A fatal misunderstanding

What is it about Naomi Wolf that inspires such venom? Perhaps that she’s American, brash, media-savvy and not averse to showing off her impressive embonpoint, which might go down badly in academe. But also — she makes mistakes. She made a pretty bad mistake in her very first book, The Beauty Myth, published in l990, by saying that 150,000 women died of anorexia in the US every year — whereas in fact she should have said 150,000 women suffered from anorexia. In this book, she seems to have dropped an even bigger clanger.

Matthew Sweet started the ball rolling on his Radio 3 Free Thinking programme, when he told her that she was quite wrong to say that the number of executions for sodomy increased in the latter half of the l9th century. She had misunderstood a term — ‘death recorded’ — in the Old Bailey records which did not mean that the defendant had actually been executed but that the judge had set aside the death sentence and shown leniency. And that she was therefore wrong to dispute the generally accepted fact that the last execution for sodomy was in 1835.

Wolf handled this body blow gracefully. She thanked Dr Sweet for pointing out her error and said that of course she would correct it in future editions. In subsequent interviews, she made it sound like an oversight that could be amended with an erratum slip on p. 71. But actually it’s far more serious than that, because it undermines the whole basis of her book.

She argues that ‘modern homophobia’ was born in 1857, when the introduction of the Matrimonial Causes Act made sodomy a threat to marriage. The Act legalised civil divorce for the first time and meant that a husband could readily divorce his wife if she committed adultery.