Naomi Wolf was destroyed
by her research bias
The Post Millenial [CAN],
by
Libby Emmons
Original Article
Posted By: MissMolly,
5/26/2019 5:19:51 AM
Naomi Wolf went on Matthew Sweet’s BBC show Sounds to promote her new book Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love, but she wasn’t expecting the entire premise of the book to be taken apart, and she for sure wasn’t expecting it to have it happen in a few short minutes.
The book is about the poet John Addington Symonds, and the increased prosecution of homosexuality in the 19th century and onward, resulting in contemporary pervasive homophobic views. But it kind of doesn’t matter if she’s right or wrong, because she misread the research rather dramatically.
Wolf’s claim is that backlash against homosexuality in the late 1800’s was about curtailing behaviour
Reply 1 - Posted by:
Highlander 5/26/2019 5:37:15 AM (No. 84403)
Crashed and burned, hung on your own petard, because you wanted to be the flag-bearer leading the charge against all the evil homophobes who persecuted the poor, innocent gays who just wanted only to love those of the same gender. Her bias did her in spectacularly.
9 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
WhamDBambam 5/26/2019 7:04:48 AM (No. 84434)
"Facts? What are facts?"
2 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
Nevadadad46 5/26/2019 7:39:34 AM (No. 84455)
How embarrassing. But, then again, you can not embarrass someone with an agenda from a cabal of agenda adherents. No more than you can embarrass a religious fanatic in front of his followers. The liars simply fade back into the praise of their adherents, "Oh, you were so brave!" and soon they are right back at the keyboard spewing more lies.
7 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
udanja99 5/26/2019 7:48:09 AM (No. 84458)
Sounds like she was about as successful with this as she was with her advice to Algore to wear “earth tones” during his presidential campaign.
5 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
cThree 5/26/2019 9:20:36 AM (No. 84506)
I have some sympathy for Naomi Wolf, in line with writer Libby Emmons' point, "This brings into question not only Wolf’s book, and her research method, but the standards of publication."
The cuts of editors and fact checkers and the like have been so deep, writers are on their own. "But accuracy, for historical books like this, needs to be a team effort.... Wolf was, in part, done a disservice by her editors, publisher, and their staff for no one having done the due diligence to check this thing out."
"In part," because "more importantly, she was done in by her impulse to believe her theory...."
So yes, the headline is true, but it's not the whole story.
3 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
Pepper Tree 5/26/2019 10:13:01 AM (No. 84529)
No surprise at all. The left frequently makes up their own definitions
and “history” facts. ‘Gay’ used to mean happy and celebratory.
3 people like this.
Questions: Will the book get pulled? If not, how many people will read this and take it for the honest truth? I know what I think the answers are.
4 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
Chuzzles 5/26/2019 11:40:07 AM (No. 84580)
Could be that she made a huge error in underestimating the validity of her research on the issue of homosexuality in Britain as well. The lifestyle is much more embedded into the fabric of their national life than it is here. So she was debating from a point of ignorance with a Brit who probably knows more about the subject than she ever will.
4 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
Mass Minority 5/26/2019 11:46:07 AM (No. 84585)
I think that Naomi Wolf definitely started her research with a pretty well thought through story line (she had the story and just wanted to support it. A lot of authors do this, if they are right then they don't get caught for the shoddy research). She also targeted a pretty uncritical audience, ie others just as committed ti tis theory of modern religious malice toward formerly well acceted gays.
The problem with this approach is that you tend to simply ignore many avenues fo thought and records simply because what you are looking at can be made to so clearly support you ideas. In this case Naomi made a pretty easy mistake. he read the Old Bailey records literally with no real understanding of the language of the courts. I'm guessing here but that death recorded notation is probably a well known quirk of the system. The reporter certainly found it easily enough. If so than many other crime historians would have known about it and probably written about it. This simply shows Naomi cut corners. She did not consult any old bailey experts or apparently any legal historians.
This is a classic case of confirmation bias. the first piece of data she found supported her preformed conclusion so she didn't dig any deeper. I truly wish she were the exception but unfortunately she is not.
1 person likes this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
happywarrior 5/26/2019 12:01:26 PM (No. 84590)
If you click on the link to Twitter and listen to the partial interview, Matthew Sweet tells her that one of her cases, Thomas Silver, was not executed but pardoned, and his offense was sodomy with a six-year-old boy. It would have been nice if the interview was filmed so we could see her mouth fall open.
3 people like this.
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