The Universe of Disco

Sun, 12 Mar 2006

Naomi Wolf and Big Ethel
Aaron Swartz has done a text search of The Beauty Myth and concluded that Wolf never intended Big Ethel to serve as an example of intelligence, contrary to what I asserted in my previous article. M. Swartz says:

Judging from a search on Amazon, the only time Ethel is mentioned is in the context of noting that an attractive woman is often paired with an unattractive one: "... Veronica and Ethel in Riverdale; ... and so forth. Male culture seems happiest to imagine two women together when they are defined as being one winner and one loser in the beauty myth." (59f)

I still question the aptness of the example, since, again, the principal case in which two women are imagined together in Archie comics is not Veronica and Ethel, but Veronica and Betty, both of whom are portrayed as "winners". Betty and Veronica are major characters; Ethel is not. But the error isn't nearly as serious as the one I said Wolf had made.

The most serious error here is mine: I should have considered and discussed the possibility that my friend was misquoting Wolf. That I didn't do this was unfair to Wolf and entirely my fault. Since I haven't read the book myself, I should have realized what shaky ground I was on, and taken pains to point this out. And yet other possibilities are:

That my friend didn't misquote Wolf at all, and I misunderstood her at the time, or
that my friend correctly quoted Wolf and I understood her at the time, but my memory of the episode (which occurred around 1993) is faulty.

I took Vallely to task for poor research and for failing to pick up a dictionary to confirm some of his assertions. Had I taken my own advice, I would have checked to see what Wolf said before commenting on it. My disclaimer in the original article that I had not read the book relieves me of only part of the responsibility for this failure.

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