Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/22/publisher-cans-naomi-wolf-book.html
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On the face of it, this almost seems like censorship.
But reading the fine article shows it to be more of a case of responsible fact checking and re-evaluation of the data.
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It’s too bad, I would actually like to read a (well researched) book on the topic.
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The BBC interview where she was gently informed of her misunderstanding is painful to watch. It is hard to find a version on YouTube that isn’t all about how “the feminazi is caught in a lie” but this might do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uRCcEoGWxs
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Ditto, but not by Naomi Wolf. The error in fact checking I could at least understand since I too would have thought that’s what “death recorded” means - though I was aware sodomy carried a broader meaning of any sexual act not intended to procreate, because the term derives from God-bothers obsessed with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Book of Genesis.
But doing to ISIS’s victims and their families what Alex Jones and his conspiracy theory cult did to Sandy Hook and Stoneman Douglass shooting victims and families is unforgivable. Calling murder victims actors or crisis actors should automatically disqualify anyone in the eyes of a publisher from employing them to write about anything.
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She’s still free to publish it third party or self publish it. But the reality is, she’s played fast and loose too much with facts that I don’t think it’d move.
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I was rather surprised when Wolf’s - and seemingly her publisher’s - reaction to finding out that she had fundamentally misunderstood the basic information that was the premise of her entire book was “the book just needs a few corrections.” That really didn’t seem like she understood the revelation. I guess her publisher (finally) did.
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I’m really impressed that the publisher actually pulled a book for being merely factually incorrect. That’s a very rare move for a publisher to take.
When the shelves are filled with books like this:
and this:
that are entirely unsupported by science and yet still sold in the nonfiction section.
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But reading the fine article shows it to be more of a case of responsible fact checking and re-evaluation of the data.
So it’ll still be fine on Facebook?
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Interestingly enough, an article like that would be ripe fodder for factcheck.org’s Facebook project.
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No one seems to be commenting that this book is based upon her doctoral thesis, which passed. Clearly she didn’t understand her sources, so why did no one point that out when she had to defend her thesis (or, ideally, well before that when she was doing her research)?
Spoiler answer: because PhDs are increasingly becoming cash-cows for institutions, including prestigious ones like Oxford, with few checks on the quality of the work being done. This is an embarrassment to the institution that granted her the degree (although frankly I do not think Oxford is remarkable in this practice)
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I just looked up her PhD supervisor and their areas of expertise should cover this (18th 19th c comparative literature with a focus on gender. A book on Oscar wilde…)
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Yes, of course it should! Presumably that is why he agreed to be her advisor in the first place. And then there are the other members of her committee, and the external examiner… It certainly possible that her supervisor was simply slack, but everyone should not have been. And yet, here we are.
Increasingly many graduate degrees exist primarily as monetized commodities for institutions, while international students are viewed as cash cows. It is incredibly depressing.
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You’re absolutely right. I am just wondering if there will be any collateral damage?
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I’m just surprised that it took four months.
When the central premise of the book is so easily refuted by minimal fact-checking, then this suggests that the author isn’t exactly familiar with the concept of opinions needing to be backed with anything so mundane as empirical evidence, which naturally makes everything else that they’ve written fairly suspect as well.
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