I majored in English during the early dawn of feminism. It was a glorious time on campus. The professors had traded in their ties for love beads. The most popular ones offered courses where you could grade yourself, and fraternized shamelessly with their students. We smoked dope with them. Sometimes we slept with them, or hoped to. Two of my best friends wound up marrying their professors. I spent my last semester futilely trying to seduce my thesis supervisor. In fact, my failure to have a single erotic encounter with a faculty member was a source of great disappointment to me.
By 1983, times had changed. Talk of gender inequity, sexual harassment, and power imbalances filled the air on campus, and sexual relations had become distinctly problematic. That's when Harold Bloom made the mistake of putting his hand on Naomi Wolf's 20-year-old thigh at Yale.
Ms. Wolf, now 41, is a celebrity feminist, best known for a book called The Beauty Myth, and also for telling Al Gore how to dress like an alpha male. Harold Bloom, now 73, is among the most renowned academics in the world, a revered interpreter of Shakespeare, and a man of dazzling intellect. According to Ms. Wolf, he's also a dirty old man, whose habit of hitting on attractive female students has been an open secret at Yale. And now she's getting her revenge.
In a long article this week in New York magazine, she recounts her trauma and accuses Yale of letting sexual harassment run unchecked. At the time, she was a nervous undergraduate who was desperate for him to read her poetry. "He was a vortex of power and intellectual charisma." One night he invited himself to dinner at her apartment and guzzled sherry throughout the meal. "You have the aura of election upon you," he breathed, and put his hand up her skirt. She promptly vomited into the kitchen sink from shock, although it's possible the sherry might also have been a factor. "You are a deeply troubled girl," he told her, then corked up his sherry and left. (For the record, Prof. Bloom denies it all and is contemplating his legal options.)
The incident, she writes, "devastated my sense of being valuable to Yale as a student rather than as a pawn of powerful men." But Ms. Wolf (who, it must be noted, is ravishingly beautiful) is getting precious little sympathy from the sisterhood. "It's a desperate power grab," says Katie Roiphe, a well-known feminist who wrote a book on date rape. "People didn't pay attention to her last book on motherhood. She wants to regain the sense of outrage of the feminism of the early 1990s."
"How many times do we have to relive Naomi Wolf's growing up?" fumes the redoubtable Camille Paglia. "Move on! Move on! Get on to the menopause next!"
Mercifully, Ms. Wolf's version of victim feminism is out of date. Most people would agree that her 20-year-old effort to get even (and her extravagant claims for the trauma she suffered at the time) are a bit bizarre. But they are no more bizarre than campus sexual-harassment policies, where victim feminism still reigns supreme. These policies treat every case of boorish, drunk behaviour as sexual predation, and they define sex between faculty and students as essentially illicit. Consensual sex across the lines is deemed to be impossible because of built-in power imbalances.
It's ironic that not so long ago, female students were objecting that the university administration had no business being sex police. My girlfriends would have been insulted by the notion that they couldn't make such decisions for themselves. And they were well aware of the special power they possessed.
Campus harassment codes have mostly put an end to the days of lecherous professors. But they also perpetuate the myth that sexual advances all go one way. Anyone with any experience of campus life knows otherwise, and any charismatic professor can tell you how often it's his students who do the chasing. Although it's impolite to say so, erotic bonds have sprung up between teachers and pupils since Socrates started giving philosophy lessons in the agora. And they aren't always a bad thing.
Ms. Wolf says she decided to go public after all this time because she owes it to other students, and also because Yale pretty much ignored her phone calls. (Yale argues that if she had a problem, she should have raised it years ago.) But perhaps her real problem with Harold Bloom was that he shattered her illusions. The man she idolized and revered turned out to be a disagreeable pig. That's another lesson young women have been learning since time immemorial. It's a hard one. But you get over it.
Trust Camille. "It really grates on me that Naomi Wolf for her entire life has been batting her eyes and bobbing her boobs in the face of men and made a profession out of courting male attention by flirting and offering her sexual allure."
