The Fire of Liberty with Naomi Wolf

The Fire of Liberty with Naomi Wolf

One of the world’s most influential feminists and bestselling author Naomi Wolf doesn’t just comment on the world’s most pervasive problems, she aims to solve them. At age 23, Dr. Wolf published The Beauty Myth, her landmark international bestseller that challenged the cosmetics industry and the marketing of unrealistic beauty standards. Considered one of the most important books of the 20th century by the New York Times, the book launched a new wave of feminism and is still taught on campuses around the world.

Naomi Wolf completed a D.Phil. in English Literature from the University of Oxford in 2015 and taught Victorian Studies as a Visiting Professor at SUNY Stony Brook. She was a research fellow at the Barnard Center for Research on Women and at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. She taught English Literature at George Washington University as a visiting lecturer. She’s lectured widely on the themes in Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, at Balliol College, Oxford, and to the undergraduates in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford.

She spoke about the themes in Outrages for the first LGBTQ Colloquium at Rhodes House. Naomi Wolf is a former Rhodes Scholar and a Yale graduate. She’s written eight nonfiction bestsellers, about women’s issues and about civil liberties, and is the CEO of DailyClout.io, a news site which explains US state and Federal legislation. She holds an honorary doctorate from Sweet Briar College. She and her family live in New York City.

Website Link: hhttp://outragesbook.com/

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Until 1857, the State did not link the idea of homosexuality to deviancy. In the same year, the concept of the obscene was coined. New York Times best-selling author Naomi Wolf’s Outrages is the story, brilliantly told, of why this two-pronged State repression took hold — first in England and spreading quickly to America — and why it was attached so dramatically, for the first time, to homosexual men. Before 1857, it wasn’t homosexuality that was a crime, but the act of sodomy. But in a single stroke, not only did love between men become illegal, but anything referring to this love alsowas ruled obscene, unprintable, unspeakable.

Wolf paints the dramatic ways this played out among a bohemian group of sexual dissidents, including American poet Walt Whitman and closeted English critic John Addington Symonds, as, decades before the infamous 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde, dire prison terms became the government’s penalty for homosexuality. Most powerfully, Wolf recounts how a dying Symonds helped write the book on sexual inversion that created our modern understanding of homosexuality. And she argues that his secret memoir, mined here fully for the first time, stands as the first gay rights manifesto in the West.

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Naomi Wolf Quotes

Peaceful, lawful protest – if it is effective – is innately disruptive of ‘business as usual.’ That is why it is effective.

The press doesn’t stop publishing, by the way, in a fascist escalation; it simply watches what it says. That too can be an incremental process, and the pace at which the free press polices itself depends on how journalists are targeted.

To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren’t is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men’s sexual – and hence social – confidence while undermining that of women.

A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.

A Mother who radiates self-love and self-acceptance actually VACCINATES her daughter against low self-esteem.

Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth, and that is not speaking.

The First Amendment applies to rogues and scoundrels. You don’t lose your First Amendment rights because of a sleazy personality, or even for having committed a crime. Felons in jail are protected by the First Amendment.