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Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, by Naomi Wolf. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019It wasn’t until well after I read this book that I found out how controversial it is. In gathering her facts, she misread court records. Where she saw the words “Death recorded” she took it to mean that the accused was hanged. In reality, that
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I heard the radio programme where she learned (whilst being interviewed!) that she'd misunderstood the phrase 'Death recorded'. She didn't bluster; I thought she was very gracious about it. The interviewer also pointed out that the boy in question had abused a six-year old child, and was on trial for that, not for being gay. The sentence was commuted to 2 years because he was only 14 himself.
It wasn't discussed, but I also thought that she'd misunderstood the divorce laws, too. She assumed that sodomy, as grounds for a woman divorcing her husband, meant that he was gay, whereas I think it meant sodomy with the wife -- in other words, that he'd forced her to have anal sex against her will or, at least (given that young brides of the time might not have known much about sex), had introduced her to a practise which she later discovered to be 'wrong'. I haven't checked that, though ( ... )
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I got a copy from Amazon's Vine program- that's where most of my books have come from in the last few years, other than library books or Library Thing Early Reviewer program. They gave them out months ago (it took me a couple of months to get to reviewing it), before the controversy came out. The book is still on their site, with it listed as available for pre-order, but with no publication date listed.
After reading it, I read a review that went into the problem with the divorce laws, too. That reviewer really tore the book apart, and went into problems with her other books, too. Which I found depressing, because I've read a few of her books, and liked them.
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