Could do better?

[sawyl]

I wasn't going to read Jenny Turner's essay on Naomi Wolf's Vagina: A New Biography — a book whose combination of wobbly science, new-age woo and TMI disclosures don't seem to have won it many friends — but the more-in-sorrow pull quote caught my attention:

Between jobs, I guess Wolf has never stopped trying to think big thoughts about women and politics and feminism. How some things change and others don't. How the same things need to be said afresh for every generation, and how hard it is to bear this, as you yourself get older and feel you've heard it all before. How much you'd like to warn the youngsters, except that all they hear when you try it is their utter conviction that they themselves will never end up like you. Exhaustion, irritation, frustration at all these goldfish-brain debatelets, repeating themselves, round and round. In a world with Jessie J and Jamie Clayton in it, Caster Semenya and the work of Judith Butler, why are we still letting one of the Anglophone world's most famous feminists waste everyone's time with all this burble about the "universal feminine" with its "Goddess-shaped" hole?

Ouch.