The Insomniac Reader

Naomi Wolf was very distraught when she noticed that her sex life lost its poetic dimension. One night, out of desperation, she prayed next to the stove. In case you were wondering, the stove was cold, ironwood, and completely irrelevant to the content of this book. Bargaining with the universe and any deity willing to listen to her plight, she promised that if she could be healed, she would share the experience and what she learned from it with everyone else, and she would make money off of it.

She really is self-entitled narcissistic out of her goddamn mind a woman who seriously needs to get a grip an incredibly selfless woman.

The universe apparently had nothing important to do that day, and made certain to remind Naomi that there are doctors before returning to more trivial matters. Turns out our poor writer was suffering from numbness due to some messed up vertebrae and needed surgery. She can’t dance like she used to anymore, but her poetic fucking was restored at last!



A woman of her word, Naomi returned the favor, and published a book celebrating the very heterosexual vaginas of privileged women with way too much damn time on their hands.

This silly and maddening book talks a lot about a vagina-brain connection. This confused me, but then again, my vagina never transmitted messages to me from my cervix, so this was obviously new territory for me.

She tries her best to use some odd combination of science, mysticism, literature and cultural history to explain this to her readers. She speaks fondly and nauseatingly about the painfully cutesy “Goddess Array”, which she considers to be the set of behaviors a lover uses to arouse his or her partner. All of this in the name of making sex pathetically romantic for feminism!



Science is not exactly my thing. Since it’s also not Naomi’s thing, we apparently have one thing in common. The only difference is that she will insist on writing about science, and while I am not perfect, I try my best to avoid talking out of my ass as often as humanly possible. So I will keep the talk about science brief so that I don’t end up looking like an idiot, and quote a neuroscientist’s response to Naomi’s belief that dopamine is the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain:

“If that were true, women with Parkinson’s could never be feminists, because that disease is caused by degeneration of the dopamine neurons. If that were true, feminists would be campaigning for the legalization of cocaine and crystal meth – at least for women – because those drugs boost dopamine levels.
In fact, if that were true, it would mean that the most complimentary thing you could say to a woman would be “You sound like you’re on crack!”
Naomi Wolf, you sound like you’re on crack.”

Basically the kind of science Naomi is prone to is looking up the definition of something and then jumping to insane conclusions to fit her cockamamie theories.

Now that we’ve taken care of that, we can go on with the rest of this scattered mess of a book.

Naomi has some serious issues with feminism lately. She’s got a grudge against second wave feminists. Judging by her whining, it’s probably because they didn’t fix everything for her so that she can stop having to think too hard about this inequality shit. Second wave feminists also didn’t tell her the joys of having her boyfriend gaze at her yoni to learn secret truths while she reads Fifty Shades of Grey. Nope, Naomi had to actually find the time to learn about what she likes sexually while dealing with the reality of an unjust world like everyone else and that was apparently something she felt she shouldn’t have to do.

Another thing Naomi likes to whine about is the so-called "hook up culture" because casual sex makes her feel icky.



I can see why. Casual sex and experimentation really doesn't fit into her very narrow Goddess vision. Naomi’s views on sex are extremely wholesome. There’s the candles. The expensive flowers ordered in advance that somehow have to do with evolution. The reservations to the fancy restaurant. The kind, gentle words. The Goddess Array and the Goddess Network. For some odd reason, she thinks that no other woman has heard of this brand of romance and intimacy even though at this point it’s become a cliché. She threatens men who do not fulfill these requirements with some pretty harsh words.

“Straight men would do well to ask themselves: “Do I want to be married to a Goddess-or a bitch?” Unfortunately, there is not, physiologically, much middle ground available for women.”



Naomi, you’re seriously starting to turn me into a raging bitch with this two dimensional woman whose very fulfillment relies on a man's ability to remember her favorite flowers.

Another thing about feminism that really upsets her is that it broke the association of heterosexual female sexual awakening with dependency on man. They do not acknowledge this imaginary paradox of feminine autonomy coexisting with our feminine need of interdependence. She considers this the central paradox of the female condition because of Eros, and I consider it the central delusions of her idiotic mind. She explains that women are just addicted to love, in need of a partner because of nature, and also because some of her favorite female writers, artists, and activists experienced an increase in creativity and passion because of a sexual awakening. Apparently she thinks the sexual experimentation of these women are because they acknowledged Naomi’s Goddess Array, and because they realized that they need the dick because of their ravenous vaginas. Someone seriously needs to tell Naomi that creativity and talent are not sexually transmitted diseases that only hetero women can become infected by.

In case all this candle lighting and reading Anais Nin to your crotch every morning isn’t your thing, don’t worry, she delves into Eastern Philosophy and Tantric sex practices next. This is when we’re introduced to the vagina whisperers. One such individual is Mike Lousada, London’s very own tantric guru and special snowflake, who fancies himself a vagina healer. Naomi seems to consider him to be some kind of champion for women and especially sexual assault victims, because for the American equivalent of $150 an hour he will massage the knots out of your vagina, say “Welcome Goddess” to you, and heal you sexually. Now I understand that we all have to pay the bills, but unless he spends his spare time volunteering at rape crisis centers, he’s either a fancy sex worker or a rip off artist. Perhaps some kind of combination of both. He prefers to call himself a “sexual healer” though, and he gets very offended if you don’t acknowledge his magic powers. But who can blame him? This is a man who claims to have seen an image of the Virgin Mary while gazing at the yoni in search of enlightenment.

Personally, if some guy just stared at my twat seeking enlightenment, I'd be more than a little annoyed. But my idea of sexual practices that appreciate my vagina are a little different from Naomi's.



Naomi Wolf needs all this tender loving care though, as her vagina is very easily traumatized. I won’t even get into the now infamous Cuntini incident that caused her vagina to suffer from writer’s block. There was another incident on a cruise with some moron friend who can only read Military books because he's an insecure mama's boy who needs to pretend he's in the military to feel like a man because according to him, all modern fiction is targeted to women and all that woman-y stuff just doesn't interest him. I'm going to guess this man doesn't read very much, or every time he reads something and comes across a female character he shits himself and gets all pissed off because there is a woman in his book which is beyond his comprehension. Everyone knows that women belong in binders!

Oh and there’s sex in these military books. And by sex he means “There’s rape. LOL!”

Naomi’s response to her friend was to then go to bed, weep for all the women vaginally traumatized by those words, and then passive aggressively call him out in her book, because being the martyred whiny victim apparently makes Naomi’s vagina do a happy dance. It’s more than a little insufferable.



Naomi means well. She read a survey once about how Western women reported lower levels of happiness and satisfaction even though our freedoms have grown over the years. And while feminists might well try to tell you that the continued existence of inequality might just have something to do with that, Naomi would like you to know that really, you just have a sad vagina in an overworked undersexed world. The vagina is a “gateway to a woman’s happiness and to her creative life” and if we all just remember that, life would just be one never ending orgasm no matter what happens.

This is the part where I’d love nothing more than to shake some of the loose screws out of Naomi’s head. Inequality still exists no matter how mind blowing Wolf’s orgasms are. This childish view of empowerment does not address this fact, presumably because it makes her vagina too sad to think about. Her vapid idea of fantasy land happiness is based on the idea that we should just be sexually dependent on men to keep our unruly yonis satisfied, and then maybe write a poem about our vulva. All this sad traumatized vagina crap cuddles up a little too close with the idea that male responsibility is dependent on female vulnerability. It feeds into patriarchy, it isn’t helping women, and it’s really getting on my nerves. I will continue to be dissatisfied with gender inequality, and while we’re at it, all inequality. If happiness for women means just getting fucked dumb, deaf and blind, I’d rather be perpetually pissed off.



Her journey finally comes to an end with a completely unnecessary description of her family trip to Greece. This is when Naomi takes her self- indulgent and over privileged prattling and turns that shit up to 11. She really is painfully out of touch if she thinks her mission to help all women was completed with this book when her vagina can afford healing sessions in the UK and then excursions to Greece when the most exciting place my vagina went recently was the drug store to pick up Icy Hot and disposable razors.



No matter how much information she vomits up from eastern philosophy, literature, pretend science, and her love of hardcore eye contact and gentle massages during couple arguments, this book is not some kind of thought provoking feminist work. This is a book about how happy Naomi Wolf is about her sex life and she wants to help you fuck just like her. There is nothing wrong with enjoying sex, or knowing what you like. It isn’t even bad to write about it. But just call it what it is. At best this book is self-help for privileged heterosexual women who somehow never heard of tantric sex. At worst this book is a self-important literary festival of misinformation that doesn’t just straddle misogyny; it dry humps it on the chaise lounge while getting high off all the scented candles.

Instead of imagining a better world for women, or feeling proud to be a woman, I imagined that I was enduring a long winded conversation with a ditzy friend who is just going on and fucking on about her sex life. Her boyfriend, like a sexual Christopher Columbus, discovered all her equipment and finally thought to ask “What does this button do, my Goddess?” instead of just reading her poetry and sending flowers that he imagined might look like female genitalia. To make it worse, she’s trying way too hard to be profound and lyrical about it all because she accidentally found Anais Nin’s Wikipedia page. Her face is one of both joy and concern as she takes my hand in hers. She finally stops gushing over her boyfriend and explosive orgasms for a moment because this is important. She looks me in the eye and lets me know, that as a newly independent woman, she feels it’s her duty to tell me that if I just found myself a man who can awaken my creativity, I’d stop being so, you know, bitchy.

Whatever, girl.