Angelina Jolie is the Feminist Ideal! Or is she?

There's some buzz on the internet about Naomi Wolf's article in which she argues that Angelina Jolie is the new face of feminism. This blog post by Jen Nedeau summarizes some views succinctly. My criticism is below.

Nedeau and Wolf are missing the broader picture. The Harpers article suggests that Jolie rightly makes single motherhood seem to be a "a glamorous, unfettered lifestyle choice." From Simone de Beauvoir's perspective, men are not really free; they are trapped in the daily grind of corporate bureaucracies. For women to aspire to be like men in this regard would doubly subjugate them to household and work-world responsibilities. This is what later theorists have called the double burden.

Moreover, Nedeau and Wolf speak of women's liberation as if it didn't involve men at all. De Beauvoir, as a counterexample, discusses ideas such as co-parenting. Co-parenting changes the fundamental gender relations by making the house (and by extension the public world) the domain of women and men.

The authors also fail to acknowledge the power and privilege that Jolie has as a rich, sexy, and successful white woman. Of course she can do all the things she does: she has millions of dollars at her disposal. How possible, is it then, for most women to achieve this alleged ideal? How desirable is it for most women to achieve this alleged ideal? An ideal that leaves men behind, one that forgets to acknowledge different class-based and ethnicity-based expressions of feminism, is moving in the wrong direction.