What was best about this talk, what made me happiest, was that it came at the end of a day which began with a lecture on feminist readings of early modern literature. It came a couple of days after men and women took to West Road to counter an anti-choice demonstration with impromptu, handmade banners. It came the week after the CUSU women’s campaign held a Craftivism workshop to plan a resistance to the impact of austerity measures upon women. And as I sat through Wolf’s talk, I held those in mind as a reminder that twenty first century feminism is very much alive and well.

Naomi Wolf’s recent book Vagina has rocketed up bestseller lists and racked up controversial, pasta-based headlines. It made me uncomfortable at first, watching the unrelenting vilification of a feminist. I don’t like that; I’m not on that side of the fence. And so I arrived at Trinity in as open a frame of mind as possible. Wolf was a charming speaker; she held her own on her platform, she seemed to genuinely enjoy her subject and the discussion that followed. She spoke to the audience, not at us. She was so engaging and lively a speaker that her arguments were almost convincing.

But there are many things I find categorically worrying about her approach. As a woman who often writes about women who write, I find myself constantly challenging what it means to be female, what implications that has on the art we produce and the way we interact with the world around us. It’s the job of feminists to ask these questions. But Naomi Wolf and her Goddess Array goes much further. For her, ‘we must reclaim the vagina as central to everything’.

At first that might resonate. Sexual confidence and autonomy is important. Learning about one’s own body: important. Respecting one’s self: important. But letting the essential fact of our genitalia overtake our entire consciousness? Comparing ourselves to rats simply on the grounds of the shared shape of our nether regions and a hazy load of faux science? Forming our destiny on the basis not only of our biology, but on our ability to shag well? Wolf places her vagina at the centre of her world, her discourse and her sense of self only to tell it that all it needs is a dashing man with a virile member, wandering hands and mood lighting.

The science behind her thinking seems dubious, but I’ve not the time to research into disputation. And to do so would miss the point. Wolf argues for a ‘brain-vagina connection’. Well, sorry – but I’ve a brain-elbow connection and a brain-toe nail connection too and I don’t allow those to dictate my whole intellectual and emotional output.

That said, her book is perhaps pertinent in its discussion of ownership. Whose vagina is it anyway? As the news seems a constant tirade of rape-sympathising, rape-excusing, rape-ignorance this is a central question. But it seemed that in her love-your-vagina overkill, Wolf lost track of who these genitals belong to herself. Her approach raises tricky questions about how we define that owner: what about gay vaginas and black vaginas and trans vaginas and disabled vaginas? Where there was no data to be played with, Wolf ignored.

It is clear that women are different from men in many ways. Those differences ought to be celebrated and understood as far as is possible. We ought to think about how those differences might manifest themselves in our work and thinking and social lives. But we can’t let them dictate our work, thinking and social lives. This weird critical metonymy where the vagina stands for the woman, her history and her values is weird, dated and counterproductive.

Liberation is central to feminist theory and practise. As is pleasure. But Wolf overstates and contorts it. While she is clearly very intelligent and personable, while anyone who uses the words ‘love’ and ‘beautiful’ as many times as she does can’t be a bad person, I couldn’t help thinking back to those anti-choice campaigners cluttering West Road on Monday. They waved a banner chequered with photographs of disembodied foetuses and asked why, if we want to protect reproductive rights, we don’t want to look at ‘the consequences’. My reply was simple, if repeatedly ignored: the photographs were selective, a foetus in a womb exists within a woman who has rights and feelings and a material context. Their photos and their proposals deny that woman a presence; they cut her out. On the other end of the spectrum Wolf narrowed in on clitoral nerve endings as if all women are walking talking labia. And we’re not. More than that, women have fought long and hard to dislodge that view.

Wolf was all too quick to relegate feminists who don’t subscribe to her view to the clunky, bra-burning, dungaree-wearing stereotypes. While this was frustrating, it was provocative. While her ideas seem at best tenuous, they are sprawling enough for there to be a few points of interest. The event spurred some lively and intriguing discussion, specifically about feminism within Cambridge, that I imagine will only be taken further at the this Friday’s event, ‘Feminism: Just Another Dirty Word?’ Contrary to Wolf’s view, enchanting as it was for a while, we shouldn’t shy from Feminism; it’s not ‘the F word’, it’s a movement that takes into account all of all women. If you took my vagina away, I’d like to think I’d still be me. Vaginas are important, they keep life interesting (and going) but that’s not all we have to offer; I’ve a brain and limbs and eyes and a mouth, all of which exist within a world that I worry Wolf, in this work, has overlooked in a beeline for the bedroom.