r/AskReddit • u/DrCompenomics • 12h ago

Who’s the best real-life example of “you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” and what happened?

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u/suburban_ennui75 10h ago

Naomi Wolf was an important public intellectual in the 90s, and is legitimately batshit crazy now.

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u/LaMaupindAubigny 8h ago

I feel so bad for Naomi Klein. I was always mixing them up until I learned “Klein=Fine, Woolf=Oof”!

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u/vibraltu 7h ago

Naomi Klein wrote an excellent book about personal identity and conspiracy ideology, which starts off with people mistaking her for her kooky nemesis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppelganger:_A_Trip_into_the_Mirror_World

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u/DKoala 4h ago

Such an excellent book, especially if you want to see how we got to where we are in regards to public and political discourse after COVID.

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u/unwantedonONTD 4h ago

Yeah I read Doppelganger a couple years ago and it still comes to mind almost daily.  She’s a pretty clear-eyed voice on the way the world is, and who stands to gain and such from everything being a mess

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u/RogueSwoobat 6h ago

Literally reading this I was thinking of Klein and was like "Wait, is she really that crazy?"

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u/JMishMosh 6h ago

I always confuse Naomi Wolf and Michelle Wolf.

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u/jaimonee 8h ago

Hahaha same! Then I remembered her husband is the new leader of the NDP, so she's still fighting the good fight.

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u/jakc1423 6h ago

I have this issue with Heath Ledger and jared leto for some dumb reason.

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u/AcrolloPeed 5h ago

Even their respective Wikipedia pages have “not be confused with Naomi (other name)” at the top of each.

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u/WorryNew3661 2h ago

I fall for this every god damn time. Hopefully this will help me remember

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u/FartSchoolDropout 2h ago

Omg thank you for this handy rhyme. I am also forever mixing them up!

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u/NoveltyAccountHater 7h ago edited 4h ago

Naomi Wolf was an important public intellectual in the 90s, and is legitimately batshit crazy now.

Wolf wrote popular non-fiction books on feminism and advised the Clinton campaign in 1996, but wasn't ever really an intellectual and was a pseudo-intellectual at best. Like her breakthrough book initially claimed 150,000 American women died each year due to anorexia and bulimia, misquoting a source that estimated 150,000 women suffered from those conditions (~100-400 people died). She stated 7.5% of girls and women suffered anorexia instead of 0.065%. An academic reviewing her book published a paper stating "18 of 23 statistics are inaccurate and overdone. On average, a statistic on anorexia by Naomi Wolf should be divided by eight to get close to the real figure.". In a later 2019 book talking about prosecutions of homosexuals in London, she confused the term for pardons/commutations with being an execution (granted in Victorian England the legal term for a pardon was "death recorded"). Similarly, she interpreted all crimes of sodomy as being for homosexual acts, while in Victorian England it also included various other sexual offenses like rape, bestiality, and pedophilia.

(This isn't to criticize feminism as a whole or even the central tenet that society forcing unrealistic beauty standards are harmful to women; just to criticize her specifically shoddy research. Having a specialty in shoddy research makes her transition to anti-vax movement relatively clear.)

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u/NoTeslaForMe 5h ago

her  breakthrough book initially claimed 150,000 American women died each year due to anorexia and bulemia, misquoting a source that estimated 150,000 women  suffered  from those conditions (~100-400 people died)

Sounds like she was ahead of her time. These types are "mistakes" are endemic nowadays. 

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u/NoveltyAccountHater 4h ago edited 4h ago

It's also that the initial claim is absurd and anyone with basic numeracy skills thinking about it would see it's insane. If 150k people are dying from eating disorders per year, that's like 1.5M deaths in a decade.

The US has a population of 250 million at the time, but most of these aren't high risk for anorexia. There's only about 20 million girls aged 14 to 24 when this was written, which is the main risk group for developing eating disorders. (Yes this is simplifying assumption assuming only affects young girls, but these are the peak prevalence).

So she was claiming 150k of 20,000k girls or one in 133 girls will die of anorexia/bulimia each year. So if a high school has 1600 students (800 girls), you should expect on average about 6 deaths from anorexia/bulimia per year (or about 24 anorexia deaths during a four year high school experience). I'm in a town with a high school of that size and whenever a kid dies for any reason (which is much rarer than 6 per year; probably more like 1 every 4 years), its huge news (and it's usually a car accident).

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u/PeaceSoft 4h ago

That truly verges on a grasp of the other person's point

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u/fresh-dork 3h ago

This isn't to criticize feminism as a whole or even the central tenet that society forcing unrealistic beauty standards are harmful to women;

the criticism of feminism would be that they only apply that to women - as if men aren't also subject to the same pressures

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u/Brassens71 6h ago

When she wrote that tweet about how the air in Belfast was so much cleaner because they didn't have 5G... in 2019. She could have googled it, but instead decided to make a fool of herself because facts didn't fit the narrative she wanted to create.

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u/trollthumper 1h ago

Wasn’t that also the same tweet that said the city felt nice and peaceful like she was back in the Seventies?

The Seventies. In Belfast.

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u/LurkerZerker 41m ago

Similarly, Ioften find myself longing for the old-timey peace and prosperity of Paris in 1940.

(/s, just in case)

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u/Sweeper1985 10h ago

The Beauty Myth still holds up. It's a fucking shame.

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u/colaxxi 6h ago

It really doesn't, there's so much deliberately wrong information in it.

See this comment below for details. Or if you want an entertaining podcast episode about her.

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u/Turgid_Donkey 6h ago

I was wondering why this episode didn't sound familiar, but that's because I listen on Amazon Music and it's not listed there. That said, I really enjoy these guys.

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u/Gladyskravitz99 6h ago

I loved this book when it was published. It was one of my top feminist reads, and I put it on my son's reading list right before she started spouting her bizarro garbage. That put everything she has ever said or written in question for me, sadly.

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u/AilisEcho 7h ago

Wait, it was a suggested read in my class. I admit I didn't read it except mandatory chapters, but what's wrong with it, give me tea please!

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u/OkSecretary1231 5h ago

The statistics are bad (IIRC the number of deaths from anorexia was her misunderstanding the number of people who had anorexia period), the ideas are mostly fine. Society really was ridiculous at the time about things like people's weight, especially women's, and we're headed back that way.

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u/ericdalieux 7h ago

They said the book still holds up, so nothing wrong with it.

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u/POGtastic 5h ago

No! No!!

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u/Capital-Exercise-364 3h ago

She was always a wingnut. It’s harder to write a bad book with a valid underlying thesis, but by gum, she did it.

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u/amishgoatfarm 2h ago

Bought and read The End of America when I was in college, and ate it up as a kid who cut his teeth in the punk scene in a post-9/11 world.

Then I did basic reading past the veil of the book's premise and realized her use of selective history. And then she went bat shit crazy.