Angelina Jolie is the cover girl for July’s Harper’s Bazaar – but she didn’t give the magazine an interview. Instead, prominent feminist writer and political consultant Naomi Wolf has written an essay about the appeal of Angelina called “The Power of Angelina”. It’s a long essay, so I’m just going to put the most interesting parts (in my opinion) but the complete essay is here. Naomi sort of goes on for a while about Angelina’s “icky” early years – something about vials of blood, blah, blah, I’m so in love with my brother, et cetera. We remember, we were there. Mere “eccentricities” for Naomi. I kind of agree.

The main crux of Wolf’s argument seems to be her admiration for Angelina boldly redefining a “fairly radical vision of single motherhood that made the relationship seem tender, glamorous, and complete, father figure or no father figure in the picture.” But once Angelina got with Brad, Wolf says Angelina managed “the almost unheard-of task of turning the home-wrecker label into a wholesome, family-friendly triumph.” Naomi also kind get wordy about Angelina and the planes. This is a bit obvious for me (flying a plane = uninhibited sexuality) so you can read it on the Harper’s site. Here’s an edited version:

Who are our female film legends these days? Rare are the sultry, dangerous, and highly individualistic Hollywood goddesses who were so prevalent in the 1930s and 1940s.

Of these few exceptions, one thinks right away of Ms. Angelina Jolie. Ever since about 2004 — when she started crafting a new and revolutionary persona out of her prior story line as an eccentric ingenue, a story line that had been erratic and filled with missteps — she has resonated in a way no other modern female star has managed.

Yes, she is conventionally beautiful: Bosomy and wasp-waisted, with that curtain of hair and those crazy pillowy lips, she is an obvious male sex fantasy. But more suggestively, polls show that her appeal and magnetism play at least as powerfully in the fantasy life of females.

Women admire Angelina Jolie, but that would hardly stop the presses. Polls also show that if women — not just lesbian and bisexual women but straight women — had to choose a female lover, they would want to sleep with Angelina Jolie. In other words, women both identify with her and desire her.

There’s something more than a simply physical response. Her persona hits an unprecedented level of global resonance — and makes women want to be with her and be her at the same time — because she has created a life narrative that is not just personal. Rather, it is archetypal. And the archetype is one that really, for the first time in modern culture, brings together almost every aspect of female empowerment and liberation.

Consider how patriarchal civilization has managed to keep women in hand for all these millennia. Among other methods of social control, women are almost always given a series of either-or choices. The deal is usually that they may realize one aspect of their personality but at the expense of many others. And the deal is usually that if they choose “too much,” a terrible punishment one way or another awaits them.

So you can be respected as a symbol of goodness (Florence Nightingale, Mother Teresa) but not, obviously, be seen as sexual. You can have a hot sex life (Marlene Dietrich) but not at the same time be seen as a symbol of goodness. You can’t get away with it. (Somehow, when an icon who was at once both a sexual being and engaged in good deeds died in a violent accident — Princess Di, of course — the story had a kind of terrible narrative inevitability.) You can take a lover — and even be a home wrecker — but not claim the hope of being seen as a good mom (Madame Bovary, Elizabeth Taylor). You can’t get away with it. You can have money, fame, and a dazzling career, but you must surely be depressed, drug addicted, lonely, or self-destructive (Jacqueline Susann, Marilyn Monroe). You can’t get away with it.

The magic of Jolie’s self-presentation? She makes the claim, with her life and actions, that, indeed, you can get away with it. All of it. Against every Western convention, she has managed to draw together all of these kinds of female liberation and empowerment. And her gestures determinedly transgress social boundaries — boundaries of convention, race, class, and gender — giving many of us a vicarious thrill.

When the megascandal took place — Jolie’s alleged seduction of a married man, Brad Pitt, on the set of Mr. and Mrs. Smith — it could have been the end of Jolie as a role model. But she managed the almost unheard-of task of turning the home-wrecker label into a wholesome, family-friendly triumph. There was little Maddox, who was growing up and clearly enjoying tossing footballs with his mother’s new boyfriend. Jolie had managed to head off the scarlet letter by giving a boy an ideal masculine counterpoint.

Equally ostentatiously in her role as lover, she took for her own pleasure the male seen as the most desired of the tribe, Brad Pitt, who is always ranked at the top of indexes of male beauty and virility. As for the constraints of social convention — ahem, he was still married? You can have a variety of feelings about this, but Jolie’s evident disdain of that social constraint certainly, for better or worse, put her in the same self-entitled category as those men who have traditionally taken what they wanted and let the emotional chips fall where they may.

So she becomes what psychoanalysts call an “ego ideal” for women — a kind of dream figure that allows women to access, through fantasies of their own, possibilities for their own heightened empowerment and liberation.

What’s next for Jolie? No way to tell, but I am certain, given the knack she has shown for tapping into this female collective unconscious, that we will watch with more than ordinary interest. Can the matriarchal tribe sustain itself? What will happen when the youthful beauty changes? Can such a sexually pluralistic woman stay satisfied in a conventional monogamous relationship — even with the most beautiful boy — for life, as Brad Pitt becomes a solidly middle-aged man? Will truly nothing break in this have-it-all-all-the-time exceptional drama?

I for one will keep watching, since Jolie’s image is not just a mirror of one woman but also a looking glass for female fantasy life writ large.

[From Harper’s Bazaar]

I tend to agree with most of what Naomi is saying, and I’m just thrilled that a serious feminist is actually focusing on a prominent woman alive today. I get so tired of reading what various feminists think of Marilyn Monroe, or even Princess Diana. Naomi is a great writer, and a very interesting feminist thinker – amongst many others, she’s notably written bestsellers The Beauty Myth (about our patriarchal society’s enforcement of beauty standards and society’s “punishment” of women who don’t adhere to those standards) and Misconceptions (about modern medicine’s complicity in dehumanizing pregnancy and birth). Though I love a good feminist treatise, Naomi’s political career wasn’t so great. She famously consulted on Al Gore’s presidential run in 2000, and is often “credited” with giving Gore horrible advice about his clothes and how he should kiss Tipper publicly and often. I’m hoping Naomi’s next essay is on Julia Roberts. Or maybe Sarah Jessica Parker? That would be a good one.

Here’s Angelina on April 23rd. Images thanks to INF Photo.