While there were always skeptics—her rival Camille Paglia dismissed Wolf as a “Seventeen magazine level of thinker”—critiques of her work rarely reached beyond women’s studies departments. And by the end of the decade, Wolf was considered such an authority on all things womanly that during the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore, the Democratic Party nominee, hired her to coach him on how to appeal to female voters. Her widely reported advice was that Gore had to get out from under Bill Clinton’s shadow and transform himself from a “beta male” to an “alpha male”—in part by wearing earth-toned
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