In a Time article, author Naomi Wolf shot back at critics who attacked her psuedo-scientific, airy-fairy "Vagina: A New Biography," for being too pseudo-scientific and airy-fairy. But much of Wolf's self-justifying rebuttal amounts to her complaining that critics don't like her book because people are afraid to talk about women and sex.
See here:
While many responses to my book were positive, the tone of some of the critiques—from “mystic woo woo about the frou frou" to “bad news for everyone who has one” — suggests to me that our culture, even one in which Fifty Shades of Grey is being devoured by millions of women, still has problems discussing women’s sexuality in a positive, empowering way. And we need — perhaps women especially — to be able to have that conversation.
And then there's:
Indeed, serious or even remotely respectful discourse about women’s erotic well-being has been so marginalized that in today’s climate, when one brings new findings on female arousal and satisfaction into public debate, as I am doing with my book, I find that one must make the case from the start that these numbers — and female sexual satisfaction — matter at all.
What Wolf doesn't seem to understand is the criticisms against her book --which the New York Review of Books described as "a shoddy piece of work, full of childlike generalizations and dreary, feminist auto-think" -- are not about vaginas or feminism or limiting public debate. On the contrary, they are about smacking down what critics see as a notably flimsy, wrongheaded work, one that might even be capable of setting back what Wolf calls "the supposedly sexually liberated society we now live in."
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