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Perhaps it comes as no suprise to many of you, but Naomi Wolf is not exactly a world-class critical thinker. A couple of years ago, she displayed her enormous talent for confusing the symbol with the thing in an op-ed piece for Exile, a “Moscow-based alternative newspaper”.

In this ill-reasoned paean to greed and stupidity, she actually says:

What is clear is this: anti-Consumerism is misogyny. To hate shopping and all of its representations is to hate women.

and:

Shopping is about choice. And choice is what women demand. A choice of fabric, color and career. Shopping is a human right — a woman’s right!

and to top it all off:

As women cower against the crash of glass, pitifully trying to cover their heads with the tiny shield of a Gold Card, these Green stormtroopers destroy women’s last safe inner space, their cultural vulva.

While she is responding to “so-called anti-Globalization activists” who began getting media attention for smashing storefronts around the time her “article” was written, there is no denying that she believes, violently so, that shopping, consumer society, is “womanist” and that all of us who refuse to be caught up in an orgy of buying are either sexist pigs (if male) or “misguided, self-hating collaborators” (if female).

Perhaps Ms. Wolf’s vulva has been sold to Bloomingdale’s, but to assume that every woman must also sell her individuality for the sake of “one of the few communal women-centric rituals our culture permits” instead of making her own choices, like the grown-up that she is, is, in my opinion, one of the most resounding endorsements of anti-consumerism I have seen yet. I mean, if Naomi Wolf hates it, it’s got to be good, right?