The wellness-to-disinformation pipeline operated heavily through women’s body experts

Evidence

There were also a few women on the list who, like Wolf—with her books extolling natural beauty, natural childbirth, and life-altering orgasms—had built personal brands around being experts on women’s bodies in particular. Christiane Northrup, a lapsed ob-gyn who wrote the Oprah-friendly, bestselling Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, made the Disinformation Dozen list after she began peppering her advice on nontoxic cleaning products and “vibrant health” with QAnon-tinged Covid denialism. So did Kelly Brogan, a “holistic psychiatrist” and bestselling author as likely to post a video of herself pole dancing as she is to tell you to “thank your body” for fighting off Covid without the help of vaccines or masks (which she urged her followers to take off in an act of liberation similar to second-wave bra burning). — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 566

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what structural feature of women’s wellness culture made its influencers particularly susceptible to the Mirror World pull — the reader’s doubling device might illuminate this.