THEY say you should never meet your heroes, but there’s no warning against going to see writers who shaped your adolescence when they speak at book festivals. After a bizarre and dispiriting Tuesday evening in Edinburgh, I’m reviewing my own policies. 

I was nine when Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth was published, and in my teens when I first read it. It had a profound influence on me, opening up new ways of viewing and thinking about the world and my place in it. So when I learned the author would be taking part in an Edinburgh International Book Festival discussion on gender in the 21st century, I bought a ticket right away.

What insights would this world-famous third-wave feminist have into the impact of girls and women being bombarded by messages about beauty and bodies via platforms we couldn’t even have imagined back in the comparatively innocent age of dial-up internet and VHS video? What nuanced perspective would she have on modern phenomena such as the Kardashians, Love Island and Instagram influence, at one extreme, and young women increasingly opting to identify out of womanhood altogether, at the other?

A friend described The Beauty Myth as a “gateway” book for young women learning about feminism, and it certainly was for me. Girls of my generation – living in a Western democracy with voting rights, access to contraception, equal opportunities to education, housing and financial services – could have been forgiven for thinking the process of “women’s liberation” was complete, and that anyone still banging on about it was stuck in the past, at best, and downright embarrassing at worst.

It was a revelation to read Wolf’s arguments that the beauty industrial complex was the “last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact”, and that as women’s freedoms had increased, so had the pressure to strive for unattainable beauty standards.

Crucially, this was no exercise in finger-wagging at young women for not being good enough feminists, or for concerning themselves with such trivial things as hair and make-up. Wolf encouraged readers to consider the broader context in which they were making not just these choices, but all choices.

Engaging with these ideas was like peeking behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain, or plugging into The Matrix, except instead of choosing a red or blue pill it meant asking who or what was influencing the choice of a red lipstick or blue eye shadow.

I read more of Wolf’s books, but nothing could match the transformative power of her debut. Over time, I learned she had a reputation for including dubious statistics to back up her arguments – for example, massively overstating the levels of eating disorders among female students in the US – but I told myself this didn’t detract from The Beauty Myth’s central thesis. The skeletal frames of several school classmates were all the evidence I needed – or so I thought – that everything Wolf wrote was true. When, in 2014, she floated conspiracy theories about the postal ballot in our independence referendum I was a little baffled, and when,this summer, a crucial error in her latest book, Outrages, was baldly exposed in a live radio interview, I cringed for her.

A subsequent article in the New York Times described her whole career as “ludicrous”, but don’t the media love to tear down a high-profile woman, especially one writing provocative, feminist books?

Perhaps so, but Tuesday night left me in no doubt that Wolf has become a ludicrous individual – and I use that word advisedly because we have all been very presumptuous by referring to her as a woman. In fact, if I understand her correctly, there is actually no such thing.

“You think I’m a woman?” she asked the audience. “You don’t know I’m a woman. Right? Why do you think I’m a woman?”

It would be a strange question for any third-wave feminist to ask her audience, but is was an even stranger one coming from someone who titled her autobiography Vagina. Were it not for the prevailing climate – in which the word “woman” means either nothing or almost anything – one might have assumed Wolf was having some kind of breakdown.

The woman (or should I say person?) who wrote a book about her experience of giving birth, and highlighted the mistreatment of women in US maternity wards, declared that she had “probably been attended to by a trans nurse many, many times”, implicitly suggesting anyone who prefers to know the sex of their caregiver is simply behind the times. “4% of people are born with indeterminate genitals,” she asserted. No citation was provided.

The woman who spoke out during #MeToo about experiencing child sexual abuse boasted that sex-segregated spaces are illegal in the United States, as if to suggest that maintaining them betrays some kind of national character flaw.

It was a slap in the face, a betrayal of everything I thought she’d taught me. It left me thinking of today’s teenagers, and asking to whom a girl might turn if a voice in her head starts telling her she isn’t good enough, beautiful enough, “womanly” enough. Certainly not Naomi Wolf, whoever she is.