAs and tax planning on behalf
of the many configurations of family they are nurturing, or even put their lives
on the line as warriors in Iraq. They are surprising themselves and the culture every day by not falling apart as they take on tasks that the prefeminist world was sure
would lead them to collapse in a heap, needing smelling salts.

Yep, it's surprising the culture every day, what these women can do. Um, Rosie the Riveter, anyone? Or Vera Brittain? And a reference to smelling salts, forsooth. Gah.

Also: punditry of this type is incredibly hard to pull off unless you have a really broad frame of reference combined with the ability to analyze and see in unexpected ways.

Also, I'm willing to believe that Paris Hilton represents something sordid and unseemly in American culture, something worth thinking about that gives me an excuse for reading TMZ and sampling the Zeitgeist. I'd love it if someone could give me an alibi.