having been confused (by name, not in per- son) with the supermodel Naomi Campbell. But more often, it’s at the expense of Wolf, who is, you see, not a very serious person. Not now, in her conspiratorial period, but also not ever. W hen Outrages went bust back in 2019, it was chic to write about how, actually, Naomi Wolf had never been any good. In particular, the work she’s known for, The Beauty Myth , can’t have been any good (even though many did remember it as powerful) given that Wolf was the one who wrote it. Slate , The New Republic , and The New York Times all ran essays about how Wolf was always a lightweight or worse. Klein stands with the revisionist historians. She recounts a conversation with her mother- in-law, a former newspaper columnist: “‘Well, I didn’t think much of that Beauty Myth book; there wasn’t much new there. But we were all glad that this pretty young woman was choosing to identify as a feminist.’” Klein sim- ply adds, “That made a lot of sense.” It lines up with what Klein remembers of her own first encounter with the book: “There was nothing in my quick read of The Beauty Myth that was new or revelatory to someone raised by a second-wave feminist who had made a documentary film about pornography eleven years before.” Not everyone had this response—but then again, not everyone’s mother makes femin- ist documentaries. Maris Kreizman, writing in The New Republic , explains that she knows better now, but that her initial re- sponse to the book was to feel, well, seen: “If Wolf’s debut felt trite and inadequately argued to anyone paying attention, then I decidedly hadn’t been. The Beauty Myth made me question my surroundings in a way that no other book had at the time... I had never taken a women’s studies class; I tended to get most of my information from women’s magazines, from broadcast TV, from the canon of literature we read in my English classes, from late-night drunken conversations.” My own reaction was far closer to Kreiz- man’s. When I first read The Beauty Myth , in 2013, it seemed plenty novel, but growing up, we had fashion magazines around the apartment, not political manifestos. T he doppelganger phenomenon implies asymmetry: there is the real person, and then there is that individual’s sinister double. This is Klein’s book, not Wolf’s, and Wolf (understandably) refused to participate.
most important issues of the day. Klein does not merely namecheck Ukraine and climate change as topics “the war” might instead have referred to, had Wolf been more plugged in, but goes into specifics about where both were in the news at the time. This is a pattern throughout the book, this swinging back and forth between calm analysis and reminders that Naomi Wolf is a fool. In trying to make sense of what draws otherwise sensible people to conspiracy I should be thinking about how terrifying it is—and it is!—that propagandists made the pandemic worse. Instead, I’m wasting time wondering, But how does Naomi Wolf feel?
surprise. My politics are closer to Klein’s than Wolf’s. I’d like to believe I’m on the side of reason and data and whatnot, regarding COVID and in general, and have the vaccine confirmation emails to prove it. I think the Nazi imagery Wolf and others embrace, presenting anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers as akin to Holocaust victims, is abhorrent. If I were granted the ability to remove the social media presence of one of these women, Wolf’s would be the obvious choice. Yet Wolf, in Doppelganger , represents human foibles. She’s the Hannah Horvath of Girls and George Costanza of Seinfeld, the figure in whom the reader—a reader probably less accomplished than Klein, because who isn’t?—sees herself at her lowest points. T he central tension in Doppelganger is whether Naomi Wolf is a danger or a dingbat. If it’s the latter, then the book is a punch down, a public intellectual com- ing down rather hard on someone whose intellectual capacities are not what they once were. Klein insists that it’s the former, citing Wolf’s current status as a member of Steve Bannon and therefore Donald Trump’s inner orbit. She warns against those who’d “under- estimate” Wolf, whose anti-vaccine conspir- acy theorizing gave her a new, substantial platform on the right. The sophisticated reader is meant to look past the Wolf thing, to understand that Wolf is but a lens into big ideas: misinformation, totalitarianism, literature, history, psycho- analysis, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The problem is the book itself, which returns again and again to Wolf. Doppelganger would not be getting the level of coverage it is, I suspect, if it were merely Naomi Klein, major thinker, sharing her interpretation of world events. The book needs the Wolf angle, and boy does the Wolf angle provide. The low-hanging dingbat-flavoured fruit on offer was just too tempting to omit. Klein opens a chapter with a discussion of Wolf using, in her newsletter, the expres- sion, “‘What did you do in the war?’—re- ferring not to any actual war, but to the ultimately unfounded concern that she’d be denied a bowl of $6 overnight oats at an upscale Manhattan hotel, on account of her unvaccinated status. The gist of the anecdote is that Wolf has no sense of perspective. Klein spells out that, through her language choices (“lunch counter”), Wolf is comparing her oatmeal woes to Black Americans’ Civil Rights-era protests. But the oatmeal tale also conveys that Klein—unlike Wolf—knows to triage the
theorizing, Klein writes that she understands why “white suburban moms” would feel “done with being dismissed and mocked as ‘Karens.’” Later on the same page, she refers to Wolf as “a onetime-famous feminist who now wants to speak to the manager”—a reference to the meme about “Karens” being past-it, entitled white ladies who request to speak to higher-ups in customer-service situations, and who call the cops if they see a Black person. Does it help matters to call Naomi Wolf a “Karen,” or does that just rev up Wolf’s admirers? Occasionally, the book’s humour (and it’s not, on the whole, a funny book, nor need it be) is self-deprecatory, as when Klein recalls
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