The big bad Wolf Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger pulls no punches—but is she punching up or down? By Phoebe Maltz Bovy
PHOTOGRAPHY BY GRANT HARDER
I t’s hard to picture anything more humili- ating than working on a project for nearly a decade only to learn, during a live radio interview, that you’ve messed up key details, thus rendering the entire work—and your reputation—suspect. On May 21, 2019, Naomi Wolf—a feminist author best known for her 1990 opus The Beauty Myth —went on BBC radio to promote her latest book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love . The host, Matthew Sweet, pointed out that Wolf had misinterpreted Victorian archival information. Men she’d claimed had been executed in Britain for homosexuality—rather crucial data for a history of homophobia—had in fact not been executed. Thanks to this and other similarly consequential errors, the U.S. publi- cation of Outrages was cancelled. If you’re reading this, wondering how the establishment-challenging activist, long known for her public commentary and analysis, an inspiration to college students for generations, and acclaimed author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine , could produce
such shoddy work, the time has come to spell out that there are actually two different high-profile author-activists named Naomi: Naomi Wolf and Naomi Klein. It apparently does require spelling out that Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf are two separate individuals: enough people have confused them that Klein wrote a book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World , riffing on her experiences having this double of sorts. In Doppelganger , Klein writes that the two Naomis had been confused for a while, but that things only got interesting on that front when, shortly after the Outrages episode, Wolf went all-in as a COVID conspiracy theorist. Wolf’s shift in focus from liberal feminism to aimless crackpottery and then to unhinged social critique had the unfortunate effect of putting her work in the same thematic wheel- house as Klein’s: both Naomis were now on what seemed, from the outside, like the same major-world-events, secret-corruption-exposed beat. This left Klein forced to defend her own reputation—all the while being a leftist critical
of the very notion of a personal brand. Over the phone, in an interview on Oct. 2, Klein insists upon the book’s wider scope. “It’s important to just say off the top that the book is not just about the confusion between me and her. It is really about doubles and different kinds of doublings and doppelgang- ers that exist in the culture.” Klein is right that someone picking up the book in the hopes of a shallow account of people thinking this one lady is this other lady will be disappointed. The doppelgang- er theme is rich, potent, and leads Klein in many innovative directions. She covers sweeping territory that includes AI and deep- fakes, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Jordan Peele’s Us , and the general sorry state of the world. Writes Michelle Goldberg, in the New York Times , “Only in a superficial sense is Doppelganger really about Wolf… Instead, it’s about the instability of identity in the virtual world and the forces pulling people away from constructive politics into a shadow realm where clout chasing and conspiracy theorizing intertwine.”
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