A radical message’s impact hinged on the speaker’s embodied youth and beauty.

Evidence

None of this took away from her magnetism, though. Because what was revelatory was Wolf’s person. The fact that these words about beauty were coming from someone so young, confident, and conventionally beautiful. She was like a pot-smoking older sister who had come of age in the freewheeling 1970s, whereas we had been teens in the glossy and suffocating 1980s. It might seem like a small thing, but Wolf didn’t dress like a power author. Back then, she wore faded jeans and T-shirts. She had a leather jacket on in her author photo. All of this, and she had written a book that people were paying attention to. A Big Book about Big Ideas. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1131

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes how the book itself repeatedly shows the doppelganger’s power resting on her specific embodiment — Naomi presenting as beautiful, fit, glamorous while Klein mirrors her unadorned. The magnetism Klein felt in 1991 prefigures the mirrored dynamic she later dissects.