My company makes a product that aids healthcare providers with difficult births. We’re seeing record sales and when our field personnel visit L&D departments, they are full up with people giving birth.
My days of not taking Naomi Wolf seriously are rapidly coming to a middle.
I still can’t get past “heavily pregnant”. I dunno what that’s supposed to mean.
Otherwise, this person is a nutter.
She’s not shy about jumping to conclusions.
Naomi Wolf admits blunder over Victorians and sodomy executions | Naomi Wolf | The Guardian.
Some bigots understand that very well, so they want the right kind of people to have more children. “Family values” and “traditional values” boil down to women staying at home and popping out sprogs to make the nation great again.
Bingo. This disgraced academic is trafficking in yet another variation of Great Replacement conspiracism.
I’m a bit conflicted on that one. I didn’t hear it live, but almost live. As in just after it happened on the radio that she was confronted with the mistake I heard a recording of it and I felt terribly sorry for her. Now I would have when I was in college actually read case law relating to convictions and sentencing for Victorian era sodomy laws (still in force in Ireland at the time despite a European court of human rights ruling) and I couldn’t honestly remember that term of art. Perhaps I would find it in the legal literature though I don’t recall, but I doubt in English lit.
[ETA it’s actually from an 1823 statute rather than just being a common law term as I had for some reason assumed. That said it’s not in contemporary legal dictionaries (nor in the one very old one I looked at) and searching on several databases didn’t reveal an extensive literature on the phenomenon. Yes, if I’d looked for the phrase I would have immediately found it but I’m not sure I would have thought to. The literature skews very Australian for some reason!]
My first thought when she was confronted with that on live radio was sympathy for her. Who would want to have years of work destroyed in an instant? Then that the supervisor wasn’t qualified (I checked immediately and they should have been). And then that the field had failed to a large extent. Many people failed. I’m sure it was devastating for her in a way most of us can’t imagine.
I vaguely knew one person who later went on to become a prominent fascist and she suffered a series of personal and professional traumas (and was a fucking arsehole) which ended up with her embracing every crazy theory in the land, including all the fascist ones. She took on a billionaire and had her life destroyed. Everything became a conspiracy.
She’s unhinged now of course. But our world does do that to people. I remember talking ro a barrister about the people with cardboard signs detailing their victimisation at the hands of the state outside the Four Courts and saying “sure they are all a bit mad, but they are not wrong”. Naomi Wolfe isn’t that of course but she is deranged by encounter with things beyond her control.
This is not intended as an excuse for anything but just as a tiny attempt to understand what is happening.
From the interviews I’ve heard with Naomi Klein about this, it seems like that event was what precipitated her shift to the right like this… because she was publicly humiliated like that… Agreed it’s not excuse, but this seems to be the start of her slide to the far right.
It was frankly horrifying and I thought at the time she handled it as well as you could. It really was the kind of event where scholars were saying “did you hear that?” In the knowledge that could be them…
A lot of people let her down, she of course bears the responsibility, but Jesus, readers, reviewers, editors, it is your job to find these. It’s why I feel no shame in making critical suggestions to the odd person I read before publication, particularly if I might know something a long, long way from their field.
Must read the Doppelgänger book. I’m just watching too many movies at the moment!
I think that is the time when strangers want to touch the pregnant person’s belly.
And I’d bet dollars to donuts, the person posting that also completely ignored or dismissed excess deaths while arguing Covid is just the flu/a hoax over the past couple of years.
Ouch. Throughout the lockdown phases I was super-glad my wife and I stayed in sync with our reactions and politics. I’ve watched acquaintances just slip out of reality with this stuff, and I can’t imagine the strain of living under the same roof raising kids together with one of them.
They don’t ignore excess deaths, they blame “the vaccine”.
Same goes for anyone who “died suddenly”. Someone on Xitter even said that Alexei Navalny was killed by the Pfizer vaccine, which has never been used in Russia.
As a woman who’s had a kid myself, I can elaborate; it means when a woman is in or near the last stages of the pregnancy, when it looks like her abdomen is about to split at the seams.
A good friend of mine had a baby last year, and at the end of her gestation, she was HUGE.
I don’t know what fuck-shit nonsense Klein Wolf is pulling out of her ass; there are still a metric fuckton women who are preggers, waddling around right now, just waiting to pop.
Edited to correct name.
Well, yet another bad idea represented by three Ks. Luckily, Krispy Kreme didn’t decide to open a Kolache shop.
Thank you for that. I was just about to post about the common confusion. It has gotten so bad that Naomi Klein was forced to write an entire book - Doppelganger - to explain that she is the other Naomi. Personally, I suspect the confusion is encouraged by the fascists.
She is the fringe, and she’s dangerous. As Naomi Klein’s book describes, she is partners with Steve Bannon in his campaign of disinformation.
And that’s how easy it is. I have to stop and think every time I use one of their names. May I refer you to @Immutable_Mike’s valuable mnemonic above?
I found that one very puzzling in that the fact that one is…ill advised…to read even contemporary law as though it’s in the natural language it resembles rather than being specialist jargon was pretty well known; and(while it wouldn’t have acquainted you with the right terms of art) you don’t major in English literature without at least brushing up against some critical theory that is essentially impenetrable unless you acknowledge it as specialist jargon and work with it accordingly.
Certainly a situation where you wouldn’t expect her to know what the term of art means; but one where you would expect a recognition that the primary sources are absolutely larded with potential misunderstandings; with special reason to suspect trouble if your reading of it is leading to a conclusion that differs remarkably from the prevailing understanding. I’d imagine that the attraction of having a novel thesis must have helped encourage some amount of haste.
Nope; thanks anyway.
I was distracted and wrote the wrong Naomi.
Fixed now.
Depends on the strain of nutter. I think denying excess deaths came first, before a new variant conspiracy spread, but there was a ton of overlap so 
Plenty of them denied there was an increase in excess deaths then shifted to "ok, but it’s the vaccine’s fault. And almost as many still insist on both, switching back and forth without batting an eye
Doppelganger is fantastic, and actually goes into depth about how Wolf and her fellows are having a negative effect in the world as @anon61221983 noted upthread too.
