Just Eat Me

In the Times a while ago:

[Naomi Wolf] added: “In 2012 we’re still living in the Victorian age when it comes to sexuality. Vagina has to be a household word. It should be a topic discussed at the dinner table when you’re having a dinner party.”

It will be a long time before readers of the new book hear the words “dinner party” without thinking of “Vagina.” Not because of Judy Chicago’s gynocentric artwork “Dinner Party,” a beloved touchstone for Ms. Wolf, but because of the party an unnamed friend gave to celebrate the book deal for “Vagina,” published by Ecco.

She wrote that when she arrived, guests were shaping homemade pasta dough into vulvas. Sausages sizzled on the stove, salmon fillets graced a platter. Her “depression that a friend would think this was funny,” Ms. Wolf wrote, rendered her unable to “type a word of the book — not even research notes for six months.” Her writer’s block was explained by what she said was the book’s “big message.”

“When you honor a woman’s sexuality,” she wrote, “you support her intellectual creativity; when you threaten and insult her sexuality and her very sex, you do exactly the opposite.”

The rest of the article presents the usual balance: the noted onslaught of terrible reviews is set against the good of argument for its own sake.