alance between angry shouting and pedantic scholarship. And often, very often, Wolf uses examples or demonstrative cases that are ill-chosen, ill-focused, irrelevant or seemingly irrelevant, and distract from her essential, reasonably thought-out points. At such times Wolf looks much too narrowly at what appears in her immediate vision and does not seem to realize that she is undercutting the effectiveness of her argument. This is extremely poor polemical writing because the already-convinced audience is distracted by the inadequacy of Wolf's details while the novice audience will be either confused or misled by them.
Good examples of Wolf's extreme rhetorical difficulties can be found in her chapter on the cult-like 'religion' that women make of their anxiety over their appearance. This anxiety develops out of the social demand that women place a premium on their appearance and behind that demand lies the patriarchy's need to subject women to close control. This is a valid and vital point and there is nothing wrong with the religion metaphor or the basic thinking behind it. Wolf amplifies her point by discussing the "sense of constant surveillance" under which women find themselves; every calorie, every bulge, every lapse in appearance is--they come to believe--being counted up against them somewhere (99). This is a very important point since it goes to the ways in which women are socialized into exerting this type of unending surveillance over themselves and over each other and, not incidentally, the ways in which men are socialized into operating from this same point of view. (This is another point that Wolf fails to make explicitly enough--the fact that most men are as brainwashed as women into believing that their socialized efforts to repress women are, somehow, natural types of behavior.)
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