Case of Harold Bloom
Humanities and English Professor, Yale University - New Haven, CT
Accused of sexually harassing students.
The Awareness Center wants to thank Naomi Wolf for her courage and tenacity to speak the truth about this alleged sexual predator.
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Table of Contents:
2004
- Statement by Naomi Wolf on Her Upcoming New York Magazine Story on Sexual Misconduct at Yale (02/19/2004)
- Howling Over Wolf Expo (02/19/2004)
- Wolf '84 accuses Bloom of sexual misconduct (02/19/2004)
- Feminist author accuses literary critic, Yale of sexual harassment (02/19/2004)
- Feminists at war over 'sex pest' professor (02/20/2004)
- Feminist alleges years of sexual harassment at Yale (02/20/2004)
- Writer Accuses Yale Professor Of Sex Harassment (02/21/2004)
- Yale sex claims brings out knives for Wolf (02/21/2004)
- Magazine details harrassment at Yale (02/22/2004)
- Diary (02/22/2004)
- A great scholar stands accused of groping America's most telegenicfeminist. Is it a storm in a C-cup? (02/22/2004)
- Feminists wage war over sex allegation (02/22/2004)
- Crying Wolf? "Beauty Myth" Author Takes on Harold Bloom (02/23/2004)
- Yale prof. accused of sexual harassment (02/23/2004)
- Always the victim (02/24/2004)
- A prof, a pass and a co-ed (02/24/2004)
- Scary Wolf tales embroil Yale (02/24/2004)
- Wolf spells out sex charge against Yale professor (02/24/2004)
- Wolf '84 writes on harassment (02/24/2004)
- Sexual harrasment is affront to Yale's values (02/24/2004)
- Dear Naomi: assumptions of victimhood don't help feminism (02/25/2004)
- 'I Am Victim' (02/25/2004)
- Crying Wolf - Naomi Wolf sets back the fight against sexual harassment (02/25/2004)
- Harold 'outed' by a feminist (02/26/2004)
- E-mails seek Bloom info - Three seniors inquire about prof's conduct (02/26/2004)
- Who's crying Wolf? (02/26/2004)
- Yale reacts to Wolf accusations against Bloom (02/27/2004)
- Crying wolf (02/28/2004)
- All together, boys, for a weekend roast (02/28/2004)
- The hand that rocked the critics (02/28/2004)
- Enough of this whingeing Wolf (02/28/2004)
- Sex and Silence at Yale (03/01/2004)
- Silent Treatment (03/01/2004)
- One Last Grope - And the cult of victimhood dissolves (03/02/2004)
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Statement by Naomi Wolf on Her Upcoming New York Magazine Story on Sexual Misconduct at Yale
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 19, 2004
On Monday, February 23, a story will run in New York Magazine about sexual misconduct at Yale University.
In it, I include an account of Professor Harold Bloom's sexual approach toward me when I was an undergraduate student at Yale in 1983, as well as the stories of a number of other Yale students who experienced sexual misconduct involving other Yale faculty members and students over the past twenty years.
After Yale contacted me to help them raise money, I felt I had to tell them why I was reluctant to do so. I then had many conversations with Yale authorities over a period of recent months, telling my story, hoping for an off-the-record meeting to address my concerns about the school's grievance procedures. I got nowhere.
Several distinguished women have come forward in my piece to attest to the fact that there is a systemic problem at Yale University. Their intention in doing so, as is mine, is simply to make sure that women students are as safe today as they deserve to be.
To clarify reports in recent news stories, a letter Professor Bloom wrote to support my application for a Rhodes scholarship in 1983 was written before the incident I describe. That application was rejected. I was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1985, and Bloom was not one of my seven referees.
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Howling Over Wolf Expo
By Lloyd Grove ad Elisa Lipsky-Karasz
New York Daily News - February 19, 2004
Celebrity feminist Naomi Wolf's New York magazine expos of sexual harassment at Yale won't be out till Monday. But folks are already fighting about it.
Yesterday, The New York Observer revealed that the 41-year-old Wolf plans to accuse eminent Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom, a godlike figure at Yale, of sexually harassing her 20 years ago when she was an undergraduate there.
I'm told that in December, Wolf asked Yale officials if she could file a grievance against the 73-year-old Bloom, who wrote her a letter of recommendation for a Rhodes scholarship after the incident allegedly occurred. I hear that Wolf was unhappy when Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead informed her the statute of limitations on such a charge was only two years, not two decades.
Celebrity feminist Camille Paglia - like Wolf, an academic protege of Bloom's - yesterday jumped on her steed and galloped at Wolf brandishing a poison-tipped lance.
"It really smacks of the Salem witch hunts and all the accompanying hysteria," Paglia told me. "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."
Paglia recalled that when Wolf's best seller, "The Beauty Myth," launched her to fame and fortune in 1991, she did an interview at her Manhattan apartment with Philadelphia Inquirer book editor Carlin Romano. She greeted him, Romano wrote, wearing "a pair of flimsy see-through orange harem pants, scarcely obscuring black panties."
Wolf enhanced her fame, during the 2000 presidential campaign, as a $15,000-a-month consultant to Democratic nominee Al Gore, reportedly advising the vice president to wear earth tones and be an Alpha male.
The Observer noted that in her 1997 book, "Promiscuities," Wolf wrote about an anonymous professor showing up at her apartment, ostensibly to discuss her poetry, but ending up by placing his hand between her legs. "It felt so familiar: this sense of being exposed as if in a slow-moving dream of shame," Wolf wrote. "I could practically hear my own pulse: What had I done, done, done?"
Observer reporter and Yale grad Rachel Donadio, herself a student in one of Bloom's Shakespeare seminars in the mid-1990s, quoted a source close to Bloom as calling the account a "vicious lie."
Bloom, who continues to teach despite severe health problems, yesterday declined to comment on Wolf's accusation - which, I'm told, will be part of a general indictment of her alma mater's sexual misconduct policies, including the ordeals of up to 10 women.
Wolf declined to get on the phone with me yesterday, but New York mag issued a statement in her name:
"The problem of sexual misconduct at Yale and the administration's tolerance of an environment in which students suffer from it, is much bigger than one person or one incident, and it needs to be addressed."
THE BRIEFING
BIG BEN? In case you thought that Ben Affleck - post J.Lo - has taken a solemn vow to stop frightening the horses and children, think again.
In the upcoming In Style, he confides that 1998, the year he and Matt Damon won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for "Good Will Hunting," was the best year of his life.
"I've never been happier than I was that year. Since then things have become more complicated and weird, though not necessarily worse. It would be nice to win for acting. I'm sure my work in 'Gigli' has a shot!"
Nice enough. But in reminiscing about his Oscar, Affleck can't resist the urge to tell the mag: "I remember standing at a urinal next to Charlton Heston, which was a really interesting moment, getting to measure my manhood against Moses'."
LOVESICK AT THE LIBRARY? That was Ethan Hawke declaring soulfully Tuesday night: "I don't love you anymore; on the contrary, I detest you. You are a vile, mean, beastly slut."
And adding for good measure:
"It is sad when one and the same heart is torn by such conflicting feelings for one person ... I need to be alone ... All my feelings have dried up ... At 29, I have exhausted everything."
But the subject wasn't estranged wife Uma Thurman, and Hawke is actually 33. The actor was reading from Napoleon Bonaparte's love letters to and about Josephine. Hawke was joined in the "Young Lions" program at the New York Public Library by fellow performers Kristin Davis, Julie Bowen, Bliss Broyard, Arthur Bradford and Alex Draper.
BUZZ-ZZZZZZ I'm told that the ratings slide of Queen of Buzz Tina Brown's weekly CNBC talk show is Topic A among the chattering class. According to figures released yesterday, last Sunday's 8 p.m. installment of "Topic A With Tina Brown," featuring Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein as the guest, drew only 20,000 viewers - a 67% plummet from the previous Sunday's debut and a rating so low that it barely registers on the buzz-o-meter.DELIVERING NEWS - AND SOON MOREMy pal Soledad O'Brien, co-anchor of CNN's "American Morning," is pregnant with twins, due sometime in late summer.
"Can you believe it?" the 37-year-old mother of two told me yesterday. "It's kind of shocking."
O'Brien, who'd been tossing her cookies between live interviews, said she finally has gotten over her morning sickness.
"I'm feeling much better now, but I had really, really bad nausea for the first trimester," she confided. "I never came close to throwing up on a guest, but I warned [co-anchor] Bill Hemmer that something could happen. We had a few trying moments, but that would be too gross to go into."
O'Brien added: "I will tell you this: Whoever marries Bill Hemmer is so lucky. He has been unbelievable. When I told him, he said, 'The next seven months are all about you.'
"Um, my husband, Brad, has been been nice, too."
Wolf '84 accuses Bloom of sexual misconduct
By Stephen Butler, Staff Reporter
Yale Daily News - Thursday, February 19, 2004
Feminist activist and Rhodes Scholar Naomi Wolf '84 recently accused Humanities and English Professor Harold Bloom of sexually harassing her while she was an undergraduate at Yale, the New York Observer reported this week.
Wolf's accusations will appear in an article she is writing for next week's New York Magazine, the Observer reported.
Bloom is well known at Yale and worldwide for his scholarship on Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton, as well for writing over 20 books including "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" and "How to Read and Why." Bloom -- who, according to unidentified sources in the Observer article, wrote a recommendation for Wolf when she was applying for the Rhodes Scholarship -- declined to comment on the accusation.
New York Magazine spokeswoman Serena Torrey said she could not comment on the specific content of an article that had not yet been published but said Wolf's story will appear next Monday.
"In next week's New York Magazine, Naomi Wolf will have a story outlining 20 years of incidents of sexual misconduct at Yale and her search and hope for an appropriate response from the administration to these situations," Torrey said.
Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said Wolf contacted Yale with her accusations, but she explained that Wolf had not acted within the two-year statute of limitations for such complaints.
"As we explained to Ms. Wolf, Yale has very clear guidelines and policies for any sexual harassment claims," Klasky said. "Any claims must be brought in two years after the alleged incident. At the time when she was a student, she did not avail herself."
Klasky said Wolf asked for an apology but was told that Yale can't issue an apology "when there's no finding of wrong-doing."
"Yale takes any claim of sexual harassment very seriously," Klasky said. "That is why we have such stringent policies and procedures in place and why we encourage students when appropriate to avail themselves."
Klasky said Wolf does not intend to take legal action against Yale.
Wolf, author of "The Beauty Myth," and "Fire With Fire," gained notoriety in 2000 as an advisor to Al Gore's Presidential Campaign, during which she suggested that Gore become an Alpha male and discard what she referred to as his Beta male tendencies.
By Lloyd Grove ad Elisa Lipsky-Karasz
New York Daily News - February 19, 2004
Celebrity feminist Naomi Wolf's New York magazine expos of sexual harassment at Yale won't be out till Monday. But folks are already fighting about it.
Yesterday, The New York Observer revealed that the 41-year-old Wolf plans to accuse eminent Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom, a godlike figure at Yale, of sexually harassing her 20 years ago when she was an undergraduate there.
I'm told that in December, Wolf asked Yale officials if she could file a grievance against the 73-year-old Bloom, who wrote her a letter of recommendation for a Rhodes scholarship after the incident allegedly occurred. I hear that Wolf was unhappy when Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead informed her the statute of limitations on such a charge was only two years, not two decades.
Celebrity feminist Camille Paglia - like Wolf, an academic protege of Bloom's - yesterday jumped on her steed and galloped at Wolf brandishing a poison-tipped lance.
"It really smacks of the Salem witch hunts and all the accompanying hysteria," Paglia told me. "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."
Paglia recalled that when Wolf's best seller, "The Beauty Myth," launched her to fame and fortune in 1991, she did an interview at her Manhattan apartment with Philadelphia Inquirer book editor Carlin Romano. She greeted him, Romano wrote, wearing "a pair of flimsy see-through orange harem pants, scarcely obscuring black panties."
Wolf enhanced her fame, during the 2000 presidential campaign, as a $15,000-a-month consultant to Democratic nominee Al Gore, reportedly advising the vice president to wear earth tones and be an Alpha male.
The Observer noted that in her 1997 book, "Promiscuities," Wolf wrote about an anonymous professor showing up at her apartment, ostensibly to discuss her poetry, but ending up by placing his hand between her legs. "It felt so familiar: this sense of being exposed as if in a slow-moving dream of shame," Wolf wrote. "I could practically hear my own pulse: What had I done, done, done?"
Observer reporter and Yale grad Rachel Donadio, herself a student in one of Bloom's Shakespeare seminars in the mid-1990s, quoted a source close to Bloom as calling the account a "vicious lie."
Bloom, who continues to teach despite severe health problems, yesterday declined to comment on Wolf's accusation - which, I'm told, will be part of a general indictment of her alma mater's sexual misconduct policies, including the ordeals of up to 10 women.
Wolf declined to get on the phone with me yesterday, but New York mag issued a statement in her name:
"The problem of sexual misconduct at Yale and the administration's tolerance of an environment in which students suffer from it, is much bigger than one person or one incident, and it needs to be addressed."
THE BRIEFING
BIG BEN? In case you thought that Ben Affleck - post J.Lo - has taken a solemn vow to stop frightening the horses and children, think again.
In the upcoming In Style, he confides that 1998, the year he and Matt Damon won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for "Good Will Hunting," was the best year of his life.
"I've never been happier than I was that year. Since then things have become more complicated and weird, though not necessarily worse. It would be nice to win for acting. I'm sure my work in 'Gigli' has a shot!"
Nice enough. But in reminiscing about his Oscar, Affleck can't resist the urge to tell the mag: "I remember standing at a urinal next to Charlton Heston, which was a really interesting moment, getting to measure my manhood against Moses'."
LOVESICK AT THE LIBRARY? That was Ethan Hawke declaring soulfully Tuesday night: "I don't love you anymore; on the contrary, I detest you. You are a vile, mean, beastly slut."
And adding for good measure:
"It is sad when one and the same heart is torn by such conflicting feelings for one person ... I need to be alone ... All my feelings have dried up ... At 29, I have exhausted everything."
But the subject wasn't estranged wife Uma Thurman, and Hawke is actually 33. The actor was reading from Napoleon Bonaparte's love letters to and about Josephine. Hawke was joined in the "Young Lions" program at the New York Public Library by fellow performers Kristin Davis, Julie Bowen, Bliss Broyard, Arthur Bradford and Alex Draper.
BUZZ-ZZZZZZ I'm told that the ratings slide of Queen of Buzz Tina Brown's weekly CNBC talk show is Topic A among the chattering class. According to figures released yesterday, last Sunday's 8 p.m. installment of "Topic A With Tina Brown," featuring Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein as the guest, drew only 20,000 viewers - a 67% plummet from the previous Sunday's debut and a rating so low that it barely registers on the buzz-o-meter.DELIVERING NEWS - AND SOON MOREMy pal Soledad O'Brien, co-anchor of CNN's "American Morning," is pregnant with twins, due sometime in late summer.
"Can you believe it?" the 37-year-old mother of two told me yesterday. "It's kind of shocking."
O'Brien, who'd been tossing her cookies between live interviews, said she finally has gotten over her morning sickness.
"I'm feeling much better now, but I had really, really bad nausea for the first trimester," she confided. "I never came close to throwing up on a guest, but I warned [co-anchor] Bill Hemmer that something could happen. We had a few trying moments, but that would be too gross to go into."
O'Brien added: "I will tell you this: Whoever marries Bill Hemmer is so lucky. He has been unbelievable. When I told him, he said, 'The next seven months are all about you.'
"Um, my husband, Brad, has been been nice, too."
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By Stephen Butler, Staff Reporter
Yale Daily News - Thursday, February 19, 2004
Feminist activist and Rhodes Scholar Naomi Wolf '84 recently accused Humanities and English Professor Harold Bloom of sexually harassing her while she was an undergraduate at Yale, the New York Observer reported this week.Wolf's accusations will appear in an article she is writing for next week's New York Magazine, the Observer reported.
Bloom is well known at Yale and worldwide for his scholarship on Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton, as well for writing over 20 books including "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" and "How to Read and Why." Bloom -- who, according to unidentified sources in the Observer article, wrote a recommendation for Wolf when she was applying for the Rhodes Scholarship -- declined to comment on the accusation.
New York Magazine spokeswoman Serena Torrey said she could not comment on the specific content of an article that had not yet been published but said Wolf's story will appear next Monday.
"In next week's New York Magazine, Naomi Wolf will have a story outlining 20 years of incidents of sexual misconduct at Yale and her search and hope for an appropriate response from the administration to these situations," Torrey said.
Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said Wolf contacted Yale with her accusations, but she explained that Wolf had not acted within the two-year statute of limitations for such complaints.
"As we explained to Ms. Wolf, Yale has very clear guidelines and policies for any sexual harassment claims," Klasky said. "Any claims must be brought in two years after the alleged incident. At the time when she was a student, she did not avail herself."
Klasky said Wolf asked for an apology but was told that Yale can't issue an apology "when there's no finding of wrong-doing."
"Yale takes any claim of sexual harassment very seriously," Klasky said. "That is why we have such stringent policies and procedures in place and why we encourage students when appropriate to avail themselves."
Klasky said Wolf does not intend to take legal action against Yale.
Wolf, author of "The Beauty Myth," and "Fire With Fire," gained notoriety in 2000 as an advisor to Al Gore's Presidential Campaign, during which she suggested that Gore become an Alpha male and discard what she referred to as his Beta male tendencies.
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Feminist author accuses literary critic, Yale of sexual harassment
Associate Press - New Haven - Feburary 19, 2004
A feminist author has written a magazine article accusing a noted Yale University professor of sexually harassing her while she was an undergraduate in the 1980s, and alleging a long history of such events at Yale.The article is to appear in Monday's issue of New York Magazine and accuses Harold Bloom, a prominent literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale.
Naomi Wolf, author of "The Beauty Myth," was a consultant to Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign. She advised Gore on changing his image, including advice on how to convince voters that he was an "alpha male" who should be in charge.
Bloom has written more than 20 books about the Bible, Milton and poetry.
Details about the forthcoming article were first reported this week by the New York Observer.
New York Magazine spokeswoman Serena Torrey said she could not comment on the article because it has not yet been published. But she told the Yale Daily News that Wolf "will have a story outlining 20 years of incidents of sexual misconduct at Yale and her search and hope for an appropriate response from the administration to these situations."
Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said Thursday she had not seen the article and could not comment on it. She said Wolf contacted Yale with the allegation about Bloom and was told a two-year statute of limitations for such complaints had passed.
Reached at his home Thursday night, Bloom declined comment.
In a statement issued through New York Magazine, Wolf said she had been asked by Yale to help raise money and said "I felt I had to tell them why I was reluctant to do so."
"I then had many conversations with Yale authorities over a period of recent months, telling my story, hoping for an off-the-record meeting to address my concerns about the school's grievance procedures. I got nowhere," Wolf said.
"Several distinguished women have come forward in my piece to attest to the fact that there is a systemic problem at Yale University," she said.
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Feminists at war over 'sex pest' professor
By Marcus Warren in New York
The Daily Telegraph (UK) - Feburary 20, 2004
America's most telegenic feminist, Naomi Wolf, has touched offa media firestorm with a forthcoming condemnation of two decades of alleged sexual harassment against women at Yale, her former university.
According to advance "tasters" of the expose, she describes herself as a victim of harassment and names a senior professor as her tormentor.
Her high-profile denunciation of alleged sexual misconduct at the Ivy League university has already drawn a furious response from one of her feminist sisters and another former student of the professor.
Camille Paglia accused Wolf of launching a witch hunt similar to those that swept New England in the 17th century and, in distinctly unfeminist fashion, of exploiting her looks to advance her career.
"It really smacks of the Salem witch hunts and all the accompanying hysteria," Paglia said.
"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."
The professor, who has been described as "destructively seductive", has maintained a dignified silence during the furore. "He has no comment," his wife said yesterday.
Wolf, a former Rhodes Scholar and the author of bestselling books such as The Beauty Myth, is reported to make her allegations in a piece to be published in next week's issue of New York magazine.
Yale has confirmed that she contacted the university with her claims but was told that the two-year statute of limitations for such offences had already passed. She studied there in the early 1980s.
When she asked for an apology for her alleged ordeal, she was told that none would be forthcoming "when there is no finding of wrong-doing".
Her piece is understood to catalogue the experiences of 10 women at Yale.
Tolerance of sexual harassment "is much bigger than one person or one incident and it needs to be addressed", a spokesman for the magazine said.
Sharp-eyed readers of Wolf's work have already spotted a passage from her book Promiscuities in which a professor visits her at home, supposedly to discuss her poetry, but then gropes her between her legs.
"It felt so familiar: this sense of being exposed as if in a slow-moving dream of shame," she wrote. "I could practically hear my own pulse: What had I done, done, done?"
The professor inspires fierce loyalty from many of his students and his learning, warmth and charisma have been described as "overwhelmingly, destructively, seductive" for female undergraduates.
After making her name with The Beauty Myth, Wolf won the status of an international celebrity and is not averse to appearing on middle-brow television talk shows.
A controversial figure, she is an easy target for the likes of Paglia who, in the light of the new allegations, unleashed a stream of vitriol at her fellow feminist. It was "indecent" of her to wait for 20 years "to bring all of this down on an elderly man who has health problems, to drag him into a 'he said/she said' scenario so late in the game", she raged.
"How many books, how many articles, Naomi, are you going to impose on us so we have to be dragged back to your teenage heartbreak years?"
She added: "This is regressive. It's childish. Move on! Get on to menopause next!"
By Marcus Warren in New York
The Daily Telegraph (UK) - Feburary 20, 2004
America's most telegenic feminist, Naomi Wolf, has touched offa media firestorm with a forthcoming condemnation of two decades of alleged sexual harassment against women at Yale, her former university.
According to advance "tasters" of the expose, she describes herself as a victim of harassment and names a senior professor as her tormentor.
Her high-profile denunciation of alleged sexual misconduct at the Ivy League university has already drawn a furious response from one of her feminist sisters and another former student of the professor.
Camille Paglia accused Wolf of launching a witch hunt similar to those that swept New England in the 17th century and, in distinctly unfeminist fashion, of exploiting her looks to advance her career.
"It really smacks of the Salem witch hunts and all the accompanying hysteria," Paglia said.
"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."
The professor, who has been described as "destructively seductive", has maintained a dignified silence during the furore. "He has no comment," his wife said yesterday.
Wolf, a former Rhodes Scholar and the author of bestselling books such as The Beauty Myth, is reported to make her allegations in a piece to be published in next week's issue of New York magazine.
Yale has confirmed that she contacted the university with her claims but was told that the two-year statute of limitations for such offences had already passed. She studied there in the early 1980s.
When she asked for an apology for her alleged ordeal, she was told that none would be forthcoming "when there is no finding of wrong-doing".
Her piece is understood to catalogue the experiences of 10 women at Yale.
Tolerance of sexual harassment "is much bigger than one person or one incident and it needs to be addressed", a spokesman for the magazine said.
Sharp-eyed readers of Wolf's work have already spotted a passage from her book Promiscuities in which a professor visits her at home, supposedly to discuss her poetry, but then gropes her between her legs.
"It felt so familiar: this sense of being exposed as if in a slow-moving dream of shame," she wrote. "I could practically hear my own pulse: What had I done, done, done?"
The professor inspires fierce loyalty from many of his students and his learning, warmth and charisma have been described as "overwhelmingly, destructively, seductive" for female undergraduates.
After making her name with The Beauty Myth, Wolf won the status of an international celebrity and is not averse to appearing on middle-brow television talk shows.
A controversial figure, she is an easy target for the likes of Paglia who, in the light of the new allegations, unleashed a stream of vitriol at her fellow feminist. It was "indecent" of her to wait for 20 years "to bring all of this down on an elderly man who has health problems, to drag him into a 'he said/she said' scenario so late in the game", she raged.
"How many books, how many articles, Naomi, are you going to impose on us so we have to be dragged back to your teenage heartbreak years?"
She added: "This is regressive. It's childish. Move on! Get on to menopause next!"
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Feminist alleges years of sexual harassment at Yale
by Polly Curtis
Guardian - February 20, 2004
America's intelligentsia was today scandalised by the revelations that one of its leading feminist theorists, Naomi Wolf, is publishing a book alleging two decades of sexual harassment against women at her alma mater, Yale.
Ms Wolf's claims are made in a book said to document her own experience and that of 10 other women over 20 years at the Ivy league university. It will get its first public viewing in an article to be published in New York magazine next week.
Today the Telegraph reported advanced "tasters" revealing that she names her former professor and leading experts in Shakespeare, Harold Bloom, as one of her own tormentors.
Mr Bloom has refused to comment, and Yale said that as there is a two-year statute of limitations on such allegations - Ms Wolf studied there in the 1980s - they will not be investigating.
However, another feminist theorist of international standing, Camille Paglia, launched a devastating attack on Ms Wolf, saying it was "indecent" to wait 20 years before making such serious allegations.
"It really smacks of the Salem witch-hunts and all the accompanying hysteria," she told the Telegraph.
"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."
Professor Bloom, who is now in his 70s, has a loyal following of ex-students who remember him for his passion for great authors.The Telegraph reported that he has been described as "overwhelmingly, destructively, seductive" for women undergraduates.
Ms Wolf was not available to comment. She made her name with the book The Beauty Myth after gaining a prestigious Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University.
Last year Ms Wolf consulted her lawyers after doing an interview with the TV presenter Ali G who told her that if women had equal rights at work, "they'll want them at home" as well. She claimed she had been used for racist humour.
by Polly Curtis
Guardian - February 20, 2004
 |
| Naomi Wolf |
Ms Wolf's claims are made in a book said to document her own experience and that of 10 other women over 20 years at the Ivy league university. It will get its first public viewing in an article to be published in New York magazine next week.
Today the Telegraph reported advanced "tasters" revealing that she names her former professor and leading experts in Shakespeare, Harold Bloom, as one of her own tormentors.
Mr Bloom has refused to comment, and Yale said that as there is a two-year statute of limitations on such allegations - Ms Wolf studied there in the 1980s - they will not be investigating.
However, another feminist theorist of international standing, Camille Paglia, launched a devastating attack on Ms Wolf, saying it was "indecent" to wait 20 years before making such serious allegations.
"It really smacks of the Salem witch-hunts and all the accompanying hysteria," she told the Telegraph.
"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."
Professor Bloom, who is now in his 70s, has a loyal following of ex-students who remember him for his passion for great authors.The Telegraph reported that he has been described as "overwhelmingly, destructively, seductive" for women undergraduates.
Ms Wolf was not available to comment. She made her name with the book The Beauty Myth after gaining a prestigious Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University.
Last year Ms Wolf consulted her lawyers after doing an interview with the TV presenter Ali G who told her that if women had equal rights at work, "they'll want them at home" as well. She claimed she had been used for racist humour.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Yale sex claims brings out knives for Wolf
By Marcus Warren in New York
The Telegraph, London; Associated Press - February 21, 2004
The American feminist Naomi Wolf has accused a noted Yale University professor of sexually harassing her while she was an undergraduate, and alleged a long history of such events at Yale.
According to advance "tasters" of her magazine expose, Wolf describes herself as a victim of harassment and names Harold Bloom, a prominent literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, as her tormentor.
Her denunciation of alleged sexual misconduct at the Ivy League university has drawn a furious response from one of her feminist sisters and another former student of the professor.
Camille Paglia accused Wolf of staging a witch-hunt similar to those that swept New England in the 17th century and, in distinctly unfeminist fashion, of exploiting her looks to advance her career.
"It really smacks of the Salem witch-hunts and all the accompanying hysteria," Paglia said.
"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."
The professor, who has been described as "destructively seductive", has maintained a silence during the furore.
Bloom has written more than 20 books about the Bible, Milton and poetry.
Wolf, a former Rhodes scholar and the author of bestselling books such as The Beauty Myth, makes her allegations in an article to appear in Monday's issue of New York Magazine.
Yale has confirmed that she contacted the university with her claims but was told that the two-year statute of limitations for such offences had passed. She studied there in the early 1980s.
When she asked for an apology, she was told that none would be forthcoming "when there is no finding of wrongdoing".
Her piece is understood to catalogue the experiences of 10 women at Yale.
Paglia said it was "indecent" of Wolf to wait for 20 years "to bring all of this down on an elderly man who has health problems, to drag him into a 'he said/she said' scenario so late in the game".
"How many books, how many articles, Naomi, are you going to impose on us so we have to be dragged back to your teenage heartbreak years?
"This is regressive. It's childish. Move on! Get on to menopause next!"
In a statement issued through New York Magazine, Wolf said she had been asked by Yale to help raise money and said "I felt I had to tell them why I was reluctant to do so".
" . . . Several distinguished women have come forward in my piece to attest to the fact that there is a systemic problem at Yale University."
By Marcus Warren in New York
The Telegraph, London; Associated Press - February 21, 2004
The American feminist Naomi Wolf has accused a noted Yale University professor of sexually harassing her while she was an undergraduate, and alleged a long history of such events at Yale.
According to advance "tasters" of her magazine expose, Wolf describes herself as a victim of harassment and names Harold Bloom, a prominent literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, as her tormentor.
Her denunciation of alleged sexual misconduct at the Ivy League university has drawn a furious response from one of her feminist sisters and another former student of the professor.
Camille Paglia accused Wolf of staging a witch-hunt similar to those that swept New England in the 17th century and, in distinctly unfeminist fashion, of exploiting her looks to advance her career.
"It really smacks of the Salem witch-hunts and all the accompanying hysteria," Paglia said.
"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."
The professor, who has been described as "destructively seductive", has maintained a silence during the furore.
Bloom has written more than 20 books about the Bible, Milton and poetry.
Wolf, a former Rhodes scholar and the author of bestselling books such as The Beauty Myth, makes her allegations in an article to appear in Monday's issue of New York Magazine.
Yale has confirmed that she contacted the university with her claims but was told that the two-year statute of limitations for such offences had passed. She studied there in the early 1980s.
When she asked for an apology, she was told that none would be forthcoming "when there is no finding of wrongdoing".
Her piece is understood to catalogue the experiences of 10 women at Yale.
Paglia said it was "indecent" of Wolf to wait for 20 years "to bring all of this down on an elderly man who has health problems, to drag him into a 'he said/she said' scenario so late in the game".
"How many books, how many articles, Naomi, are you going to impose on us so we have to be dragged back to your teenage heartbreak years?
"This is regressive. It's childish. Move on! Get on to menopause next!"
In a statement issued through New York Magazine, Wolf said she had been asked by Yale to help raise money and said "I felt I had to tell them why I was reluctant to do so".
" . . . Several distinguished women have come forward in my piece to attest to the fact that there is a systemic problem at Yale University."
____________________________________________________________________________________
Writer Accuses Yale Professor Of Sex Harassment
By Kim Martineau
By Kim Martineau
Courant - February 21, 2004
NEW HAVEN -- In one of her books, feminist author Naomi Wolf describes the shock and shame of showing her poetry manuscript to a college professor, only to feel his hand slide between her legs.
The professor wasn't named in the book, "Promiscuities," but now, nearly 20 years later, Wolf has identified the professor she says put his hand on her thigh.
She has accused Harold Bloom, a towering literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, of groping her in the fall of 1983 - her senior year. Her story, "Sex and Silence at Yale," will appear on the cover of New York magazine Monday. Already the piece is causing a stir.
Cultural commentator Camille Paglia, who counts Bloom as a longtime mentor, blasted Wolf for coming forward so late. "This is regressive!" she told the New York Observer. "It's childish! Move on! Move on! Get on to menopause next!"
Trucks from CNN arrived Friday at Bloom's door in New Haven, cameras rolling, to film his response. He had none - in case he files a defamation suit, he said Friday.
Wolf was a senior, majoring in English, when Bloom agreed to meet with her weekly for an independent study in poetry, she writes in her article, released in advance to the press Friday. He also agreed to write a recommendation for her Rhodes scholarship application.
Arranging a meeting with Bloom proved more difficult. At office hours, adoring students - whom he alternately called "my dear" and "my child," she says - vied for his attention. One night, Bloom invited himself to dinner at Wolf's house, she reported. After dinner, she dropped her manuscript on the table, eager for his review. "It was the best work of my life," she wrote.
But he barely noticed the poetry, she said. Suddenly, she felt a hand on her thigh.
"I turned away from him toward the sink and found myself vomiting, in shock," she wrote. He appeared in the kitchen with his coat.
"You are a deeply troubled girl," he said, before corking his bottle of Amontillado sherry and walking out the door, she writes.
Wolf shared her story with friends but they tried to talk her out of filing a complaint, she said. She was a student on financial aid. He was an international authority on Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton. He seemed untouchable.
Her grades began to slip. She was passed over for the Rhodes scholarship. She did not meet with Bloom again that semester, but dropped the poems in his department mailbox. He later gave her a B.
She never filed a grievance, but went on to win a Rhodes Scholarship on her second try. While studying at Oxford, she got the idea for her 1991 bestseller, "The Beauty Myth."
She went on to write books about teenage sexuality and motherhood and even coached Al Gore during his 2000 presidential campaign - though he was later ridiculed for taking her advice on how to become an "alpha-male."
In her lectures to young women, she was often troubled by their questions about the unnamed professor described in her work and why she never came forward publicly.
That changed last summer when a Yale alumnus asked her for help raising money for Yale. Wolf wrote a letter to Charles Pagnam, vice president of development, describing what had happened her senior year. She wanted to know what the university was doing to protect its students. She got no response, she wrote.
She then called Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead. He said he'd get back to her, she wrote. She tried Pagnam again, then Yale President Richard Levin. She felt thwarted at every turn, she said.
"I was starting to feel like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction," she wrote. "One assistant responded brightly: You should try the Women's Studies Department."
Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said Wolf wanted to file a complaint and demanded an apology, but because of the university's two-year statute of limitations, neither was possible. Wolf also wanted the name of other students who had been harassed, but Klasky said confidentiality rules prevented Yale from giving that out. She defended the university's sexual harassment procedure, and said it should have been clear to Wolf in 1983, she said.
Frustrated by what she saw as Yale's stonewalling, Wolf started her own investigation. In her New York article she paints a picture of an institution more concerned with protecting its reputation than making sure complaints from female students are followed up appropriately.
"It gave me an up-front and raw look at how power works at a powerful institution," she said Friday from her home in Manhattan.
Deborah Amory, now a dean at the State University of New York, told Wolf how a faculty member in 1985 had put his hand on her leg at Mory's, a local restaurant in New Haven. She filed a complaint but was never told of its outcome, the article relates. "The secrecy around the sanctions was more traumatic than the original event," she told Wolf. Amory later learned the professor had been advised to get alcohol counseling and stay away from students when drinking.
Wolf writes that a former law student, Cynthia Powell, told her she had been sexually assaulted by a tenured professor in 1992, but when Powell met with university officials to file her grievance, Yale immediately brought in a lawyer while denying her request to bring a lawyer of her own. The university refused to call it "rape," Powell added, but a few months later the professor resigned and was promptly hired by another college.
In 1996, a Yale math professor, Jay Jorgenson, had consensual sex with a freshman student he was grading, and though the grievance board recommended he not teach undergraduates that term, he continued, Wolf recounts in her story. In the wake of that incident, Yale explicitly barred faculty from having sexual relationships with their students.
As recently as January, Stephanie Urie, a graduate of Yale Divinity School who now volunteers as a hospice chaplain, accused Yale in a lawsuit of ignoring complaints about divinity professor Gilbert Bond. She claims Bond lured her to a hotel in Boston, on the pretense of a potential job, and took advantage of her sexually. That case is pending.
Bloom, 73, is teaching two classes this semester, including a course on Shakespeare, "Tragedies and Romances." He canceled his courses last semester due to health problems.
Wolf said Friday it was never her intention to single Bloom out. But when she didn't get the answers she wanted from Yale, she felt compelled to find out why. "There were many other women with worse stories than mine," she said.
The criticism she received from Paglia, she said, is just one way that complaints of sexual harassment are used to question the credibility of the women making the complaint - perpetuating the silence.
NEW HAVEN -- In one of her books, feminist author Naomi Wolf describes the shock and shame of showing her poetry manuscript to a college professor, only to feel his hand slide between her legs.
The professor wasn't named in the book, "Promiscuities," but now, nearly 20 years later, Wolf has identified the professor she says put his hand on her thigh.
She has accused Harold Bloom, a towering literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, of groping her in the fall of 1983 - her senior year. Her story, "Sex and Silence at Yale," will appear on the cover of New York magazine Monday. Already the piece is causing a stir.
Cultural commentator Camille Paglia, who counts Bloom as a longtime mentor, blasted Wolf for coming forward so late. "This is regressive!" she told the New York Observer. "It's childish! Move on! Move on! Get on to menopause next!"
Trucks from CNN arrived Friday at Bloom's door in New Haven, cameras rolling, to film his response. He had none - in case he files a defamation suit, he said Friday.
Wolf was a senior, majoring in English, when Bloom agreed to meet with her weekly for an independent study in poetry, she writes in her article, released in advance to the press Friday. He also agreed to write a recommendation for her Rhodes scholarship application.
Arranging a meeting with Bloom proved more difficult. At office hours, adoring students - whom he alternately called "my dear" and "my child," she says - vied for his attention. One night, Bloom invited himself to dinner at Wolf's house, she reported. After dinner, she dropped her manuscript on the table, eager for his review. "It was the best work of my life," she wrote.
But he barely noticed the poetry, she said. Suddenly, she felt a hand on her thigh.
"I turned away from him toward the sink and found myself vomiting, in shock," she wrote. He appeared in the kitchen with his coat.
"You are a deeply troubled girl," he said, before corking his bottle of Amontillado sherry and walking out the door, she writes.
Wolf shared her story with friends but they tried to talk her out of filing a complaint, she said. She was a student on financial aid. He was an international authority on Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton. He seemed untouchable.
Her grades began to slip. She was passed over for the Rhodes scholarship. She did not meet with Bloom again that semester, but dropped the poems in his department mailbox. He later gave her a B.
She never filed a grievance, but went on to win a Rhodes Scholarship on her second try. While studying at Oxford, she got the idea for her 1991 bestseller, "The Beauty Myth."
She went on to write books about teenage sexuality and motherhood and even coached Al Gore during his 2000 presidential campaign - though he was later ridiculed for taking her advice on how to become an "alpha-male."
In her lectures to young women, she was often troubled by their questions about the unnamed professor described in her work and why she never came forward publicly.
That changed last summer when a Yale alumnus asked her for help raising money for Yale. Wolf wrote a letter to Charles Pagnam, vice president of development, describing what had happened her senior year. She wanted to know what the university was doing to protect its students. She got no response, she wrote.
She then called Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead. He said he'd get back to her, she wrote. She tried Pagnam again, then Yale President Richard Levin. She felt thwarted at every turn, she said.
"I was starting to feel like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction," she wrote. "One assistant responded brightly: You should try the Women's Studies Department."
Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said Wolf wanted to file a complaint and demanded an apology, but because of the university's two-year statute of limitations, neither was possible. Wolf also wanted the name of other students who had been harassed, but Klasky said confidentiality rules prevented Yale from giving that out. She defended the university's sexual harassment procedure, and said it should have been clear to Wolf in 1983, she said.
Frustrated by what she saw as Yale's stonewalling, Wolf started her own investigation. In her New York article she paints a picture of an institution more concerned with protecting its reputation than making sure complaints from female students are followed up appropriately.
"It gave me an up-front and raw look at how power works at a powerful institution," she said Friday from her home in Manhattan.
Deborah Amory, now a dean at the State University of New York, told Wolf how a faculty member in 1985 had put his hand on her leg at Mory's, a local restaurant in New Haven. She filed a complaint but was never told of its outcome, the article relates. "The secrecy around the sanctions was more traumatic than the original event," she told Wolf. Amory later learned the professor had been advised to get alcohol counseling and stay away from students when drinking.
Wolf writes that a former law student, Cynthia Powell, told her she had been sexually assaulted by a tenured professor in 1992, but when Powell met with university officials to file her grievance, Yale immediately brought in a lawyer while denying her request to bring a lawyer of her own. The university refused to call it "rape," Powell added, but a few months later the professor resigned and was promptly hired by another college.
In 1996, a Yale math professor, Jay Jorgenson, had consensual sex with a freshman student he was grading, and though the grievance board recommended he not teach undergraduates that term, he continued, Wolf recounts in her story. In the wake of that incident, Yale explicitly barred faculty from having sexual relationships with their students.
As recently as January, Stephanie Urie, a graduate of Yale Divinity School who now volunteers as a hospice chaplain, accused Yale in a lawsuit of ignoring complaints about divinity professor Gilbert Bond. She claims Bond lured her to a hotel in Boston, on the pretense of a potential job, and took advantage of her sexually. That case is pending.
Bloom, 73, is teaching two classes this semester, including a course on Shakespeare, "Tragedies and Romances." He canceled his courses last semester due to health problems.
Wolf said Friday it was never her intention to single Bloom out. But when she didn't get the answers she wanted from Yale, she felt compelled to find out why. "There were many other women with worse stories than mine," she said.
The criticism she received from Paglia, she said, is just one way that complaints of sexual harassment are used to question the credibility of the women making the complaint - perpetuating the silence.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Magazine details harassment at Yale
Michelle Tuccitto
New Haven Register - Feburary 22, 2004
A well-known feminist author and Yale graduate, who claims a famous professor groped her, says the university has created a culture that tolerates sexual harassment.
Naomi Wolf, author of "The Beauty Myth," claims professor Harold Bloom put his hand on her inner thigh in the late fall of 1983 while she was seeking his input on poetry she had written.
A sneak preview of the article in New York magazine sent out Saturday details Wolf's ignored pleas for action in 1983 and years later when the Ivy League school asked her to participate in campus events.
The article, entitled, "The Silent Treatment," hits newsstands Monday. Wolf, who was a 20-year-old senior and English major in 1983, said she considered going to the school's Grievance Board, but her friends persuaded her not to speak to anyone official about what happened.
"Someone said she had heard things about Bloom and other students, and that administrators had heard about it as well. But the university saw him as untouchable, my friends warned. Don't do it," the article says.
Wolf writes that she sought private reassurance from university officials in the past year that steps have been taken to ensure that unwanted sexual advances weren't still occurring.
"I was shocked to conclude that the atmosphere of collusion that had helped to keep me quiet twenty years ago was still as secretive as a Masonic lodge," Wolf wrote.
Wolf acknowledges that she never took action or filed any complaint.
"Every year, I wonder about the young women who might have suffered because I was too scared to tell the truth to the people whose job it is to make sure the institution is clean," Wolf wrote.
She had taken an independent study with Bloom, and he agreed to meet with her weekly, according to the article. She had a poetry manuscript and wanted Bloom to go over it with her.
Wolf claims Bloom suggested that he come to the house she shared with one of his employees and the employee's boyfriend. Wolf agreed and the four had dinner.
Later, she and Bloom were alone, and she put her manuscript between them, she says.
"He did not open it. He did not look at it ... The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh," Wolf writes. She claims Bloom came at her, and she turned away, "vomiting, in shock."
Wolf outlines other incidents of alleged sexual misconduct at Yale and her search for an appropriate response from Yale to address the problem.
She cites the case of Stephanie Urie, a Yale Divinity School graduate, as an example. Urie recently filed a lawsuit against Yale, claiming a professor who had been her mentor, Gilbert Bond, sexually abused her. Urie's lawsuit alleges that Yale officials did not act to protect her and failed to enforce a policy that prohibits sexual relations between faculty and students.
Bond has denied Urie's claims.
Bloom, a Sterling Professor of Humanities who has written 20 books about the Bible, poetry and the author Milton, could not be reached for comment Saturday, as there was no answer at his home.
When reached by the Associated Press last week, Bloom declined to comment.
Yale spokesman Thomas Conroy disagreed with any suggestion that the university isn't taking steps to prevent unwanted sexual advances.
"The university has a firm policy prohibiting sexual harassment, and it has excellent procedures in place to prevent and address sexual harassment," Conroy said.
He noted that the university prohibits teachers from having a sexual relationship with students they have direct supervisory responsibilities over, regardless of whether the relationship is consensual.
Wolf notes in her article that the rule was made only after a controversy broke out in 1996 over a consensual relationship between a professor and a student.
Students can lodge complaints with a grievance board, which will work to address them, according to Conroy.
Under university policy, students need to bring a claim or complaint of sexual harassment within two years of when the incident is alleged to have occurred, Conroy said.
"In this particular case, the individual sought to bring a claim for an incident (alleged to have happened ) 20 years ago," Conroy said. "She was informed by the university that the time limit for bringing a complaint has expired."
Conroy said no one whom Wolf spoke with at Yale can know what the facts are.
"The fundamental question is — does the university have responsible, appropriate policies and procedures regarding this issue?" Conroy said. "The answer is, `Yes.' "
Wolf contends Yale's rules are too little, too late.
"(Bloom's) harmful impulse would not have entered his life or my real life — then or now — if Yale made the consequences of such behavior both clear and real," she writes.
Wolf compares Yale to the Catholic Church's recent struggles.
"The public understood that church leaders' maintaining silence about systemic sexual transgressions corrupted the mission of an organization that had a great responsibility to society as a whole," she writes.
The article ends with Wolf imagining how she would react if a current Yale student came to her with a complaint similar to hers.
"I still could not urge her to speak up confidently to those tasked with educating, supporting, and mentoring her ... I would, with a heavy heart, advise that young woman, for her own protection, to get a good lawyer."
Michelle Tuccitto
New Haven Register - Feburary 22, 2004
A well-known feminist author and Yale graduate, who claims a famous professor groped her, says the university has created a culture that tolerates sexual harassment.
Naomi Wolf, author of "The Beauty Myth," claims professor Harold Bloom put his hand on her inner thigh in the late fall of 1983 while she was seeking his input on poetry she had written.
A sneak preview of the article in New York magazine sent out Saturday details Wolf's ignored pleas for action in 1983 and years later when the Ivy League school asked her to participate in campus events.
The article, entitled, "The Silent Treatment," hits newsstands Monday. Wolf, who was a 20-year-old senior and English major in 1983, said she considered going to the school's Grievance Board, but her friends persuaded her not to speak to anyone official about what happened.
"Someone said she had heard things about Bloom and other students, and that administrators had heard about it as well. But the university saw him as untouchable, my friends warned. Don't do it," the article says.
Wolf writes that she sought private reassurance from university officials in the past year that steps have been taken to ensure that unwanted sexual advances weren't still occurring.
"I was shocked to conclude that the atmosphere of collusion that had helped to keep me quiet twenty years ago was still as secretive as a Masonic lodge," Wolf wrote.
Wolf acknowledges that she never took action or filed any complaint.
"Every year, I wonder about the young women who might have suffered because I was too scared to tell the truth to the people whose job it is to make sure the institution is clean," Wolf wrote.
She had taken an independent study with Bloom, and he agreed to meet with her weekly, according to the article. She had a poetry manuscript and wanted Bloom to go over it with her.
Wolf claims Bloom suggested that he come to the house she shared with one of his employees and the employee's boyfriend. Wolf agreed and the four had dinner.
Later, she and Bloom were alone, and she put her manuscript between them, she says.
"He did not open it. He did not look at it ... The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh," Wolf writes. She claims Bloom came at her, and she turned away, "vomiting, in shock."
Wolf outlines other incidents of alleged sexual misconduct at Yale and her search for an appropriate response from Yale to address the problem.
She cites the case of Stephanie Urie, a Yale Divinity School graduate, as an example. Urie recently filed a lawsuit against Yale, claiming a professor who had been her mentor, Gilbert Bond, sexually abused her. Urie's lawsuit alleges that Yale officials did not act to protect her and failed to enforce a policy that prohibits sexual relations between faculty and students.
Bond has denied Urie's claims.
Bloom, a Sterling Professor of Humanities who has written 20 books about the Bible, poetry and the author Milton, could not be reached for comment Saturday, as there was no answer at his home.
When reached by the Associated Press last week, Bloom declined to comment.
Yale spokesman Thomas Conroy disagreed with any suggestion that the university isn't taking steps to prevent unwanted sexual advances.
"The university has a firm policy prohibiting sexual harassment, and it has excellent procedures in place to prevent and address sexual harassment," Conroy said.
He noted that the university prohibits teachers from having a sexual relationship with students they have direct supervisory responsibilities over, regardless of whether the relationship is consensual.
Wolf notes in her article that the rule was made only after a controversy broke out in 1996 over a consensual relationship between a professor and a student.
Students can lodge complaints with a grievance board, which will work to address them, according to Conroy.
Under university policy, students need to bring a claim or complaint of sexual harassment within two years of when the incident is alleged to have occurred, Conroy said.
"In this particular case, the individual sought to bring a claim for an incident (alleged to have happened ) 20 years ago," Conroy said. "She was informed by the university that the time limit for bringing a complaint has expired."
Conroy said no one whom Wolf spoke with at Yale can know what the facts are.
"The fundamental question is — does the university have responsible, appropriate policies and procedures regarding this issue?" Conroy said. "The answer is, `Yes.' "
Wolf contends Yale's rules are too little, too late.
"(Bloom's) harmful impulse would not have entered his life or my real life — then or now — if Yale made the consequences of such behavior both clear and real," she writes.
Wolf compares Yale to the Catholic Church's recent struggles.
"The public understood that church leaders' maintaining silence about systemic sexual transgressions corrupted the mission of an organization that had a great responsibility to society as a whole," she writes.
The article ends with Wolf imagining how she would react if a current Yale student came to her with a complaint similar to hers.
"I still could not urge her to speak up confidently to those tasked with educating, supporting, and mentoring her ... I would, with a heavy heart, advise that young woman, for her own protection, to get a good lawyer."
____________________________________________________________________________________
Diary
By Cristina Odone
(UK) The Observer - Sunday February 22, 2004
I'm losing sympathy with howling Wolf
American feminism is in turmoil. Camille Paglia, the pugnacious, counter-culture feminist, is reported in the US press as attacking Naomi Wolf, the pouting, glossy-haired feminist. According to one columnist, Paglia bitches that 'for her entire life' Wolf 'has been batting her eyes and bobbing her boobs in men's faces'. The row has been sparked by a sneak preview of Wolf's exposé on sexual harassment at Yale university in tomorrow's New York magazine.
While an undergraduate at Yale university in the 1980s, Wolf claims she was the victim of unwanted sexual advances from none other than Harold Bloom, celebrated Shakespearean scholar. Bloom, an intellectual heavyweight fêted by the American literary establishment, has not dignified Wolf's revelation with a comment. His silence has prompted Paglia to take up arms on his behalf - and the ensuing cat fight has trivialised what should have been a serious investigation into Ivy League misogyny.
It is always the way with Wolf. The serious premise - the tyranny of an aesthetic ideal, the price of sexual liberation, the dilemmas facing modern mothers - is blow-dried and lip glossed into something media friendly but ultimately self-obsessed and banal.
Wolf's habitual defence - that she mines her past in order to help the sisterhood - rings hollow in this most recent battle: if she really wished to help fellow women undergraduates then why wait 20 years to blow the whistle on a serial offender?
Wolf's most unforgivable disservice to feminism, though, lies in her constant portrayal of herself as a victim. Thus, we have had Naomi the victim of her youthful good looks (The Beauty Myth), Naomi the victim of her sexual allure (Promiscuities), Naomi the victim of motherhood (Misconceptions). The whingeing oeuvre has brought her international celebrity and not a few dollars. Can we soon expect Affluenza, in which Naomi describes herself as a victim of her wealth? I'm not sure that she can bank on our sympathy for much longer.
By Cristina Odone
(UK) The Observer - Sunday February 22, 2004
I'm losing sympathy with howling Wolf
American feminism is in turmoil. Camille Paglia, the pugnacious, counter-culture feminist, is reported in the US press as attacking Naomi Wolf, the pouting, glossy-haired feminist. According to one columnist, Paglia bitches that 'for her entire life' Wolf 'has been batting her eyes and bobbing her boobs in men's faces'. The row has been sparked by a sneak preview of Wolf's exposé on sexual harassment at Yale university in tomorrow's New York magazine.
While an undergraduate at Yale university in the 1980s, Wolf claims she was the victim of unwanted sexual advances from none other than Harold Bloom, celebrated Shakespearean scholar. Bloom, an intellectual heavyweight fêted by the American literary establishment, has not dignified Wolf's revelation with a comment. His silence has prompted Paglia to take up arms on his behalf - and the ensuing cat fight has trivialised what should have been a serious investigation into Ivy League misogyny.
It is always the way with Wolf. The serious premise - the tyranny of an aesthetic ideal, the price of sexual liberation, the dilemmas facing modern mothers - is blow-dried and lip glossed into something media friendly but ultimately self-obsessed and banal.
Wolf's habitual defence - that she mines her past in order to help the sisterhood - rings hollow in this most recent battle: if she really wished to help fellow women undergraduates then why wait 20 years to blow the whistle on a serial offender?
Wolf's most unforgivable disservice to feminism, though, lies in her constant portrayal of herself as a victim. Thus, we have had Naomi the victim of her youthful good looks (The Beauty Myth), Naomi the victim of her sexual allure (Promiscuities), Naomi the victim of motherhood (Misconceptions). The whingeing oeuvre has brought her international celebrity and not a few dollars. Can we soon expect Affluenza, in which Naomi describes herself as a victim of her wealth? I'm not sure that she can bank on our sympathy for much longer.
____________________________________________________________________________________
A great scholar stands accused of groping America's most telegenicfeminist. Is it a storm in a C-cup?
By Sarah Baxter
London Times - February 22, 2004
A professor puts his hand on a female student's thigh. The gesture is "banal, human and destructive", according to his victim. But when the transgressor is the world's greatest Shakespeare scholar and the young woman does not speak until 20 years later, when she has become a glamorous feminist celebrity, a firestorm is bound to erupt.
Did he do it? Should she have talked? It could be the plot of a Hollywood soap. At a stroke the campus wars over sexual harassment have been reignited and insults are being traded over a brief encounter at an Ivy League university two decades ago.
The young Naomi Wolf was a clever and beautiful student of English literature at Yale in 1983. She had yet to make her name as the author of the bestselling The Beauty Myth, but her professor was already famous.
For half a century Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon, has towered over literary critics. He tutored Paul Wolfowitz, one of the leading neo conservatives in the Bush administration.
As Wolf writes: "He was a vortex of power and intellectual charisma", surrounded by fawning acolytes. She was "sick with excitement" at the prospect of being tutored by him.
Bloom came to supper at her student house and promised to read her poetry. The thickset 53-year-old professor brought a bottle of amontillado sherry with him and "drank continually".
At last Wolf's housemates left. "Finally! I thought we could discuss our poetry manuscript," she writes in an article to be published tomorrow in New York magazine.
"He did not open it. He did not look at it. He leaned towards me and put his face inches from mine. 'You have the aura of election upon you,' he breathed. I moved back and took the manuscript and turned it around so he could read. The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh.
"I lurched away ... The whole thing had suddenly taken on the quality of a bad horror film. The floor spun. By now my back was against the sink which was as far away as I could get. He came at me. I turned away from him toward the sink and found myself vomiting in shock. Bloom disappeared."
Was that it? Nothing more than a simple pass? Oh please, say many feminists, what's the fuss about? Some are angry with Wolf. Camille Paglia, a former protege of Bloom's and an incendiary writer, rounded on her last week for naming and shaming a grand old man of 73 whose health is failing.
"It really smacks of the Salem witch hunts and all the accompanying hysteria," Paglia fumed. "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."
Ouch. Many feminists have not forgiven Wolf for her dissection of the "myth" of beauty while being something of a stunner herself. Paglia accuses her of having greeted one interviewer wearing "a pair of flimsy see-through orange harem pants, scarcely obscuring black panties".
Wolf, who is now 41 and married with children, has also had to live down her reputation as the consultant who advised Al Gore, the presidential loser in 2000, to wear earth tones and behave more like an alpha male.
She insists that the issue at stake is not simply Bloom's behaviour. She outed him only after Yale refused to hear her complaint.
"Since I started writing the piece more women have come out of the woodwork," she says. "There are several other women I write about in the article. One of them alleges that another professor raped her and that Yale covered it up for years."
But why did Wolf wait until now to out Bloom as a groper?
In her 1997 book Promiscuities she referred to the incident without identifying Bloom by name. "My whole body, my whole self- image, once again, again, burned with culpability," she wrote. "It felt so familiar: this sense of being exposed as if in a slow- moving dream of shame."
She also cited the incident anonymously at debates and public events. Women would ask her at meetings: "Did you tell?" and she would answer guiltily: "No, I did nothing."
"Have you never named the guy all these years on?"
"No, never."
"But don't you have an obligation to protect other women students who might be targets now?"
"Yes," Wolf would respond. "I do have that obligation. I have not lived up to it.
I have not been brave enough."
In her soul, she writes now, she always saw that "soft spot of complicity".
Bloom's act of harassment, such as it was, had "devastated my sense of being valuable to Yale as a student rather than as a pawn of powerful men".
Today the tables have turned on Bloom. If anything, Wolf is better known than he is to the public, giving her ample opportunity for revenge.
She decided to break her silence after declining yet again a request to join a Yale fundraising drive. "Something broke in me," she says.
She always spurned such requests, she wrote in a letter to an administrator, because she had been "sexually encroached upon" as a student and the professor in question was still a revered campus figure. There was no reply, so she took her complaint to the then dean of Yale, Richard Brodhead, who seemed to know which "revered figure" she was talking about before she began to name names.
Wolf told him she neither intended to go public nor to bring a lawsuit, but she did want a private, closed-door meeting with Bloom and a Yale representative, to make sure the college was accountable. The dean promised to get back to her, she says, but didn't.
Wolf persisted with her complaint though "I was starting to feel like the woman in Fatal Attraction". Eight months passed before she was finally told to drop the matter: the two-year statute of limitations for bringing such accusations had passed long ago.
One Yale press officer told her: "Harold Bloom? He hits on everybody," before backpedalling "in a bizarre way".
"Now I was truly angry," she says. She began to draft her article.
Is Wolf behaving self-righteously by airing a 20-year-old private grievance? Feminists appear to think so.
Katie Roiphe, author of a groundbreaking book on date-rape which challenges the notion of women as victims, says: "I find it distasteful. Whether or not it happened, taking on somebody whose health is failing strikes me as a little desperate. It's completely sensible to have a statute of limitations. Even criminals are entitled to some protection."
Roiphe has often shared a platform with Wolf at public meetings and heard her raise the issue with audiences.
"To take a minor incident like this and have it echo over the years is blowing it out of all proportion. I know she was a student and he was in a position of power, but the best way to handle such things is to say, 'Wait a minute. What are you doing?' Unless you are accusing somebody of sexual assault it is not a hugely complicated matter."
Roiphe has her own damning analysis of why Wolf has gone public. "It's a desperate power grab. People didn't pay much attention to her last book on motherhood. She wants to regain the sense of outrage of the feminism of the early 1990s, which was about the lurking sexual threat of complimenting women at the water cooler. It is an attempt to go back to the golden age of Naomi Wolf."
In a similar vein, Paglia has advised her: "This is regressive. It's childish.
Move on! Get on to the menopause next!"
There is more to it than this, however. Wolf was a student when feminism was at a crossroads. The original women's "liberation" movement had tempted many male university lecturers to regard their female students as easy lays. The 1970s was the era of The History Man, Malcolm Bradbury's satirical novel. Sleeping around was considered by some feminists as almost a revolutionary duty that broke down repressive barriers of male authority.
The novelist Howard Jacobson recalls that, in his early career as an English lecturer, affairs were the norm. "As often as not we were the quarry," he wrote.
"I say 'we' because sex with students was more or less a departmental affair. Most philosophers did it, a goodly number of geographers did it, not quite so many historians, but in English literature we all did it."
In the 1980s, at the moment when Bloom may have been laying his hand on Wolf's thigh, the rules of the game were changing. Feminists began to regard women as men's victims and to demand female empowerment. All men were potential rapists, argued Andrea Dworkin. Women had to beware of sexual harassment and exploitation.
This led in the early 1990s to puritan political correctness, codes of conduct for dating and a new crime: date rape. Men who claimed that women who said "no" meant "yes" risked jail. David Mamet, the playwright, struck back with Oleanna, a chilling drama about a student's false allegations of sexual harassment by her professor.
Universities, including Yale, drew up regulations for behaviour between staff and students. A spokesman for Yale said yesterday: "The university has in place appropriate policies and regulations to address the serious issue of sexual harassment."
Bloom himself has so far refused to comment on Wolf's claims, but a friend has denounced them as a "vicious lie".
His alleged pass, true or false, could provide the answer to a question that has long puzzled Wolf's readers. When she published her 1991 bestseller The Beauty Myth, about women's lack of self- esteem and the pressure to look good, her angst seemed at odds with her appearance and poise.
The writer Ros Coward, who has for many years explored the contradictions of feminism, says: "In some ways she was an unlikely recruit to feminism. Maybe her sense of injustice began boiling away at university and she felt belittled by her looks. It could explain why she took the path she did and started thinking more critically about sexual relations."
That, says Coward, is perhaps the most charitable interpretation of why Bloom's seemingly minor act of harassment still rankles so much with Wolf years later.
Coward argues that while victims of child abuse may justifiably wait for years before challenging their tormentors, it is hard to fathom Wolf's reasons.
"It's disturbing. It is in no way excusing lecherous professors to say that both parties seem to have survived intact. Wolf is well known and successful and has a beautiful family. She's the have-it- all woman. It is a strange thing to do at this point in her life."
Anticipating her critics, Wolf insists that institutions need to confront their past, just as the Catholic Church is doing over the scandal of paedophile priests.
"Is Harold Bloom a bad man? No," she writes. "Does this complex, brilliant man's one bad choice make him a monster? No, of course not; nor does this one experience make me a 'victim'.
"This man did something, at least once, that was self-centred and harmful. But his harmful impulse would not have entered his or my real life -then or now -if Yale made the consequences of such behaviour clear."
The saddest part, she says, is that she could still not advise an undergraduate to speak up confidently to those in authority about a secret. "I would, with a heavy heart, advise that young woman for her own protection to get a good lawyer."
Feminists wage war over sex allegation
(NY) Sunday Times - Sunday 22 Feb 2004
Controversial: Naomi Wolf says she was sexually harassed at Yale Livid: Feminist Camille Paglia slammed the claims as childish
The most telegenic feminist in the US, Naomi Wolf, has touched off a media storm over a soon-to-be-published condemnation of two decades of alleged sexual harassment against women at Yale, her former university.
According to advance "tasters" of the exposé, she describes herself as a victim of harassment and names Harold Bloom, her former professor, as her tormentor.
Her high-profile denunciation of alleged sexual misconduct at the Ivy League university has already drawn a furious response from one of her feminist sisters, also a former student of the professor.
Camille Paglia accused Wolf of launching a witch-hunt similar to those that swept New England in the 17th century and, in distinctly unfeminist fashion, of exploiting her looks to advance her career.
"It really smacks of the Salem witch-hunts and all the accompanying hysteria," Paglia said. "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."
Bloom, 73, one of the world's leading Shakespearean scholars, has maintained a dignified silence during the furore. "He has no comment," his wife said.
Wolf, a former Rhodes Scholar and the author of bestselling books such as The Beauty Myth, is said to be making her allegations in a piece appearing this week in New York magazine.
Yale confirmed that she contacted the university with her claims but was told that the two-year statute of limitations for such offences had already passed.
She studied at Yale in the early 1980s.
Her article is understood to catalogue the experiences of 10 women at Yale. Tolerance of sexual harassment "is much bigger than one person or one incident and it needs to be addressed", a spokesman for the magazine said.
Sharp-eyed readers of Wolf's work have already spotted a passage from her book Promiscuities in which a professor visits her at home, supposedly to discuss her poetry, but then gropes her between her legs.
"It felt so familiar: this sense of being exposed as if in a slow-moving dream of shame," she wrote. "I could practically hear my own pulse: what had I done, done, done?"
The professor, who has been described as Falstaffian and rabbinical in his passion for great authors, inspires fierce loyalty from many of his students and his warmth and charisma have been described as "overwhelmingly, destructively, seductive" for female undergraduates.
After making her name with The Beauty Myth, Wolf won celebrity status and is not averse to appearing on middle-brow television talk shows.
Said Paglia: "This is regressive. It's childish. Move on! Get on to menopause next!" - © The Telegraph, London
Cristina Odone is deputy editor of the New Statesman
(NZ) Sunday Times - Sunday 22 Feb 2004
http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/2004/02/22/news/world/world03.asp
Controversial: Naomi Wolf says she was sexually harassed at Yale Livid: Feminist Camille Paglia slammed the claims as childish
The most telegenic feminist in the US, Naomi Wolf, has touched off a media storm over a soon-to-be-published condemnation of two decades of alleged sexual harassment against women at Yale, her former university.
According to advance "tasters" of the exposé, she describes herself as a victim of harassment and names Harold Bloom, her former professor, as her tormentor.
Her high-profile denunciation of alleged sexual misconduct at the Ivy League university has already drawn a furious response from one of her feminist sisters, also a former student of the professor.
Camille Paglia accused Wolf of launching a witch-hunt similar to those that swept New England in the 17th century and, in distinctly unfeminist fashion, of exploiting her looks to advance her career.
"It really smacks of the Salem witch-hunts and all the accompanying hysteria," Paglia said. "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."
Bloom, 73, one of the world's leading Shakespearean scholars, has maintained a dignified silence during the furore. "He has no comment," his wife said.
Wolf, a former Rhodes Scholar and the author of bestselling books such as The Beauty Myth, is said to be making her allegations in a piece appearing this week in New York magazine.
Yale confirmed that she contacted the university with her claims but was told that the two-year statute of limitations for such offences had already passed.
She studied at Yale in the early 1980s.
Her article is understood to catalogue the experiences of 10 women at Yale. Tolerance of sexual harassment "is much bigger than one person or one incident and it needs to be addressed", a spokesman for the magazine said.
Sharp-eyed readers of Wolf's work have already spotted a passage from her book Promiscuities in which a professor visits her at home, supposedly to discuss her poetry, but then gropes her between her legs.
"It felt so familiar: this sense of being exposed as if in a slow-moving dream of shame," she wrote. "I could practically hear my own pulse: what had I done, done, done?"
The professor, who has been described as Falstaffian and rabbinical in his passion for great authors, inspires fierce loyalty from many of his students and his warmth and charisma have been described as "overwhelmingly, destructively, seductive" for female undergraduates.
After making her name with The Beauty Myth, Wolf won celebrity status and is not averse to appearing on middle-brow television talk shows.
Said Paglia: "This is regressive. It's childish. Move on! Get on to menopause next!" - © The Telegraph, London
Cristina Odone is deputy editor of the New Statesman
By Sarah Baxter
London Times - February 22, 2004
A professor puts his hand on a female student's thigh. The gesture is "banal, human and destructive", according to his victim. But when the transgressor is the world's greatest Shakespeare scholar and the young woman does not speak until 20 years later, when she has become a glamorous feminist celebrity, a firestorm is bound to erupt.
Did he do it? Should she have talked? It could be the plot of a Hollywood soap. At a stroke the campus wars over sexual harassment have been reignited and insults are being traded over a brief encounter at an Ivy League university two decades ago.
The young Naomi Wolf was a clever and beautiful student of English literature at Yale in 1983. She had yet to make her name as the author of the bestselling The Beauty Myth, but her professor was already famous.
For half a century Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon, has towered over literary critics. He tutored Paul Wolfowitz, one of the leading neo conservatives in the Bush administration.
As Wolf writes: "He was a vortex of power and intellectual charisma", surrounded by fawning acolytes. She was "sick with excitement" at the prospect of being tutored by him.
Bloom came to supper at her student house and promised to read her poetry. The thickset 53-year-old professor brought a bottle of amontillado sherry with him and "drank continually".
At last Wolf's housemates left. "Finally! I thought we could discuss our poetry manuscript," she writes in an article to be published tomorrow in New York magazine.
"He did not open it. He did not look at it. He leaned towards me and put his face inches from mine. 'You have the aura of election upon you,' he breathed. I moved back and took the manuscript and turned it around so he could read. The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh.
"I lurched away ... The whole thing had suddenly taken on the quality of a bad horror film. The floor spun. By now my back was against the sink which was as far away as I could get. He came at me. I turned away from him toward the sink and found myself vomiting in shock. Bloom disappeared."
Was that it? Nothing more than a simple pass? Oh please, say many feminists, what's the fuss about? Some are angry with Wolf. Camille Paglia, a former protege of Bloom's and an incendiary writer, rounded on her last week for naming and shaming a grand old man of 73 whose health is failing.
"It really smacks of the Salem witch hunts and all the accompanying hysteria," Paglia fumed. "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."
Ouch. Many feminists have not forgiven Wolf for her dissection of the "myth" of beauty while being something of a stunner herself. Paglia accuses her of having greeted one interviewer wearing "a pair of flimsy see-through orange harem pants, scarcely obscuring black panties".
Wolf, who is now 41 and married with children, has also had to live down her reputation as the consultant who advised Al Gore, the presidential loser in 2000, to wear earth tones and behave more like an alpha male.
She insists that the issue at stake is not simply Bloom's behaviour. She outed him only after Yale refused to hear her complaint.
"Since I started writing the piece more women have come out of the woodwork," she says. "There are several other women I write about in the article. One of them alleges that another professor raped her and that Yale covered it up for years."
But why did Wolf wait until now to out Bloom as a groper?
In her 1997 book Promiscuities she referred to the incident without identifying Bloom by name. "My whole body, my whole self- image, once again, again, burned with culpability," she wrote. "It felt so familiar: this sense of being exposed as if in a slow- moving dream of shame."
She also cited the incident anonymously at debates and public events. Women would ask her at meetings: "Did you tell?" and she would answer guiltily: "No, I did nothing."
"Have you never named the guy all these years on?"
"No, never."
"But don't you have an obligation to protect other women students who might be targets now?"
"Yes," Wolf would respond. "I do have that obligation. I have not lived up to it.
I have not been brave enough."
In her soul, she writes now, she always saw that "soft spot of complicity".
Bloom's act of harassment, such as it was, had "devastated my sense of being valuable to Yale as a student rather than as a pawn of powerful men".
Today the tables have turned on Bloom. If anything, Wolf is better known than he is to the public, giving her ample opportunity for revenge.
She decided to break her silence after declining yet again a request to join a Yale fundraising drive. "Something broke in me," she says.
She always spurned such requests, she wrote in a letter to an administrator, because she had been "sexually encroached upon" as a student and the professor in question was still a revered campus figure. There was no reply, so she took her complaint to the then dean of Yale, Richard Brodhead, who seemed to know which "revered figure" she was talking about before she began to name names.
Wolf told him she neither intended to go public nor to bring a lawsuit, but she did want a private, closed-door meeting with Bloom and a Yale representative, to make sure the college was accountable. The dean promised to get back to her, she says, but didn't.
Wolf persisted with her complaint though "I was starting to feel like the woman in Fatal Attraction". Eight months passed before she was finally told to drop the matter: the two-year statute of limitations for bringing such accusations had passed long ago.
One Yale press officer told her: "Harold Bloom? He hits on everybody," before backpedalling "in a bizarre way".
"Now I was truly angry," she says. She began to draft her article.
Is Wolf behaving self-righteously by airing a 20-year-old private grievance? Feminists appear to think so.
Katie Roiphe, author of a groundbreaking book on date-rape which challenges the notion of women as victims, says: "I find it distasteful. Whether or not it happened, taking on somebody whose health is failing strikes me as a little desperate. It's completely sensible to have a statute of limitations. Even criminals are entitled to some protection."
Roiphe has often shared a platform with Wolf at public meetings and heard her raise the issue with audiences.
"To take a minor incident like this and have it echo over the years is blowing it out of all proportion. I know she was a student and he was in a position of power, but the best way to handle such things is to say, 'Wait a minute. What are you doing?' Unless you are accusing somebody of sexual assault it is not a hugely complicated matter."
Roiphe has her own damning analysis of why Wolf has gone public. "It's a desperate power grab. People didn't pay much attention to her last book on motherhood. She wants to regain the sense of outrage of the feminism of the early 1990s, which was about the lurking sexual threat of complimenting women at the water cooler. It is an attempt to go back to the golden age of Naomi Wolf."
In a similar vein, Paglia has advised her: "This is regressive. It's childish.
Move on! Get on to the menopause next!"
There is more to it than this, however. Wolf was a student when feminism was at a crossroads. The original women's "liberation" movement had tempted many male university lecturers to regard their female students as easy lays. The 1970s was the era of The History Man, Malcolm Bradbury's satirical novel. Sleeping around was considered by some feminists as almost a revolutionary duty that broke down repressive barriers of male authority.
The novelist Howard Jacobson recalls that, in his early career as an English lecturer, affairs were the norm. "As often as not we were the quarry," he wrote.
"I say 'we' because sex with students was more or less a departmental affair. Most philosophers did it, a goodly number of geographers did it, not quite so many historians, but in English literature we all did it."
In the 1980s, at the moment when Bloom may have been laying his hand on Wolf's thigh, the rules of the game were changing. Feminists began to regard women as men's victims and to demand female empowerment. All men were potential rapists, argued Andrea Dworkin. Women had to beware of sexual harassment and exploitation.
This led in the early 1990s to puritan political correctness, codes of conduct for dating and a new crime: date rape. Men who claimed that women who said "no" meant "yes" risked jail. David Mamet, the playwright, struck back with Oleanna, a chilling drama about a student's false allegations of sexual harassment by her professor.
Universities, including Yale, drew up regulations for behaviour between staff and students. A spokesman for Yale said yesterday: "The university has in place appropriate policies and regulations to address the serious issue of sexual harassment."
Bloom himself has so far refused to comment on Wolf's claims, but a friend has denounced them as a "vicious lie".
His alleged pass, true or false, could provide the answer to a question that has long puzzled Wolf's readers. When she published her 1991 bestseller The Beauty Myth, about women's lack of self- esteem and the pressure to look good, her angst seemed at odds with her appearance and poise.
The writer Ros Coward, who has for many years explored the contradictions of feminism, says: "In some ways she was an unlikely recruit to feminism. Maybe her sense of injustice began boiling away at university and she felt belittled by her looks. It could explain why she took the path she did and started thinking more critically about sexual relations."
That, says Coward, is perhaps the most charitable interpretation of why Bloom's seemingly minor act of harassment still rankles so much with Wolf years later.
Coward argues that while victims of child abuse may justifiably wait for years before challenging their tormentors, it is hard to fathom Wolf's reasons.
"It's disturbing. It is in no way excusing lecherous professors to say that both parties seem to have survived intact. Wolf is well known and successful and has a beautiful family. She's the have-it- all woman. It is a strange thing to do at this point in her life."
Anticipating her critics, Wolf insists that institutions need to confront their past, just as the Catholic Church is doing over the scandal of paedophile priests.
"Is Harold Bloom a bad man? No," she writes. "Does this complex, brilliant man's one bad choice make him a monster? No, of course not; nor does this one experience make me a 'victim'.
"This man did something, at least once, that was self-centred and harmful. But his harmful impulse would not have entered his or my real life -then or now -if Yale made the consequences of such behaviour clear."
The saddest part, she says, is that she could still not advise an undergraduate to speak up confidently to those in authority about a secret. "I would, with a heavy heart, advise that young woman for her own protection to get a good lawyer."
____________________________________________________________________________________
(NY) Sunday Times - Sunday 22 Feb 2004
Controversial: Naomi Wolf says she was sexually harassed at Yale Livid: Feminist Camille Paglia slammed the claims as childish
The most telegenic feminist in the US, Naomi Wolf, has touched off a media storm over a soon-to-be-published condemnation of two decades of alleged sexual harassment against women at Yale, her former university.
According to advance "tasters" of the exposé, she describes herself as a victim of harassment and names Harold Bloom, her former professor, as her tormentor.
Her high-profile denunciation of alleged sexual misconduct at the Ivy League university has already drawn a furious response from one of her feminist sisters, also a former student of the professor.
Camille Paglia accused Wolf of launching a witch-hunt similar to those that swept New England in the 17th century and, in distinctly unfeminist fashion, of exploiting her looks to advance her career.
"It really smacks of the Salem witch-hunts and all the accompanying hysteria," Paglia said. "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."
Bloom, 73, one of the world's leading Shakespearean scholars, has maintained a dignified silence during the furore. "He has no comment," his wife said.
Wolf, a former Rhodes Scholar and the author of bestselling books such as The Beauty Myth, is said to be making her allegations in a piece appearing this week in New York magazine.
Yale confirmed that she contacted the university with her claims but was told that the two-year statute of limitations for such offences had already passed.
She studied at Yale in the early 1980s.
Her article is understood to catalogue the experiences of 10 women at Yale. Tolerance of sexual harassment "is much bigger than one person or one incident and it needs to be addressed", a spokesman for the magazine said.
Sharp-eyed readers of Wolf's work have already spotted a passage from her book Promiscuities in which a professor visits her at home, supposedly to discuss her poetry, but then gropes her between her legs.
"It felt so familiar: this sense of being exposed as if in a slow-moving dream of shame," she wrote. "I could practically hear my own pulse: what had I done, done, done?"
The professor, who has been described as Falstaffian and rabbinical in his passion for great authors, inspires fierce loyalty from many of his students and his warmth and charisma have been described as "overwhelmingly, destructively, seductive" for female undergraduates.
After making her name with The Beauty Myth, Wolf won celebrity status and is not averse to appearing on middle-brow television talk shows.
Said Paglia: "This is regressive. It's childish. Move on! Get on to menopause next!" - © The Telegraph, London
Cristina Odone is deputy editor of the New Statesman
(NZ) Sunday Times - Sunday 22 Feb 2004
http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/2004/02/22/news/world/world03.asp
Controversial: Naomi Wolf says she was sexually harassed at Yale Livid: Feminist Camille Paglia slammed the claims as childish
The most telegenic feminist in the US, Naomi Wolf, has touched off a media storm over a soon-to-be-published condemnation of two decades of alleged sexual harassment against women at Yale, her former university.
According to advance "tasters" of the exposé, she describes herself as a victim of harassment and names Harold Bloom, her former professor, as her tormentor.
Her high-profile denunciation of alleged sexual misconduct at the Ivy League university has already drawn a furious response from one of her feminist sisters, also a former student of the professor.
Camille Paglia accused Wolf of launching a witch-hunt similar to those that swept New England in the 17th century and, in distinctly unfeminist fashion, of exploiting her looks to advance her career.
"It really smacks of the Salem witch-hunts and all the accompanying hysteria," Paglia said. "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."
Bloom, 73, one of the world's leading Shakespearean scholars, has maintained a dignified silence during the furore. "He has no comment," his wife said.
Wolf, a former Rhodes Scholar and the author of bestselling books such as The Beauty Myth, is said to be making her allegations in a piece appearing this week in New York magazine.
Yale confirmed that she contacted the university with her claims but was told that the two-year statute of limitations for such offences had already passed.
She studied at Yale in the early 1980s.
Her article is understood to catalogue the experiences of 10 women at Yale. Tolerance of sexual harassment "is much bigger than one person or one incident and it needs to be addressed", a spokesman for the magazine said.
Sharp-eyed readers of Wolf's work have already spotted a passage from her book Promiscuities in which a professor visits her at home, supposedly to discuss her poetry, but then gropes her between her legs.
"It felt so familiar: this sense of being exposed as if in a slow-moving dream of shame," she wrote. "I could practically hear my own pulse: what had I done, done, done?"
The professor, who has been described as Falstaffian and rabbinical in his passion for great authors, inspires fierce loyalty from many of his students and his warmth and charisma have been described as "overwhelmingly, destructively, seductive" for female undergraduates.
After making her name with The Beauty Myth, Wolf won celebrity status and is not averse to appearing on middle-brow television talk shows.
Said Paglia: "This is regressive. It's childish. Move on! Get on to menopause next!" - © The Telegraph, London
Cristina Odone is deputy editor of the New Statesman
_________________________________________________________________________________
Crying Wolf? "Beauty Myth" Author Takes on Harold Bloom
by Rachel Donadio
New York Observer - February 23, 2004
And now a word from The Observer culture reporter. Naomi Wolf is back in the news. Nearly two decades after graduating from Yale, Ms. Wolf is taking on her alma mater and the patriarchy, in the form of eminent literary scholar Harold Bloom. According to sources at New York magazine and Yale University, in the course of reporting an article slated to run in next week's issue, Ms. Wolf has been claiming that Mr. Bloom sexually harassed her while she was an undergraduate 20 years ago.
Mr. Bloom didn't agree to be interviewed for the New York magazine story, and he declined an interview with The Observer. Sources close to Mr. Bloom, however, told The Observer that the 73-year old Shakespeare scholar has called Ms. Wolf's claims a "vicious lie." These same sources also note that Mr. Bloom wrote Ms. Wolf a recommendation for a Rhodes scholarship when she was a Yale undergraduate, a scholarship which she subsequently won. When asked about the Rhodes recommendation letter and how it might bear on Ms. Wolf's accusations against Mr. Bloom, a spokeswoman for New York magazine, Serena Torrey, said, "I can't comment on the content of a story that's not closed." She described the story as "a broader examination of the way that Yale and institutions of higher learning handle incidents of sexual misconduct and harassment." After being contacted about the controversy, Ms. Torrey called back to say that the article may not appear in next week's issue: "It's subject to a number of reviews. We can't be sure when it's running."
Ms. Wolf declined an interview and issued a statement through Ms. Torrey: "My story will speak for itself."
According to Yale University, Ms. Wolf approached the university last month with various requests. For one thing, she wished to explore filing a complaint of sexual harassment against Mr. Bloom. Helaine Klasky, a spokeswoman for Yale, said Ms. Wolf was told that "you are not permitted under Yale statutes to file sexual-harassment complaints 20 years after an alleged event occurred. There were policies and procedures in place when Ms. Wolf attended Yale and the alleged harassment took place, yet she did not avail herself of them." (Yale has a two-year statute of limitations on such complaints.) Ms. Klasky said that last month Ms. Wolf also contacted the offices of Yale president Richard Levin and the dean of Yale College, Richard Brodhead, as well as the public-relations office, in the context of writing her article. Furthermore, according to Ms. Klasky, Ms. Wolf "requested an apology from the university, and was told that an apology could only be issued if wrongdoing was found—and unless one's filed a formal complaint, there cannot be any apology."
Ms. Wolf made her name as the author of the 1991 best-seller The Beauty Myth, and more recently has written books on motherhood and adolescent sexuality. Her notoriety seemed to have peaked when she famously advised Al Gore during the 2000 campaign, suggesting that he wear more "earth tones" in order to appeal to the women's vote, and reportedly collected a monthly fee of $15,000 for her advice.
Sources close to Mr. Bloom said that Ms. Wolf never tried reaching the professor at home—his number is listed—but rather left specific, and potentially incendiary, phone messages with administrative assistants at his two Yale offices.
In her 1997 book Promiscuities, Ms. Wolf wrote about an unnamed college professor who placed his hand between her legs after showing up at her apartment to discuss her poetry. Other classmates, she claimed, had had similar experiences, but she thought she could resist. "My whole body, my whole self-image, once again, again, burned with culpability," she wrote. "It felt so familiar: this sense of being exposed as if in a slow-moving dream of shame. I could practically hear my own pulse: What had I done, done, done?"
Ms. Wolf's editor at New York, Joanna Coles, a former reporter for the Times of London, denied that Ms. Wolf had contacted Yale about a sexual-harassment claim. Ms. Wolf had been "working with a lawyer on this story," Ms. Coles said. "She is fully aware of what is on the statute, and she had no intention at all of bringing a claim against Harold Bloom."
Ms. Coles told The Observer that Yale had been uncooperative with Ms. Wolf in her efforts to report on its sexual-harassment policies. "She's been back and forth trying to talk to people at the university for months and months," Ms. Coles said. "She succeeded in talking to some of them, but she didn't get the information that she was looking for."
Ms. Wolf's article landed during a particularly turbulent few weeks at New York magazine, with editor in chief Caroline Miller departing as former New York Times Magazine editor Adam Moss prepares to take over the reins.
Camille Paglia, who traded blows with Ms. Wolf in the early 1990's over their radically different views on female sexual power, said she was no longer at war with Ms. Wolf, but was "shocked" to learn of Ms. Wolf's accusations against Mr. Bloom, who is a long-time mentor of Ms. Paglia's.
"I just feel it's indecent that if Naomi Wolf did not have the courage to pursue the matter at the time, or in the 1990's, and put her own reputation on the line, then to bring all of this down on a man who is in his 70's and has health problems—who has become a culture hero to readers in the humanities around the world—to drag him into a `he said/she said' scenario so late in the game, to me demonstrates a lack of proportion and a basic sense of fair play," said Ms. Paglia, who is professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she said she helped institute that university's sexual-harassment policies in the 1980s.
"At the beginning of the 90's, people said, `Oh, Naomi Wolf, this great thinker,'" said Ms. Paglia. "But what she's managed to do in 10 years is marginalize herself as a chronicler of teenage angst. She doesn't want to leave that magic island when she was the ripening teenager. How many times do we have to relive Naomi Wolf's growing up? How many books, how many articles, Naomi, are you going to impose on us so we have to be dragged back to your teenage-heartbreak years? This is regressive! It's childish! Move on! Move on! Get on to menopause next!"
Since Ms. Wolf's days at Yale—she graduated in 1986—the university has, like many of its counterparts, strengthened its sexual-harassment grievance procedures. In the late 1990's, the university instituted a strict policy forbidding student-teacher relationships.
Sources at New York said that Ms. Wolf's article was being fact-checked, and may change significantly in the next few days.
by Rachel Donadio
New York Observer - February 23, 2004
And now a word from The Observer culture reporter. Naomi Wolf is back in the news. Nearly two decades after graduating from Yale, Ms. Wolf is taking on her alma mater and the patriarchy, in the form of eminent literary scholar Harold Bloom. According to sources at New York magazine and Yale University, in the course of reporting an article slated to run in next week's issue, Ms. Wolf has been claiming that Mr. Bloom sexually harassed her while she was an undergraduate 20 years ago.
Mr. Bloom didn't agree to be interviewed for the New York magazine story, and he declined an interview with The Observer. Sources close to Mr. Bloom, however, told The Observer that the 73-year old Shakespeare scholar has called Ms. Wolf's claims a "vicious lie." These same sources also note that Mr. Bloom wrote Ms. Wolf a recommendation for a Rhodes scholarship when she was a Yale undergraduate, a scholarship which she subsequently won. When asked about the Rhodes recommendation letter and how it might bear on Ms. Wolf's accusations against Mr. Bloom, a spokeswoman for New York magazine, Serena Torrey, said, "I can't comment on the content of a story that's not closed." She described the story as "a broader examination of the way that Yale and institutions of higher learning handle incidents of sexual misconduct and harassment." After being contacted about the controversy, Ms. Torrey called back to say that the article may not appear in next week's issue: "It's subject to a number of reviews. We can't be sure when it's running."
Ms. Wolf declined an interview and issued a statement through Ms. Torrey: "My story will speak for itself."
According to Yale University, Ms. Wolf approached the university last month with various requests. For one thing, she wished to explore filing a complaint of sexual harassment against Mr. Bloom. Helaine Klasky, a spokeswoman for Yale, said Ms. Wolf was told that "you are not permitted under Yale statutes to file sexual-harassment complaints 20 years after an alleged event occurred. There were policies and procedures in place when Ms. Wolf attended Yale and the alleged harassment took place, yet she did not avail herself of them." (Yale has a two-year statute of limitations on such complaints.) Ms. Klasky said that last month Ms. Wolf also contacted the offices of Yale president Richard Levin and the dean of Yale College, Richard Brodhead, as well as the public-relations office, in the context of writing her article. Furthermore, according to Ms. Klasky, Ms. Wolf "requested an apology from the university, and was told that an apology could only be issued if wrongdoing was found—and unless one's filed a formal complaint, there cannot be any apology."
Ms. Wolf made her name as the author of the 1991 best-seller The Beauty Myth, and more recently has written books on motherhood and adolescent sexuality. Her notoriety seemed to have peaked when she famously advised Al Gore during the 2000 campaign, suggesting that he wear more "earth tones" in order to appeal to the women's vote, and reportedly collected a monthly fee of $15,000 for her advice.
Sources close to Mr. Bloom said that Ms. Wolf never tried reaching the professor at home—his number is listed—but rather left specific, and potentially incendiary, phone messages with administrative assistants at his two Yale offices.
In her 1997 book Promiscuities, Ms. Wolf wrote about an unnamed college professor who placed his hand between her legs after showing up at her apartment to discuss her poetry. Other classmates, she claimed, had had similar experiences, but she thought she could resist. "My whole body, my whole self-image, once again, again, burned with culpability," she wrote. "It felt so familiar: this sense of being exposed as if in a slow-moving dream of shame. I could practically hear my own pulse: What had I done, done, done?"
Ms. Wolf's editor at New York, Joanna Coles, a former reporter for the Times of London, denied that Ms. Wolf had contacted Yale about a sexual-harassment claim. Ms. Wolf had been "working with a lawyer on this story," Ms. Coles said. "She is fully aware of what is on the statute, and she had no intention at all of bringing a claim against Harold Bloom."
Ms. Coles told The Observer that Yale had been uncooperative with Ms. Wolf in her efforts to report on its sexual-harassment policies. "She's been back and forth trying to talk to people at the university for months and months," Ms. Coles said. "She succeeded in talking to some of them, but she didn't get the information that she was looking for."
Ms. Wolf's article landed during a particularly turbulent few weeks at New York magazine, with editor in chief Caroline Miller departing as former New York Times Magazine editor Adam Moss prepares to take over the reins.
Camille Paglia, who traded blows with Ms. Wolf in the early 1990's over their radically different views on female sexual power, said she was no longer at war with Ms. Wolf, but was "shocked" to learn of Ms. Wolf's accusations against Mr. Bloom, who is a long-time mentor of Ms. Paglia's.
"I just feel it's indecent that if Naomi Wolf did not have the courage to pursue the matter at the time, or in the 1990's, and put her own reputation on the line, then to bring all of this down on a man who is in his 70's and has health problems—who has become a culture hero to readers in the humanities around the world—to drag him into a `he said/she said' scenario so late in the game, to me demonstrates a lack of proportion and a basic sense of fair play," said Ms. Paglia, who is professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she said she helped institute that university's sexual-harassment policies in the 1980s.
"At the beginning of the 90's, people said, `Oh, Naomi Wolf, this great thinker,'" said Ms. Paglia. "But what she's managed to do in 10 years is marginalize herself as a chronicler of teenage angst. She doesn't want to leave that magic island when she was the ripening teenager. How many times do we have to relive Naomi Wolf's growing up? How many books, how many articles, Naomi, are you going to impose on us so we have to be dragged back to your teenage-heartbreak years? This is regressive! It's childish! Move on! Move on! Get on to menopause next!"
Since Ms. Wolf's days at Yale—she graduated in 1986—the university has, like many of its counterparts, strengthened its sexual-harassment grievance procedures. In the late 1990's, the university instituted a strict policy forbidding student-teacher relationships.
Sources at New York said that Ms. Wolf's article was being fact-checked, and may change significantly in the next few days.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Yale prof. accused of sexual harassment
By Matthew Kelly
By Matthew Kelly
The Dartmouth Staff - February 23, 2004
Yale University is bracing for what some are calling one of the largest scandals to hit the Ivy League, as a prestigious alumna is accusing a famous professor of sexual harassment through the media.
In an article titled "Sex and Silence at Yale" published in Monday's New York magazine, noted feminist author Naomi Wolf accuses celebrated Shakespeare expert Harold Bloom of groping her 20 years ago when she was his student.
Wolf also points the finger at Yale for protecting its image rather than truly investigating these and other harassment charges. Wolf said a systemic problem of sexual misconduct exists at the school, and added that many of her friends had similar experiences with professors at Yale.
According to the article, Bloom dined with Wolf at her apartment, under the guise of critiquing her poetry manuscripts. She said rather than focusing on the poetry, she felt his hand slowly move up her thigh, which caused her to vomit. As Bloom left, she said, he called her a "deeply troubled girl."
Yale University's sexual harassment policy dictates a two-year statute of limitations on claims, and as such, Bloom will not face an investigation or disciplinary action. Bloom, however, is reportedly considering filing a defamation of character lawsuit against Wolf.
Wolf said that she didn't report the charges earlier because she was a student on financial aid and Bloom was a towering figure of literature, and thus felt intimidated.
These allegations may have already been described in one of Wolf's books. In her 1997 book "Promiscuities," Wolf wrote about an unnamed college professor who placed his hand between her legs while discussing poetry at her apartment.
Wolf's allegations have set off a firestorm of debate among feminist circles. Feminist author Camille Paglia, who also studied under Bloom at Yale, has criticized Wolf for launching what she calls an unfair attack against an elderly man through the media. She said Wolf has always used her good looks to further her career, and is now going public with the sexual harassment charges because she is in a career slump.
Wolf is a former Rhodes scholar at Yale who became a celebrated writer after her 1991 best seller "The Beauty Myth." She advised former Vice President Al Gore during his 2000 presidential run, most notably suggesting he wear more "earth tones" to attract female voters.
Yale University is bracing for what some are calling one of the largest scandals to hit the Ivy League, as a prestigious alumna is accusing a famous professor of sexual harassment through the media.
In an article titled "Sex and Silence at Yale" published in Monday's New York magazine, noted feminist author Naomi Wolf accuses celebrated Shakespeare expert Harold Bloom of groping her 20 years ago when she was his student.
Wolf also points the finger at Yale for protecting its image rather than truly investigating these and other harassment charges. Wolf said a systemic problem of sexual misconduct exists at the school, and added that many of her friends had similar experiences with professors at Yale.
According to the article, Bloom dined with Wolf at her apartment, under the guise of critiquing her poetry manuscripts. She said rather than focusing on the poetry, she felt his hand slowly move up her thigh, which caused her to vomit. As Bloom left, she said, he called her a "deeply troubled girl."
Yale University's sexual harassment policy dictates a two-year statute of limitations on claims, and as such, Bloom will not face an investigation or disciplinary action. Bloom, however, is reportedly considering filing a defamation of character lawsuit against Wolf.
Wolf said that she didn't report the charges earlier because she was a student on financial aid and Bloom was a towering figure of literature, and thus felt intimidated.
These allegations may have already been described in one of Wolf's books. In her 1997 book "Promiscuities," Wolf wrote about an unnamed college professor who placed his hand between her legs while discussing poetry at her apartment.
Wolf's allegations have set off a firestorm of debate among feminist circles. Feminist author Camille Paglia, who also studied under Bloom at Yale, has criticized Wolf for launching what she calls an unfair attack against an elderly man through the media. She said Wolf has always used her good looks to further her career, and is now going public with the sexual harassment charges because she is in a career slump.
Wolf is a former Rhodes scholar at Yale who became a celebrated writer after her 1991 best seller "The Beauty Myth." She advised former Vice President Al Gore during his 2000 presidential run, most notably suggesting he wear more "earth tones" to attract female voters.
Wire services contributed to this report.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Comment
Always the victim
By Zoe Williams
The Guardian (UK) - Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Naomi Wolf's belated charges about being sexually harassed as a student don't do feminism any favours
Whatever the truth of Naomi Wolf's sex-pest accusations against Harold Bloom, nobody, so far, is coming out of the business very well. Wolf picked a funny old time to come out with this charge - not within the two years that charges can be investigated by the authorities; some considerable time after she had made suggestions of harassment on a public forum, though refused to name names (owing to the "soft spot of complicity" in her soul); two full decades after the event itself.
Bloom has declined to comment, using instead the "a friend says..." avenue (the friend, incidentally, has denounced this as a vicious lie), which I always find a bit lame. Sundry other commentators have unleashed a weird level of spite, specifi cally Camille Paglia, who raged: "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."
An assessment of that kind has to be based upon pretty close personal intimacy - in other words, Paglia needs to have observed Wolf exhibiting that behaviour, at close range and over a period of years. Otherwise, all she's saying is: "This woman is pretty, and that disqualifies her from reasoned thought."
I'd also, in the interests of perfect clarity, conduct some research into how transfixed men really are by boobs that bob, but never mind that for the time being. This vitriol is, without question, disproportionate. Had Wolf written an essay claiming that, while at Yale, a professor or student stole from her, hit her over the head with a chair, involved her in a pyramid scheme that was really a scam, or perpetrated any crime at all against her that didn't involve sex, the response would have been different. There might have been some puzzlement that she'd left it so long. There would have been people who questioned her veracity or, at the very least, were prepared to withhold judgment until greater evidence could be provided than the word of the accuser. But there wouldn't be anything like this fury that gushes out like a geyser whenever a woman, especially so tardily, makes a charge of sexual assault, be she an academic or 'er off Shooting Stars (Ulrika Jonsson, I mean). And it almost always comes from other women, handily, if bizarrely uniting feminists, post-feminists, non-feminists and the undecided, in a single voice of unsisterly incandescence. Why should the response be so vehement? What is it about sex crimes, or charges thereof, which riles not men, defending each other in an old-boy stylie, but other women?
It's partly that the dangerous predator in question is often characterised not as an individual who behaved badly, but as a symptom of the rottenness at the core of all of society. For instance, Bloom's behaviour "devastated" Wolf's sense of "being valuable to Yale as a student rather than as a pawn of powerful men". Wolf depicts Bloom as the personification not just of an intellectual landscape (Yale), but of an entire gender ("powerful men"). In so doing, she styles herself as the binary opposite, the personification of her own gender, the eternal pawn or victim. And this is where, as someone who shares that gender, something rises in my throat (and no doubt in Paglia's) - it really is debateable whether or not some drunk bloke putting his face quite near yours and his hand on your thigh, when you thought he'd come round to read poetry, undermines your value to an entire institution. In the barometer that runs from "misunderstanding" to "act of violence", it leans irrefutably towards the former. So, sure, object to it, at the time or many years afterwards, but not in the name of your gender. Not in the name of people who see no possibility of gender-parity in a world where women achieve victim status simply by being women. Not in my name - object to it in your own name.
Moreover, women making claims of sexual harassment or violation many years after the event often bat off "why now?" critics by saying they're doing it for other women; that, at the time, they were too afraid/ young/ powerless to object. Again, this is a flawed position - as an individual, it's up to you when you make an allegation. But if you're doing it under the guise of being a role model, then frankly, you're making a terrible fist of it. You're basically saying, as much confidence and rage and mettle and verbal aplomb as I had 20 years ago, it was still too daunting and too humiliating to report this crime. It's better to wait till you're famous, which in all probability you won't be, before you let this kind of thing out of the bag.
Ultimately, sexual politics is the one thing that really dates feminism, that makes it "old school" and lets it down. Equal pay for equal work will never go out of fashion. But blanket assumptions of female victimhood and weakness, the inevitability of male exploitation, the drive to politicise every ambiguous physical gesture as if we're all working shoulder to shoulder against malevolent men - this is not feminism. To bundle it all together as such catches a lot of us who cannot agree, like dolphins in a tuna net. No wonder we thrash about so much.
Always the victim
By Zoe Williams
The Guardian (UK) - Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Naomi Wolf's belated charges about being sexually harassed as a student don't do feminism any favours
Whatever the truth of Naomi Wolf's sex-pest accusations against Harold Bloom, nobody, so far, is coming out of the business very well. Wolf picked a funny old time to come out with this charge - not within the two years that charges can be investigated by the authorities; some considerable time after she had made suggestions of harassment on a public forum, though refused to name names (owing to the "soft spot of complicity" in her soul); two full decades after the event itself.
Bloom has declined to comment, using instead the "a friend says..." avenue (the friend, incidentally, has denounced this as a vicious lie), which I always find a bit lame. Sundry other commentators have unleashed a weird level of spite, specifi cally Camille Paglia, who raged: "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."
An assessment of that kind has to be based upon pretty close personal intimacy - in other words, Paglia needs to have observed Wolf exhibiting that behaviour, at close range and over a period of years. Otherwise, all she's saying is: "This woman is pretty, and that disqualifies her from reasoned thought."
I'd also, in the interests of perfect clarity, conduct some research into how transfixed men really are by boobs that bob, but never mind that for the time being. This vitriol is, without question, disproportionate. Had Wolf written an essay claiming that, while at Yale, a professor or student stole from her, hit her over the head with a chair, involved her in a pyramid scheme that was really a scam, or perpetrated any crime at all against her that didn't involve sex, the response would have been different. There might have been some puzzlement that she'd left it so long. There would have been people who questioned her veracity or, at the very least, were prepared to withhold judgment until greater evidence could be provided than the word of the accuser. But there wouldn't be anything like this fury that gushes out like a geyser whenever a woman, especially so tardily, makes a charge of sexual assault, be she an academic or 'er off Shooting Stars (Ulrika Jonsson, I mean). And it almost always comes from other women, handily, if bizarrely uniting feminists, post-feminists, non-feminists and the undecided, in a single voice of unsisterly incandescence. Why should the response be so vehement? What is it about sex crimes, or charges thereof, which riles not men, defending each other in an old-boy stylie, but other women?
It's partly that the dangerous predator in question is often characterised not as an individual who behaved badly, but as a symptom of the rottenness at the core of all of society. For instance, Bloom's behaviour "devastated" Wolf's sense of "being valuable to Yale as a student rather than as a pawn of powerful men". Wolf depicts Bloom as the personification not just of an intellectual landscape (Yale), but of an entire gender ("powerful men"). In so doing, she styles herself as the binary opposite, the personification of her own gender, the eternal pawn or victim. And this is where, as someone who shares that gender, something rises in my throat (and no doubt in Paglia's) - it really is debateable whether or not some drunk bloke putting his face quite near yours and his hand on your thigh, when you thought he'd come round to read poetry, undermines your value to an entire institution. In the barometer that runs from "misunderstanding" to "act of violence", it leans irrefutably towards the former. So, sure, object to it, at the time or many years afterwards, but not in the name of your gender. Not in the name of people who see no possibility of gender-parity in a world where women achieve victim status simply by being women. Not in my name - object to it in your own name.
Moreover, women making claims of sexual harassment or violation many years after the event often bat off "why now?" critics by saying they're doing it for other women; that, at the time, they were too afraid/ young/ powerless to object. Again, this is a flawed position - as an individual, it's up to you when you make an allegation. But if you're doing it under the guise of being a role model, then frankly, you're making a terrible fist of it. You're basically saying, as much confidence and rage and mettle and verbal aplomb as I had 20 years ago, it was still too daunting and too humiliating to report this crime. It's better to wait till you're famous, which in all probability you won't be, before you let this kind of thing out of the bag.
Ultimately, sexual politics is the one thing that really dates feminism, that makes it "old school" and lets it down. Equal pay for equal work will never go out of fashion. But blanket assumptions of female victimhood and weakness, the inevitability of male exploitation, the drive to politicise every ambiguous physical gesture as if we're all working shoulder to shoulder against malevolent men - this is not feminism. To bundle it all together as such catches a lot of us who cannot agree, like dolphins in a tuna net. No wonder we thrash about so much.
_________________________________________________________________________________
A prof, a pass and a co-ed
By MARGARET WENTE
Bell Globe and Mail -Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2004
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."
By MARGARET WENTE
Bell Globe and Mail -Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2004
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."
_________________________________________________________________________________
Scary Wolf tales embroil Yale
By Lloyd Grove with Elisa Lipsky-Karasz
New York Daily News - Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Celebrity feminist Naomi Wolf and her alma mater, Yale, traded volleys yesterday over Wolf's New York magazine cover story about sexual misconduct at the Ivy League institution.
"Yale does not tolerate sexual harassment," a Yale spokeswoman said in response to the much-discussed article, in which Wolf alleges that two decades ago, when she was a student, eminent Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom put his hand between her legs during a visit to her New Haven apartment.
"Yale has had specific - and well-publicized - grievance policies and procedures for all students, faculty and staff for well over two decades," the Yale spokeswoman continued. "Ms. Wolf suggests that Yale does not take seriously those sexual harassment complaints that are registered.
To the contrary, there have been penalties ranging from reprimand to separation from Yale."
By Lloyd Grove with Elisa Lipsky-Karasz
New York Daily News - Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Celebrity feminist Naomi Wolf and her alma mater, Yale, traded volleys yesterday over Wolf's New York magazine cover story about sexual misconduct at the Ivy League institution.
"Yale does not tolerate sexual harassment," a Yale spokeswoman said in response to the much-discussed article, in which Wolf alleges that two decades ago, when she was a student, eminent Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom put his hand between her legs during a visit to her New Haven apartment.
"Yale has had specific - and well-publicized - grievance policies and procedures for all students, faculty and staff for well over two decades," the Yale spokeswoman continued. "Ms. Wolf suggests that Yale does not take seriously those sexual harassment complaints that are registered.
To the contrary, there have been penalties ranging from reprimand to separation from Yale."
Wolf told me: "What I'm shocked and surprised by is that Yale has spent 20 years, up to the present and even as we speak, covering up some very painful experiences that women are undergoing - in violation of their own policies. ... They are turning an effective blind eye to sexual misconduct. If I were running a major institution and if I found out about a systematic failure to take appropriate actions when women were assaulted or harassed, my response would be to convene an investigation rather than smear the messenger."
In addition, Yale claimed that Wolf omitted from her article the fact that, instead of first trying to address the issue privately, as she writes in her piece, she demanded a public apology from Yale for the alleged incident, as well as a private meeting with the 73-year-old Bloom, who continues to teach despite ill health.
Wolf said "I did not ask for a public apology" when she first contacted Yale last year. "But I absolutely and firmly believe that Yale owes a public apology to every single woman who has suffered from sexual misconduct."
____________________________________________________________________________________
Wolf spells out sex charge against Yale professor
Sydney Morning News (Australia) - February 25, 2004
The feminist author Naomi Wolf has published details of much-heralded allegations of sexual misconduct against one of the world's leading Shakespeare scholars, and charges that Yale University ignored her complaints.
Yale, one of America's most rarefied educational institutions, has remained silent since
Wolf published a several-thousand-word denunciation in New York Magazine on Monday that alleges Harold Bloom put his hand on the inside of her thigh after she invited him to her home for a candlelit dinner 20 years ago.
Wolf writes that "he was a vortex of power and intellectual charisma" and she was "sick with excitement" at the prospect of being tutored by him. On her invitation the professor agreed to come to supper at her student house and promised to read her poetry. When her housemates left, she said she believed: "Finally! I thought we could discuss our poetry manuscript. He did not look at it.
"He leaned towards me and put his face inches from mine. 'You have the aura of election upon you,' he breathed. I hoped he was talking about my poetry. The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh.
"The whole thing had suddenly taken on the quality of a bad horror film. The floor spun. By now my back was against the sink, which was as far away as I could get. He came at me. I turned away from him toward the sink and found myself vomiting in shock. He disappeared."
She continued: "When he re-emerged [from the bedroom with his coat] a moment later, I was still frozen, my back against the sink. He said, 'You are a deeply troubled girl.'
"Then he went to the table, took the rest of his sherry, corked the bottle, and left."
In the article, whose main charges had been widely publicised, she said she had been approached by students across the US who had experienced similar incidents of harassment.
However, her campaign has alienated as many as have rushed to support it.
Several leading feminists have attacked her for making such an issue over what they say is a minor transgression, and one committed against a woman who, it is claimed, had often used her beauty and sexuality to manipulate men.
Wolf said that when she raised the issue with Yale last year she was brushed off with nine months of obfuscation and delay.
Unnamed sources say that senior Yale officials are incensed that a 20-year-old misjudged pass has been turned into a public embarrassment.
Professor Bloom, now elderly and in failing health, is one of the US's leading academics. He has vehemently denied the charge.
Sydney Morning News (Australia) - February 25, 2004
The feminist author Naomi Wolf has published details of much-heralded allegations of sexual misconduct against one of the world's leading Shakespeare scholars, and charges that Yale University ignored her complaints.
Yale, one of America's most rarefied educational institutions, has remained silent since
Wolf published a several-thousand-word denunciation in New York Magazine on Monday that alleges Harold Bloom put his hand on the inside of her thigh after she invited him to her home for a candlelit dinner 20 years ago.
Wolf writes that "he was a vortex of power and intellectual charisma" and she was "sick with excitement" at the prospect of being tutored by him. On her invitation the professor agreed to come to supper at her student house and promised to read her poetry. When her housemates left, she said she believed: "Finally! I thought we could discuss our poetry manuscript. He did not look at it.
"He leaned towards me and put his face inches from mine. 'You have the aura of election upon you,' he breathed. I hoped he was talking about my poetry. The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh.
"The whole thing had suddenly taken on the quality of a bad horror film. The floor spun. By now my back was against the sink, which was as far away as I could get. He came at me. I turned away from him toward the sink and found myself vomiting in shock. He disappeared."
She continued: "When he re-emerged [from the bedroom with his coat] a moment later, I was still frozen, my back against the sink. He said, 'You are a deeply troubled girl.'
"Then he went to the table, took the rest of his sherry, corked the bottle, and left."
In the article, whose main charges had been widely publicised, she said she had been approached by students across the US who had experienced similar incidents of harassment.
However, her campaign has alienated as many as have rushed to support it.
Several leading feminists have attacked her for making such an issue over what they say is a minor transgression, and one committed against a woman who, it is claimed, had often used her beauty and sexuality to manipulate men.
Wolf said that when she raised the issue with Yale last year she was brushed off with nine months of obfuscation and delay.
Unnamed sources say that senior Yale officials are incensed that a 20-year-old misjudged pass has been turned into a public embarrassment.
Professor Bloom, now elderly and in failing health, is one of the US's leading academics. He has vehemently denied the charge.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Wolf '84 writes on harassment
By Stephen Butler
Yale Daily News - Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Former student presents her claims against Harold Bloom in New York magazine article
New York magazine published an article by Naomi Wolf '84 on Monday in which she accuses Humanities and English professor Harold Bloom of sexually harassing her while he was her independent study advisor in 1983.
Wolf's article, "The Silent Treatment," describes her year-long interaction with the Yale administration after she decided to draw attention to her allegation. Wolf portrays Yale's administration as unresponsive to her attempts to ensure that adequate channels exist now for addressing sexual harassment complaints.
"If a Yale undergraduate came to me today with a bad secret to tell, I still could not urge her to speak up confidently to those tasked with educating, supporting, and mentoring her," Wolf said in the article's conclusion. "I would, with a heavy heart, advise that young woman, for her own protection, to get a good lawyer."
Yale General Counsel Dorothy Robinson said Yale has appropriate methods for addressing sexual harassment complaints, but she said Wolf should have raised her allegation within the two-year statute of limitations that exists for such complaints.
"We do have rules that require that grievances be filed within a limited time period. They are intended to promote fairness," Robinson said in an e-mail. "When time passes, memories fade, witnesses and evidence become unavailable, and these things make it much harder to determine the truth. Yale's procedures are robust, and its students are routinely informed about them."
Bloom declined to comment Monday.
The Hartford Courant reported on Friday that Bloom is withholding comments in case he decides to file an anti-defamation suit against Wolf.
Wolf, a feminist activist and former Rhodes Scholar, said in her article that she began to bring up her harassment allegations with administrative figures after Yale asked her to help with fund-raising efforts. She said she had approached the administration with her concerns about the University's grievance procedures but "got nowhere." She also mentions other examples of sexual harassment claims she says she does not believe the administration handled appropriately.
Yale President Richard Levin and Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead were unavailable for comment Monday night.
Jacqueline Byrne '84, who said she was "acquainted" with Wolf but knew nothing of these allegations while at Yale, said she had never dealt with sexual harassment while she was an undergraduate. But she said she would have been unsure how to deal with such an issue if it had arisen.
"I never had trouble gaining access to the administration or talking to people, but I never had a sexual harassment claim either," Byrne said. "I don't know what I would have done if I did."
In her article, Wolf describes the specific details of her allegation. After repeated efforts to meet with Bloom to discuss her poetry, Wolf said in her article that Bloom finally agreed to join her for dinner at her house and discuss her work "over a glass of Amontillado." Wolf said Bloom made an advance after the end of dinner, leaning in close to her face and placing his hand on her thigh when she tried to present him with a manuscript of her poetry.
Wolf said in a statement issued Thursday that her article was not intended to imply that Bloom had sexually harassed her while he was writing a recommendation for her Rhodes Scholarship application. He wrote her a recommendation in 1983 before the alleged incident, and was not one of her referees when she was awarded the scholarship in 1985, she said.
By Stephen Butler
Yale Daily News - Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Former student presents her claims against Harold Bloom in New York magazine article
New York magazine published an article by Naomi Wolf '84 on Monday in which she accuses Humanities and English professor Harold Bloom of sexually harassing her while he was her independent study advisor in 1983.
Wolf's article, "The Silent Treatment," describes her year-long interaction with the Yale administration after she decided to draw attention to her allegation. Wolf portrays Yale's administration as unresponsive to her attempts to ensure that adequate channels exist now for addressing sexual harassment complaints.
"If a Yale undergraduate came to me today with a bad secret to tell, I still could not urge her to speak up confidently to those tasked with educating, supporting, and mentoring her," Wolf said in the article's conclusion. "I would, with a heavy heart, advise that young woman, for her own protection, to get a good lawyer."
Yale General Counsel Dorothy Robinson said Yale has appropriate methods for addressing sexual harassment complaints, but she said Wolf should have raised her allegation within the two-year statute of limitations that exists for such complaints.
"We do have rules that require that grievances be filed within a limited time period. They are intended to promote fairness," Robinson said in an e-mail. "When time passes, memories fade, witnesses and evidence become unavailable, and these things make it much harder to determine the truth. Yale's procedures are robust, and its students are routinely informed about them."
Bloom declined to comment Monday.
The Hartford Courant reported on Friday that Bloom is withholding comments in case he decides to file an anti-defamation suit against Wolf.
Wolf, a feminist activist and former Rhodes Scholar, said in her article that she began to bring up her harassment allegations with administrative figures after Yale asked her to help with fund-raising efforts. She said she had approached the administration with her concerns about the University's grievance procedures but "got nowhere." She also mentions other examples of sexual harassment claims she says she does not believe the administration handled appropriately.
Yale President Richard Levin and Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead were unavailable for comment Monday night.
Jacqueline Byrne '84, who said she was "acquainted" with Wolf but knew nothing of these allegations while at Yale, said she had never dealt with sexual harassment while she was an undergraduate. But she said she would have been unsure how to deal with such an issue if it had arisen.
"I never had trouble gaining access to the administration or talking to people, but I never had a sexual harassment claim either," Byrne said. "I don't know what I would have done if I did."
In her article, Wolf describes the specific details of her allegation. After repeated efforts to meet with Bloom to discuss her poetry, Wolf said in her article that Bloom finally agreed to join her for dinner at her house and discuss her work "over a glass of Amontillado." Wolf said Bloom made an advance after the end of dinner, leaning in close to her face and placing his hand on her thigh when she tried to present him with a manuscript of her poetry.
Wolf said in a statement issued Thursday that her article was not intended to imply that Bloom had sexually harassed her while he was writing a recommendation for her Rhodes Scholarship application. He wrote her a recommendation in 1983 before the alleged incident, and was not one of her referees when she was awarded the scholarship in 1985, she said.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Sexual harassment is affront to Yale's values
By Susan Hockfield
Yale Daily News - February 24, 2004
An Open Letter to Yale Students:
In this week's New York Magazine, Naomi Wolf '84 describes an incident of sexual harassment from the early 1980s. Although I cannot address Ms. Wolf's allegation, I can address Yale's abhorrence of sexual harassment and what we have done and continue to do to provide an environment in which all members of our community feel that their intellectual growth and inquiry are not compromised by unwanted or inappropriate behavior.
Sexual harassment is an affront to human dignity and fundamentally at odds with the values of the University; it is similarly at odds with an environment free from the fact or appearance of coercion. Sexual harassment is a matter of particular concern to an academic community in which students, faculty and staff are related by strong bonds of intellectual dependence and trust, and therefore it cannot and will not be tolerated.
Ms. Wolf's article suggests that Yale does not take registered complaints seriously and that there are no consequences. To the contrary, concerns and formal grievances have been addressed and adjudicated with the utmost seriousness, and penalties ranging from reprimand to separation from Yale have been applied to faculty for sexual-harassment offenses.
Yale has had, since 1979, a full grievance procedure for Yale College students to bring forward complaints of sexual harassment. In addition, in 1997, the University expanded its approach through the Policy on Teacher-Student Consensual Relations, which states that "no teacher shall have a sexual relationship with a student over whom he or she has direct supervisory responsibilities regardless of whether the relationship is consensual."
Ms. Wolf did not bring her claim forward at the time of the incident, nearly twenty years ago. As I hope all can understand, fairness requires that complaints be brought forward in a timely fashion. Furthermore, for obvious reasons, our policies and practices include the protection of the confidentiality of all parties, which therefore limits the discussion of cases that have been considered. They also constrain members of the administration from discussing specific cases, precluding comment even when a report may be one-sided or not grounded in fact.
While we continue to take extraordinary measures to promulgate and enforce our policies and to revise them in light of experience here and elsewhere, it is inevitable that some individuals may not feel sufficiently confident in the policies to bring forward their concerns and that a decision in any particular case may leave one party or another unhappy with the outcome. These difficulties have not and will not prevent us from continuing to enforce our policies even while we seek improvements in the structure and implementation of our procedures.
I want to reinforce the avenues for pursuing any claim an individual might feel he or she has. The University's policies concerning sexual harassment are published in full each year in the special annual supplement to the Yale Bulletin & Calendar. That supplement includes information regarding complaint procedures for all students, as well as for staff and faculty (http://www.yale.edu/hronline/forms/shbroch.pdf). Although historically women have been disproportionately the victims of sexual harassment, the protections apply to men as well. In addition to University-wide grievance policies that are available to address complaints about various issues, including complaints of discrimination and sexual harassment, Yale College, the Graduate School, the School of Medicine, the Divinity School and the Nursing School have amplified these policies and have adopted specific policies for claims of sexual harassment.
I would urge any student who has a complaint, or simply has confronted a troubling incident, not to hesitate in seeking counsel. Yale College and each professional school have a Title IX coordinator who is available to any student who has concerns about sex discrimination, including concerns about sexual harassment. Students in Yale College can also speak confidentially with their college deans, with Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg or with any member of the Yale College Grievance Board for Complaints of Sexual Harassment. These procedures were developed to ensure that students could first pursue these issues in confidence with their deans. Students in the graduate and professional schools can consult their deans for the specific procedures applicable in their schools.
For an individual who has experienced sexual harassment, maintaining silence can amplify distress. But it does more: it limits the University's ability to redress violations for the benefit of all. Only by doing so can we work to provide an environment in which all may study and work free from harassment.
Our policies and our actions are intended to protect the human dignity and fundamental integrity of the community. Toward that end, we will continue to be diligent in responding to and addressing issues that are raised with us in a fair, equitable and timely manner.
By Susan Hockfield
Yale Daily News - February 24, 2004
An Open Letter to Yale Students:
In this week's New York Magazine, Naomi Wolf '84 describes an incident of sexual harassment from the early 1980s. Although I cannot address Ms. Wolf's allegation, I can address Yale's abhorrence of sexual harassment and what we have done and continue to do to provide an environment in which all members of our community feel that their intellectual growth and inquiry are not compromised by unwanted or inappropriate behavior.
Sexual harassment is an affront to human dignity and fundamentally at odds with the values of the University; it is similarly at odds with an environment free from the fact or appearance of coercion. Sexual harassment is a matter of particular concern to an academic community in which students, faculty and staff are related by strong bonds of intellectual dependence and trust, and therefore it cannot and will not be tolerated.
Ms. Wolf's article suggests that Yale does not take registered complaints seriously and that there are no consequences. To the contrary, concerns and formal grievances have been addressed and adjudicated with the utmost seriousness, and penalties ranging from reprimand to separation from Yale have been applied to faculty for sexual-harassment offenses.
Yale has had, since 1979, a full grievance procedure for Yale College students to bring forward complaints of sexual harassment. In addition, in 1997, the University expanded its approach through the Policy on Teacher-Student Consensual Relations, which states that "no teacher shall have a sexual relationship with a student over whom he or she has direct supervisory responsibilities regardless of whether the relationship is consensual."
Ms. Wolf did not bring her claim forward at the time of the incident, nearly twenty years ago. As I hope all can understand, fairness requires that complaints be brought forward in a timely fashion. Furthermore, for obvious reasons, our policies and practices include the protection of the confidentiality of all parties, which therefore limits the discussion of cases that have been considered. They also constrain members of the administration from discussing specific cases, precluding comment even when a report may be one-sided or not grounded in fact.
While we continue to take extraordinary measures to promulgate and enforce our policies and to revise them in light of experience here and elsewhere, it is inevitable that some individuals may not feel sufficiently confident in the policies to bring forward their concerns and that a decision in any particular case may leave one party or another unhappy with the outcome. These difficulties have not and will not prevent us from continuing to enforce our policies even while we seek improvements in the structure and implementation of our procedures.
I want to reinforce the avenues for pursuing any claim an individual might feel he or she has. The University's policies concerning sexual harassment are published in full each year in the special annual supplement to the Yale Bulletin & Calendar. That supplement includes information regarding complaint procedures for all students, as well as for staff and faculty (http://www.yale.edu/hronline/forms/shbroch.pdf). Although historically women have been disproportionately the victims of sexual harassment, the protections apply to men as well. In addition to University-wide grievance policies that are available to address complaints about various issues, including complaints of discrimination and sexual harassment, Yale College, the Graduate School, the School of Medicine, the Divinity School and the Nursing School have amplified these policies and have adopted specific policies for claims of sexual harassment.
I would urge any student who has a complaint, or simply has confronted a troubling incident, not to hesitate in seeking counsel. Yale College and each professional school have a Title IX coordinator who is available to any student who has concerns about sex discrimination, including concerns about sexual harassment. Students in Yale College can also speak confidentially with their college deans, with Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg or with any member of the Yale College Grievance Board for Complaints of Sexual Harassment. These procedures were developed to ensure that students could first pursue these issues in confidence with their deans. Students in the graduate and professional schools can consult their deans for the specific procedures applicable in their schools.
For an individual who has experienced sexual harassment, maintaining silence can amplify distress. But it does more: it limits the University's ability to redress violations for the benefit of all. Only by doing so can we work to provide an environment in which all may study and work free from harassment.
Our policies and our actions are intended to protect the human dignity and fundamental integrity of the community. Toward that end, we will continue to be diligent in responding to and addressing issues that are raised with us in a fair, equitable and timely manner.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Dear Naomi: assumptions of victimhood don't help feminism
By Zoe Williams
The Age (Austrialia) - February 25, 2004
Ms Wolf should know that sexual politics is the one thing that really dates feminism.
Whatever the truth of Naomi Wolf's sex-pest accusations against Harold Bloom, nobody, so far, is coming out of the business very well.
Wolf picked a funny old time to come out with this charge - not within the two years that charges can be investigated by the authorities; some considerable time after she had made suggestions of harassment on a public forum, though refused to name names (owing to the "soft spot of complicity" in her soul); two full decades after the event.
Bloom has declined to comment, using instead the "a friend says . . ." avenue (the friend, incidentally, has denounced this as a vicious lie), which I always find a bit lame.
Sundry other commentators have unleashed a weird level of spite, specifically Camille Paglia, who raged: "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."
An assessment of that kind has to be based upon pretty close personal intimacy - in other words, Paglia needs to have observed Wolf exhibiting that behaviour, at close range and over a period of years. Otherwise, all she's saying is: "This woman is pretty, and that disqualifies her from reasoned thought."
This vitriol is, without question, disproportionate. Had Wolf written an essay claiming that, while at Yale, a professor or student stole from her, hit her over the head with a chair, involved her in a pyramid scheme that was really a scam, or perpetrated any crime at all against her that didn't involve sex, the response would have been different.
There might have been some puzzlement that she'd left it so long. There would have been people who questioned her veracity or, at the very least, were prepared to withhold judgement until greater evidence could be provided than the word of the accuser. But there wouldn't be anything like this fury that gushes out like a geyser whenever a woman, especially so tardily, makes a charge of sexual assault.
What is it about sex crimes that rile not men, but other women?
And it almost always comes from other women, handily, if bizarrely, uniting feminists, post-feminists, non-feminists and the undecided, in a single voice of unsisterly incandescence.
Why should the response be so vehement? What is it about sex crimes, or charges thereof, that rile not men, defending each other in an old-boy style, but other women?
pIt's partly that the dangerous predator in question is often characterised not as an individual who behaved badly, but as a symptom of the rottenness at the core of all of society.
For instance, Bloom's behaviour "devastated" Wolf's sense of "being valuable to Yale as a student rather than as a pawn of powerful men". Wolf depicts Bloom as the personification not just of an intellectual landscape (Yale), but of an entire gender ("powerful men"). In so doing, she styles herself as the binary opposite, the personification of her own gender, the eternal pawn or victim.
And this is where, as someone who shares that gender, something rises in my throat (and no doubt in Paglia's) - it really is debatable whether or not some drunk bloke putting his face quite near yours and his hand on your thigh, when you thought he'd come round to read poetry, undermines your value to an entire institution.
In the barometer that runs from "misunderstanding" to "act of violence", it leans irrefutably towards the former.
So, sure, object to it, at the time or many years afterwards, but not in the name of your gender. Not in the name of people who see no possibility of gender-parity in a world where women achieve victim status simply by being women. Not in my name - object to it in your own name.
Moreover, women making claims of sexual harassment or violation many years after the event often bat off "why now?" critics by saying they're doing it for other women; that, at the time, they were too afraid/young/powerless to object.
Again, this is a flawed position - as an individual, it's up to you when you make an allegation. But if you're doing it under the guise of being a role model, then frankly, you're making a terrible fist of it. You're basically saying that, as much confidence and rage and mettle and verbal aplomb as I had 20 years ago, it was still too daunting and too humiliating to report this crime. It's better to wait till you're famous, which in all probability you won't be, before you let this kind of thing out of the bag.
Ultimately, sexual politics is the one thing that really dates feminism, that makes it "old school" and lets it down. Equal pay for equal work will never go out of fashion. But blanket assumptions of female victimhood and weakness, the inevitability of male exploitation, the drive to politicise every ambiguous physical gesture as if we're all working shoulder to shoulder against malevolent men - this is not feminism.
To bundle it all together as such catches a lot of us who cannot agree, like dolphins in a tuna net. No wonder we thrash about so much.
Zoe Williams is a columnist with The Guardian, London.
By Zoe Williams
The Age (Austrialia) - February 25, 2004
Ms Wolf should know that sexual politics is the one thing that really dates feminism.
Whatever the truth of Naomi Wolf's sex-pest accusations against Harold Bloom, nobody, so far, is coming out of the business very well.
Wolf picked a funny old time to come out with this charge - not within the two years that charges can be investigated by the authorities; some considerable time after she had made suggestions of harassment on a public forum, though refused to name names (owing to the "soft spot of complicity" in her soul); two full decades after the event.
Bloom has declined to comment, using instead the "a friend says . . ." avenue (the friend, incidentally, has denounced this as a vicious lie), which I always find a bit lame.
Sundry other commentators have unleashed a weird level of spite, specifically Camille Paglia, who raged: "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."
An assessment of that kind has to be based upon pretty close personal intimacy - in other words, Paglia needs to have observed Wolf exhibiting that behaviour, at close range and over a period of years. Otherwise, all she's saying is: "This woman is pretty, and that disqualifies her from reasoned thought."
This vitriol is, without question, disproportionate. Had Wolf written an essay claiming that, while at Yale, a professor or student stole from her, hit her over the head with a chair, involved her in a pyramid scheme that was really a scam, or perpetrated any crime at all against her that didn't involve sex, the response would have been different.
There might have been some puzzlement that she'd left it so long. There would have been people who questioned her veracity or, at the very least, were prepared to withhold judgement until greater evidence could be provided than the word of the accuser. But there wouldn't be anything like this fury that gushes out like a geyser whenever a woman, especially so tardily, makes a charge of sexual assault.
What is it about sex crimes that rile not men, but other women?
And it almost always comes from other women, handily, if bizarrely, uniting feminists, post-feminists, non-feminists and the undecided, in a single voice of unsisterly incandescence.
Why should the response be so vehement? What is it about sex crimes, or charges thereof, that rile not men, defending each other in an old-boy style, but other women?
pIt's partly that the dangerous predator in question is often characterised not as an individual who behaved badly, but as a symptom of the rottenness at the core of all of society.
For instance, Bloom's behaviour "devastated" Wolf's sense of "being valuable to Yale as a student rather than as a pawn of powerful men". Wolf depicts Bloom as the personification not just of an intellectual landscape (Yale), but of an entire gender ("powerful men"). In so doing, she styles herself as the binary opposite, the personification of her own gender, the eternal pawn or victim.
And this is where, as someone who shares that gender, something rises in my throat (and no doubt in Paglia's) - it really is debatable whether or not some drunk bloke putting his face quite near yours and his hand on your thigh, when you thought he'd come round to read poetry, undermines your value to an entire institution.
In the barometer that runs from "misunderstanding" to "act of violence", it leans irrefutably towards the former.
So, sure, object to it, at the time or many years afterwards, but not in the name of your gender. Not in the name of people who see no possibility of gender-parity in a world where women achieve victim status simply by being women. Not in my name - object to it in your own name.
Moreover, women making claims of sexual harassment or violation many years after the event often bat off "why now?" critics by saying they're doing it for other women; that, at the time, they were too afraid/young/powerless to object.
Again, this is a flawed position - as an individual, it's up to you when you make an allegation. But if you're doing it under the guise of being a role model, then frankly, you're making a terrible fist of it. You're basically saying that, as much confidence and rage and mettle and verbal aplomb as I had 20 years ago, it was still too daunting and too humiliating to report this crime. It's better to wait till you're famous, which in all probability you won't be, before you let this kind of thing out of the bag.
Ultimately, sexual politics is the one thing that really dates feminism, that makes it "old school" and lets it down. Equal pay for equal work will never go out of fashion. But blanket assumptions of female victimhood and weakness, the inevitability of male exploitation, the drive to politicise every ambiguous physical gesture as if we're all working shoulder to shoulder against malevolent men - this is not feminism.
To bundle it all together as such catches a lot of us who cannot agree, like dolphins in a tuna net. No wonder we thrash about so much.
Zoe Williams is a columnist with The Guardian, London.
_________________________________________________________________________________
'I Am Victim'
By Anne Applebaum
Washington Post - February 25, 2004
Sometimes in the course of a great American debate there comes a moment when the big battle guns fall silent, the pundits run out of breath, and -- unexpectedly -- the long, bitter argument suddenly turns into farce. In the past two decades, this nation has lived through the spectacle of Anita Hill accusing Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment; the destruction of the career of Sen. Bob Packwood; the ugly drama of Paula Jones, her lawyers and the president; and, as a result, the creation of multiple university and workplace "codes of sexual conduct," which no one dares defy. But now it's as if none of that ever happened: In an extraordinary, several-thousand-word article in New York magazine, Naomi Wolf, the celebrated feminist writer, has just accused Harold Bloom, the celebrated literary scholar, of having put his hand on her thigh at Yale University 20 years ago.
But Wolf's article is not merely about that event (a secret that she "can't bear to carry around anymore"). The article is also about the lasting damage that this single experience has wrought on a woman who has since written a number of bestsellers, given hundreds of lectures, been featured on dozens of talk shows and photographed in various glamorous poses, including a smiling, self-confident head shot on New York magazine's Web site this week. Not that she mentions her achievements. On the contrary, she implies that this terrible experience left a lasting mark on her academic and professional career: "I was spiraling downward; I had gotten a C-, a D, and an F. . . . My confidence shaken, I failed in my effort to win the Rhodes Scholarship."
She also implies that she never recovered academically, which isn't quite the case. I was her contemporary, and happen to remember some of her achievements. But although I scoured the article, I could find no reference to the fact that Wolf did eventually win a Rhodes Scholarship, thanks, in part, to a recommendation letter written by Bloom. Or that, while in England, she began writing "The Beauty Myth," the first of those bestsellers.
Indeed, Wolf not only never mentions any of this, she seems to want us to believe that none of it matters -- and that deep down inside she is still a quivering 19-year-old whose single experience with a man she describes as a "vortex of power and intellectual charisma," had "devastated my sense of being valuable to Yale as a student, rather than as a pawn of powerful men." She was not exactly emotionally traumatized, she writes (and seems sorry that this avenue of legal argument isn't open to her) but her "educational experience was corrupted." And, somehow, that allows her to equate her experience with that of children harassed by Catholic priests or female cadets raped by fellow soldiers. She, and they, are all victims of "systemic corruption."
Now, there are a number of surprising elements to Wolf's article, all of which deserve more intense scrutiny. One is her bizarre description of her attempts to get bewildered university bureaucrats to do something -- she doesn't know what -- long after the statute of limitations has run out. Another is her account of the hand-on-thigh event itself, which seems to have taken place late at night in her apartment, where Bloom had come at her invitation. A third is her apparent lack of awareness of the long debate about sexual harassment itself, and of the way it has radically changed the atmosphere on campuses and in offices, in both positive and negative ways.
But in the end, what is most extraordinary about Wolf is the way in which she has voluntarily stripped herself of her achievements and her status, and reduced herself to a victim, nothing more. The implication here is that women are psychologically weak: One hand on the thigh, and they never get over it. The implication is also that women are naive, and powerless as well: Even Yale undergraduates are not savvy enough to avoid late-night encounters with male professors whose romantic intentions don't interest them.
The larger implications are for the movement that used to be called "feminism." Twenty years of fame, money, success, happy marriage and the children she has described in her books -- and Naomi Wolf, one of my generation's leading feminists, is still obsessed with her own exaggerated victimhood? It's not an ideology I'd want younger women to follow.
By Anne Applebaum
Washington Post - February 25, 2004
Sometimes in the course of a great American debate there comes a moment when the big battle guns fall silent, the pundits run out of breath, and -- unexpectedly -- the long, bitter argument suddenly turns into farce. In the past two decades, this nation has lived through the spectacle of Anita Hill accusing Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment; the destruction of the career of Sen. Bob Packwood; the ugly drama of Paula Jones, her lawyers and the president; and, as a result, the creation of multiple university and workplace "codes of sexual conduct," which no one dares defy. But now it's as if none of that ever happened: In an extraordinary, several-thousand-word article in New York magazine, Naomi Wolf, the celebrated feminist writer, has just accused Harold Bloom, the celebrated literary scholar, of having put his hand on her thigh at Yale University 20 years ago.
But Wolf's article is not merely about that event (a secret that she "can't bear to carry around anymore"). The article is also about the lasting damage that this single experience has wrought on a woman who has since written a number of bestsellers, given hundreds of lectures, been featured on dozens of talk shows and photographed in various glamorous poses, including a smiling, self-confident head shot on New York magazine's Web site this week. Not that she mentions her achievements. On the contrary, she implies that this terrible experience left a lasting mark on her academic and professional career: "I was spiraling downward; I had gotten a C-, a D, and an F. . . . My confidence shaken, I failed in my effort to win the Rhodes Scholarship."
She also implies that she never recovered academically, which isn't quite the case. I was her contemporary, and happen to remember some of her achievements. But although I scoured the article, I could find no reference to the fact that Wolf did eventually win a Rhodes Scholarship, thanks, in part, to a recommendation letter written by Bloom. Or that, while in England, she began writing "The Beauty Myth," the first of those bestsellers.
Indeed, Wolf not only never mentions any of this, she seems to want us to believe that none of it matters -- and that deep down inside she is still a quivering 19-year-old whose single experience with a man she describes as a "vortex of power and intellectual charisma," had "devastated my sense of being valuable to Yale as a student, rather than as a pawn of powerful men." She was not exactly emotionally traumatized, she writes (and seems sorry that this avenue of legal argument isn't open to her) but her "educational experience was corrupted." And, somehow, that allows her to equate her experience with that of children harassed by Catholic priests or female cadets raped by fellow soldiers. She, and they, are all victims of "systemic corruption."
Now, there are a number of surprising elements to Wolf's article, all of which deserve more intense scrutiny. One is her bizarre description of her attempts to get bewildered university bureaucrats to do something -- she doesn't know what -- long after the statute of limitations has run out. Another is her account of the hand-on-thigh event itself, which seems to have taken place late at night in her apartment, where Bloom had come at her invitation. A third is her apparent lack of awareness of the long debate about sexual harassment itself, and of the way it has radically changed the atmosphere on campuses and in offices, in both positive and negative ways.
But in the end, what is most extraordinary about Wolf is the way in which she has voluntarily stripped herself of her achievements and her status, and reduced herself to a victim, nothing more. The implication here is that women are psychologically weak: One hand on the thigh, and they never get over it. The implication is also that women are naive, and powerless as well: Even Yale undergraduates are not savvy enough to avoid late-night encounters with male professors whose romantic intentions don't interest them.
The larger implications are for the movement that used to be called "feminism." Twenty years of fame, money, success, happy marriage and the children she has described in her books -- and Naomi Wolf, one of my generation's leading feminists, is still obsessed with her own exaggerated victimhood? It's not an ideology I'd want younger women to follow.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Crying Wolf - Naomi Wolf sets back the fight against sexual harassment
By Meghan O'Rourke
MSN - February 25, 2004
In the cover story in New York this week, Naomi Wolf reveals that Harold Bloom, a famous humanities professor at Yale, "sexually encroached" upon her when she was a student. The transgression, she tells us, "devastated my sense of being valuable to Yale as a student." Wolf insists that her true target isn't Bloom, whose behavior she calls all too "human." Rather, it's Yale, she claims, that continues to have a systemic problem with preventing and prosecuting harassment.
The piece makes a serious charge about the failure of higher education anti-harassment measures: Wolf claims that Yale—like other institutions she breezily alludes to without naming—still has no truly "transparent" procedure for students to lodge grievances against professors. She concludes this based on her own experience with Yale following her recent disclosure of her two-decade-old encounter with Bloom.
Both her evidence and her reasoning are deeply flawed. Yale's Grievance Board statement is posted here—and is easily available as the kind of standard response she allows us to believe, for much of the piece, that the college doesn't have. What it seems she really wants from Yale is for its administration to bend over backward for her now that she's come forward, and thus prove that it really, really cares about its students. When it doesn't, she says that Yale must not be truly "accountable to the equality of women." This is a kind of bait and switch. Yale's response to her disclosure of a 1983 offense is not necessarily predictive of its response to a present-day offense—not just because the statute of limitations for what Bloom did to Wolf expired 18 years ago, but also because what Bloom did may not have been explicitly wrong by Yale's standards at the time and by law (though from our vantage point it looks sleazy). We don't know, since Wolf never tried to find out how Yale would have handled the charge. This is typical of the way in which Wolf's article is disingenuous. She makes a dangerous extrapolation from the personal to the political—but the personal undermines the cause that is the pretext for writing the piece in the first place.
Wolf's allegation against Bloom is this: During her senior year, in 1983, she took an independent study with him. Somehow much of the semester "slipped away" without a meeting. Finally Bloom invited himself over for dinner at her house—Wolf lived with one of his graduate editorial assistants and her boyfriend—during which he drank several glasses of Amontillado. Afterward, he cornered her and breathed, "You have the aura of election upon you." "The next thing I knew his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh," she tells us. Wolf says she fended him off and vomited in the sink and that Bloom packed up the sherry and snapped, "You are a deeply troubled girl."
Bloom's neglect of his academic duties (he failed to meet with her for the rest of the semester and then gave her a B) is itself troubling, and his come-on isn't pretty. But Wolf acknowledges that what transpired was not, strictly speaking, sexual harassment. Meanwhile, we still don't know whether, according to Yale's policy at the time—a "discouragement policy"—Bloom could have been fired or censured for his action had she brought a grievance.
This may sound like splitting hairs, but it's not. Naomi Wolf extrapolates broadly from her experience with Yale today to suggest that "the atmosphere of collusion that had helped to keep me quiet twenty years ago was still intact—as secretive as a Masonic lodge." Let's stipulate for the sake of argument that Yale has not dealt well with Naomi Wolf in the months since she excavated the Bloom incident. This doesn't mean that Yale's current policies aren't sound. Today, according to its rules Yale would unequivocally say that Bloom's behavior was wrong and that he would be subject to discipline.
Most of Wolf's broader case against Bloom—and the oppressive atmosphere at Yale in 1983—rests on hearsay: "Some women friends, however, persuaded me not to speak to anyone official ... the university saw him [Bloom] as untouchable, my friends warned." An old professor of hers recently told her that professors and students "gossiped" about Bloom's affairs, and a woman who had been a graduate student at the time (and is now a tenured professor) recently "confirmed" to Wolf that "it was known; it was in the air." Was it known, or was it in the air? In an American court of law, a man is innocent until proven guilty. Here, Wolf invites us to be scandalized by an accretion of rumor and personal recollection. Think about what happens when a man makes damning public charges about a woman's sexuality based on "gossip" and things that were "in the air." (Full disclosure: I was a student at Yale in the 1990s and studied with Bloom. He never hit on me, or anyone who told me about an incident directly, though I did hear the kind of vague rumors that Wolf cites as evidence.)
Then there's Wolf's hyperbolic rhetoric. She calls Bloom's hand "boneless" (meant to conjure another appendage, perhaps). She casually describes "an atmosphere at Yale in which female students were expected to be sociable with male professors." The passive construction makes it sound as though Yale's co-eds were little more than privileged New England geishas—as though Wolf had to play along with Bloom's flirtatious games to have a shot at being a Rhodes scholar. What Wolf leaves out is that she chose to buy into these outdated expectations. In Promiscuities, her memoir of teenage sexuality, she writes about the calculations women make about their (admittedly limited) erotic power over professors on the same page that she discusses, with pseudonyms, inviting Bloom over to dinner. (It's worth noting that Promiscuities has a different account of the details leading up to the Bloom incident. See this New York Observer article, which explains the differences. When I asked Wolf about this by phone, she contended that these weren't inconsistencies in her story, but changes made by legal necessity.)
In marshalling evidence that Yale handles sexual harassment badly, Wolf recounts four stories of sexual harassment at Yale, taking place between 1985 and 1999. The incidents are troubling but too muddy to evaluate for several reasons. She makes no distinctions between events that happened in the 1980s and those that took place just five years ago. This lapse is crucial; it's not news that schools handled harassment badly in '80s, and the thrust of her piece purports to concern universities today. Moreover, she makes no distinctions among the gravity of the charges, which range from rape to a professor putting his hand on the knee of a student not enrolled in any of his courses—the kind of thing Jeffrey Rosen argues might better be called "privacy invasion."
Wolf argues, convincingly, that we need to move away from the discourse of victim/victimizer. But she undermines this move within her own piece. She jumps through verbal hoops to make it clear she was not "personally traumatized," yet she spends paragraphs describing the incident in precisely those terms, telling us that she spiraled into a "moral" crisis after Bloom's come-on—that her grades slipped; that she didn't get her coveted Rhodes Scholarship because her "confidence" was "shaken." She neglects to mention that she later was awarded a Rhodes; that might dam our sympathy.
Is there a problem with sexual harassment at Yale? It's entirely possible, but the piece isn't persuasive on this front. The strangest thing about it may be that Wolf failed to talk to any contemporary Yale undergraduates, so there's no sense what any of them think. Wolf says that Dean Brodhead told her that the number of meetings held by Yale's Grievance Board's weren't for public release. (Wolf says "committee," but I think she means "Grievance Board.") Helaine Klasky, a spokeswoman for Yale, told me when I asked that the Grievance Board had brought four formal complaints of sexual harassment against faculty over the course of the last decade. Of course, those numbers could mean anything—that women at Yale are relatively safe and well-off, or that they're afraid to come forward. (This piece from the Yale Herald in 1996—when I was at the university—says that an ACLU study of sexual harassment there found that 17 students felt that they had been "made to feel uncomfortable" by professors and teaching assistants at some point, and that 70 percent of students would have gone to a Grievance Board had they been harassed; only 8 percent knew exactly how to proceed.)
What's particularly frustrating about Wolf's piece is that it is raising an important question irresponsibly. Sexual harassment continues to occur on campuses. On the day her article came out, Slate had an editorial meeting, over the course of which it became apparent that the female editors took it for granted—in some cases because of personal experience—that campus sexual harassment was a live issue. The male editors, on the other hand, were shocked to hear that harassment continued to take place and go unreported. Is it possible that, unreported in a post-Clarence Thomas, post-Clinton, post-Tailhook era, universities are still not behaving responsibly toward women? Wolf's article confuses the issue rather than clarifies it. Her gaps and imprecision give fodder to skeptics who think sexual harassment charges are often just a form of hysteria.
By Meghan O'Rourke
MSN - February 25, 2004
 |
| Naomi Wolf and Harold Bloom |
The piece makes a serious charge about the failure of higher education anti-harassment measures: Wolf claims that Yale—like other institutions she breezily alludes to without naming—still has no truly "transparent" procedure for students to lodge grievances against professors. She concludes this based on her own experience with Yale following her recent disclosure of her two-decade-old encounter with Bloom.
Both her evidence and her reasoning are deeply flawed. Yale's Grievance Board statement is posted here—and is easily available as the kind of standard response she allows us to believe, for much of the piece, that the college doesn't have. What it seems she really wants from Yale is for its administration to bend over backward for her now that she's come forward, and thus prove that it really, really cares about its students. When it doesn't, she says that Yale must not be truly "accountable to the equality of women." This is a kind of bait and switch. Yale's response to her disclosure of a 1983 offense is not necessarily predictive of its response to a present-day offense—not just because the statute of limitations for what Bloom did to Wolf expired 18 years ago, but also because what Bloom did may not have been explicitly wrong by Yale's standards at the time and by law (though from our vantage point it looks sleazy). We don't know, since Wolf never tried to find out how Yale would have handled the charge. This is typical of the way in which Wolf's article is disingenuous. She makes a dangerous extrapolation from the personal to the political—but the personal undermines the cause that is the pretext for writing the piece in the first place.
Wolf's allegation against Bloom is this: During her senior year, in 1983, she took an independent study with him. Somehow much of the semester "slipped away" without a meeting. Finally Bloom invited himself over for dinner at her house—Wolf lived with one of his graduate editorial assistants and her boyfriend—during which he drank several glasses of Amontillado. Afterward, he cornered her and breathed, "You have the aura of election upon you." "The next thing I knew his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh," she tells us. Wolf says she fended him off and vomited in the sink and that Bloom packed up the sherry and snapped, "You are a deeply troubled girl."
Bloom's neglect of his academic duties (he failed to meet with her for the rest of the semester and then gave her a B) is itself troubling, and his come-on isn't pretty. But Wolf acknowledges that what transpired was not, strictly speaking, sexual harassment. Meanwhile, we still don't know whether, according to Yale's policy at the time—a "discouragement policy"—Bloom could have been fired or censured for his action had she brought a grievance.
This may sound like splitting hairs, but it's not. Naomi Wolf extrapolates broadly from her experience with Yale today to suggest that "the atmosphere of collusion that had helped to keep me quiet twenty years ago was still intact—as secretive as a Masonic lodge." Let's stipulate for the sake of argument that Yale has not dealt well with Naomi Wolf in the months since she excavated the Bloom incident. This doesn't mean that Yale's current policies aren't sound. Today, according to its rules Yale would unequivocally say that Bloom's behavior was wrong and that he would be subject to discipline.
Most of Wolf's broader case against Bloom—and the oppressive atmosphere at Yale in 1983—rests on hearsay: "Some women friends, however, persuaded me not to speak to anyone official ... the university saw him [Bloom] as untouchable, my friends warned." An old professor of hers recently told her that professors and students "gossiped" about Bloom's affairs, and a woman who had been a graduate student at the time (and is now a tenured professor) recently "confirmed" to Wolf that "it was known; it was in the air." Was it known, or was it in the air? In an American court of law, a man is innocent until proven guilty. Here, Wolf invites us to be scandalized by an accretion of rumor and personal recollection. Think about what happens when a man makes damning public charges about a woman's sexuality based on "gossip" and things that were "in the air." (Full disclosure: I was a student at Yale in the 1990s and studied with Bloom. He never hit on me, or anyone who told me about an incident directly, though I did hear the kind of vague rumors that Wolf cites as evidence.)
Then there's Wolf's hyperbolic rhetoric. She calls Bloom's hand "boneless" (meant to conjure another appendage, perhaps). She casually describes "an atmosphere at Yale in which female students were expected to be sociable with male professors." The passive construction makes it sound as though Yale's co-eds were little more than privileged New England geishas—as though Wolf had to play along with Bloom's flirtatious games to have a shot at being a Rhodes scholar. What Wolf leaves out is that she chose to buy into these outdated expectations. In Promiscuities, her memoir of teenage sexuality, she writes about the calculations women make about their (admittedly limited) erotic power over professors on the same page that she discusses, with pseudonyms, inviting Bloom over to dinner. (It's worth noting that Promiscuities has a different account of the details leading up to the Bloom incident. See this New York Observer article, which explains the differences. When I asked Wolf about this by phone, she contended that these weren't inconsistencies in her story, but changes made by legal necessity.)
In marshalling evidence that Yale handles sexual harassment badly, Wolf recounts four stories of sexual harassment at Yale, taking place between 1985 and 1999. The incidents are troubling but too muddy to evaluate for several reasons. She makes no distinctions between events that happened in the 1980s and those that took place just five years ago. This lapse is crucial; it's not news that schools handled harassment badly in '80s, and the thrust of her piece purports to concern universities today. Moreover, she makes no distinctions among the gravity of the charges, which range from rape to a professor putting his hand on the knee of a student not enrolled in any of his courses—the kind of thing Jeffrey Rosen argues might better be called "privacy invasion."
Wolf argues, convincingly, that we need to move away from the discourse of victim/victimizer. But she undermines this move within her own piece. She jumps through verbal hoops to make it clear she was not "personally traumatized," yet she spends paragraphs describing the incident in precisely those terms, telling us that she spiraled into a "moral" crisis after Bloom's come-on—that her grades slipped; that she didn't get her coveted Rhodes Scholarship because her "confidence" was "shaken." She neglects to mention that she later was awarded a Rhodes; that might dam our sympathy.
Is there a problem with sexual harassment at Yale? It's entirely possible, but the piece isn't persuasive on this front. The strangest thing about it may be that Wolf failed to talk to any contemporary Yale undergraduates, so there's no sense what any of them think. Wolf says that Dean Brodhead told her that the number of meetings held by Yale's Grievance Board's weren't for public release. (Wolf says "committee," but I think she means "Grievance Board.") Helaine Klasky, a spokeswoman for Yale, told me when I asked that the Grievance Board had brought four formal complaints of sexual harassment against faculty over the course of the last decade. Of course, those numbers could mean anything—that women at Yale are relatively safe and well-off, or that they're afraid to come forward. (This piece from the Yale Herald in 1996—when I was at the university—says that an ACLU study of sexual harassment there found that 17 students felt that they had been "made to feel uncomfortable" by professors and teaching assistants at some point, and that 70 percent of students would have gone to a Grievance Board had they been harassed; only 8 percent knew exactly how to proceed.)
What's particularly frustrating about Wolf's piece is that it is raising an important question irresponsibly. Sexual harassment continues to occur on campuses. On the day her article came out, Slate had an editorial meeting, over the course of which it became apparent that the female editors took it for granted—in some cases because of personal experience—that campus sexual harassment was a live issue. The male editors, on the other hand, were shocked to hear that harassment continued to take place and go unreported. Is it possible that, unreported in a post-Clarence Thomas, post-Clinton, post-Tailhook era, universities are still not behaving responsibly toward women? Wolf's article confuses the issue rather than clarifies it. Her gaps and imprecision give fodder to skeptics who think sexual harassment charges are often just a form of hysteria.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Harold 'outed' by a feminist
By Jenny Hjul
The Scotsman (Scotland) - February 26, 2004
THE feminist Naomi Wolf has never exactly united the sisterhood - she's too pretty - but she hasn't alienated women either, as have other more robust-looking and sounding radicals.
Not for Naomi the "`all men are rapists" lunacy of moustachioed Andrea Dworkin, or the "all men are sexual exiles" extremism of Camille Paglia.
She may have irritated us by focusing on the Beauty Myth through her Maybelline Thick Lash eyes and cashing $15,000-a-month cheques for advising Al Gore to get in touch with his alpha male, but apart from that she has been an acceptable face of American feminism.
Which is why her decision to out Harold Bloom as a sex fiend just doesn't compute.
She had been "sick with excitement" at the prospect of being tutored by him and was plain sick when he allegedly made a post-prandial pass at her. She has made her accusations 20 years later, she says, to help all those female undergraduates pawed at by frisky male academics.
I'm not sure how this has gone down on campuses in the States, but in Britain, where students are more phlegmatic, she will probably be consigned to the hysterical, politically correct, "not one of ours" brand of feminism.
To be upset by a touch on the thigh after a candlelit supper where sherry (sherry!) was consumed is babyish. In my day (the same as Wolf's), predatory behaviour from male (and sometimes female) lecturers happened and you took evasive action accordingly.
It's nothing to be proud of, and I trust they wouldn't get away with it today, thanks partly to that PC culture imported from America.
However, a pass, even an alleged one, is a relatively minor blip on life's learning curve, and most young women get over it.
Naomi has made the mistake, again, of taking herself too seriously. Her encounter with the comedian Ali G (she consulted lawyers following his spoof interview last year) obviously taught her nothing.
IN NEW Jersey, America's most densely populated state, 52 per cent of drivers questioned in a survey said they are very angry or moderately angry when they drive.
About 40 per cent admitted they are likely to curse or make gestures at other drivers, or to use their vehicles to punish them by tailgating, flashing full beams, slowing down to block them in a lane, and so on.
I mention this to put in context my occasional outbursts at the wheel, mild by comparison, but no longer possible to deny since my three-year-old child was heard muttering "bloody car".
The day before yesterday, I even hooted at another driver, something I very rarely do, and was embarrassed by the camp beep emitted by my red-blooded motor. It was a male driver, which is neither here nor there, and he had not only cut a corner while turning right but had failed to get back to his side of the road afterwards, thereby creating head-on collision conditions, only avoided by my deft swerving. The least I could do was hoot.
Like the New Jersey motorists, I was moderately to very angry, but not for a second was I tempted to punish the man with my vehicle. I have not got a problem with this.
However, as we will soon be moving to a house without a garage on a street without residents' permit parking, I am aware that I need to address my anger issues, such as they are. My husband has suggested Valium.
But I prefer the tactic that is deployed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu whenever he is in a confrontational situation - which is to grin, giggle, tease, mock, until the enemy caves in and rolls over for his tummy to be tickled.
It worked on a traffic warden, apparently, so I don't see why it won't work on ordinary folk.
I WAS saddened to read of the untimely death earlier this week of Les Gray, lead singer of Mud. He was 57, but the picture next to his obit showed him in his prime - tinted glasses, feather haircut and fur coat. That's how I remembered him.
When we met, I had been a Mud fan for, ooh, about a year and could do the Tiger Feet dance with my eyes closed, although Oh Boy was my favourite ... All that love, All that kissing, You don't know what you've been a-missing, Oh Boy ...
We - me, my sister, and our friend Marina - knew all their songs. When we performed for our parents and brothers, Marina was always Les, and it was Marina's father, Norman, who magicked that unforgettable meeting in a London studio.
Norman was selling his camper van and one of the lads wanted to buy it. Norman, Superdad by now, must have mentioned our pre-teen infatuation, and Les invited us to a recording session.
I can't remember what I wore, but I do remember what I said - absolutely nothing. I was sick with excitement, so Marina, an earlier developer, did all the talking.
Still, Les was sweet, smiley and smoky, and when we left we all got a kiss.
They don't make 'em like Mud any more.
By Jenny Hjul
The Scotsman (Scotland) - February 26, 2004
THE feminist Naomi Wolf has never exactly united the sisterhood - she's too pretty - but she hasn't alienated women either, as have other more robust-looking and sounding radicals.
Not for Naomi the "`all men are rapists" lunacy of moustachioed Andrea Dworkin, or the "all men are sexual exiles" extremism of Camille Paglia.
She may have irritated us by focusing on the Beauty Myth through her Maybelline Thick Lash eyes and cashing $15,000-a-month cheques for advising Al Gore to get in touch with his alpha male, but apart from that she has been an acceptable face of American feminism.
Which is why her decision to out Harold Bloom as a sex fiend just doesn't compute.
She had been "sick with excitement" at the prospect of being tutored by him and was plain sick when he allegedly made a post-prandial pass at her. She has made her accusations 20 years later, she says, to help all those female undergraduates pawed at by frisky male academics.
I'm not sure how this has gone down on campuses in the States, but in Britain, where students are more phlegmatic, she will probably be consigned to the hysterical, politically correct, "not one of ours" brand of feminism.
To be upset by a touch on the thigh after a candlelit supper where sherry (sherry!) was consumed is babyish. In my day (the same as Wolf's), predatory behaviour from male (and sometimes female) lecturers happened and you took evasive action accordingly.
It's nothing to be proud of, and I trust they wouldn't get away with it today, thanks partly to that PC culture imported from America.
However, a pass, even an alleged one, is a relatively minor blip on life's learning curve, and most young women get over it.
Naomi has made the mistake, again, of taking herself too seriously. Her encounter with the comedian Ali G (she consulted lawyers following his spoof interview last year) obviously taught her nothing.
IN NEW Jersey, America's most densely populated state, 52 per cent of drivers questioned in a survey said they are very angry or moderately angry when they drive.
About 40 per cent admitted they are likely to curse or make gestures at other drivers, or to use their vehicles to punish them by tailgating, flashing full beams, slowing down to block them in a lane, and so on.
I mention this to put in context my occasional outbursts at the wheel, mild by comparison, but no longer possible to deny since my three-year-old child was heard muttering "bloody car".
The day before yesterday, I even hooted at another driver, something I very rarely do, and was embarrassed by the camp beep emitted by my red-blooded motor. It was a male driver, which is neither here nor there, and he had not only cut a corner while turning right but had failed to get back to his side of the road afterwards, thereby creating head-on collision conditions, only avoided by my deft swerving. The least I could do was hoot.
Like the New Jersey motorists, I was moderately to very angry, but not for a second was I tempted to punish the man with my vehicle. I have not got a problem with this.
However, as we will soon be moving to a house without a garage on a street without residents' permit parking, I am aware that I need to address my anger issues, such as they are. My husband has suggested Valium.
But I prefer the tactic that is deployed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu whenever he is in a confrontational situation - which is to grin, giggle, tease, mock, until the enemy caves in and rolls over for his tummy to be tickled.
It worked on a traffic warden, apparently, so I don't see why it won't work on ordinary folk.
I WAS saddened to read of the untimely death earlier this week of Les Gray, lead singer of Mud. He was 57, but the picture next to his obit showed him in his prime - tinted glasses, feather haircut and fur coat. That's how I remembered him.
When we met, I had been a Mud fan for, ooh, about a year and could do the Tiger Feet dance with my eyes closed, although Oh Boy was my favourite ... All that love, All that kissing, You don't know what you've been a-missing, Oh Boy ...
We - me, my sister, and our friend Marina - knew all their songs. When we performed for our parents and brothers, Marina was always Les, and it was Marina's father, Norman, who magicked that unforgettable meeting in a London studio.
Norman was selling his camper van and one of the lads wanted to buy it. Norman, Superdad by now, must have mentioned our pre-teen infatuation, and Les invited us to a recording session.
I can't remember what I wore, but I do remember what I said - absolutely nothing. I was sick with excitement, so Marina, an earlier developer, did all the talking.
Still, Les was sweet, smiley and smoky, and when we left we all got a kiss.
They don't make 'em like Mud any more.
_________________________________________________________________________________
E-mails seek Bloom info - Three seniors inquire about prof's conduct
By Stephen Butler
Yale Daily News - February 26, 2004
Three Yale seniors sent e-mails asking current and former female students of Humanities and English professor Harold Bloom if he had ever sexually harassed them, Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said Wednesday.
The e-mails came in the wake of a controversial week for Bloom that began with Monday's publication of a New York Magazine article by Naomi Wolf '84, in which she accused Bloom of sexually harassing her while he was her independent study advisor in 1983.
Klasky said the e-mail to Bloom's students was an "unfair" action to take.
"Yale takes sexual harassment very seriously and has clear and robust policies and procedures in place," Klasky said in an e-mail. "If any students [feel] that -- inappropriate behavior has taken place, [he or she] should not hesitate to talk to someone on the grievance board, in the Dean's office or in [his or her] residential college. To send a blast e-mail implying that wrongdoing has taken place is simply unfair and is reminiscent of a witch-hunt."
Bloom declined to comment for this article.
Erin Birdsong '05, who is currently enrolled in one of Bloom's courses, said she did not receive the e-mail. But Birdsong said Bloom mentioned the e-mail in class Wednesday.
"He said in class he assumed most of us had gotten [the e-mail]," Birdsong said.
At press time, the News had not yet obtained the names of the students who sent the e-mail.
In her article, Wolf said Bloom was not "a bad man," but she said the current framework at Yale for handling complaints of sexual harassment was inadequate.
"This man [Bloom] did something, at least once, that was self-centered and harmful," Wolf said in the article. "But his harmful impulse would not have entered his or my real life -- then or now -- if Yale made the consequences of such behavior both clear and real."
Tala Gharagozlou '06, who took Bloom's class last semester, said she does not think he is the type of person who would sexually harass a student.
"He has a tendency to call everybody sweetheart, but no sexual connotations in any way," Gharagozlou said. "He seemed more like he cares a lot about his students."
Bloom is a world-renowned scholar of Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton. He has written over 20 books, including "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" and "How to Read and Why."
By Stephen Butler
Yale Daily News - February 26, 2004
Three Yale seniors sent e-mails asking current and former female students of Humanities and English professor Harold Bloom if he had ever sexually harassed them, Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said Wednesday.
The e-mails came in the wake of a controversial week for Bloom that began with Monday's publication of a New York Magazine article by Naomi Wolf '84, in which she accused Bloom of sexually harassing her while he was her independent study advisor in 1983.
Klasky said the e-mail to Bloom's students was an "unfair" action to take.
"Yale takes sexual harassment very seriously and has clear and robust policies and procedures in place," Klasky said in an e-mail. "If any students [feel] that -- inappropriate behavior has taken place, [he or she] should not hesitate to talk to someone on the grievance board, in the Dean's office or in [his or her] residential college. To send a blast e-mail implying that wrongdoing has taken place is simply unfair and is reminiscent of a witch-hunt."
Bloom declined to comment for this article.
Erin Birdsong '05, who is currently enrolled in one of Bloom's courses, said she did not receive the e-mail. But Birdsong said Bloom mentioned the e-mail in class Wednesday.
"He said in class he assumed most of us had gotten [the e-mail]," Birdsong said.
At press time, the News had not yet obtained the names of the students who sent the e-mail.
In her article, Wolf said Bloom was not "a bad man," but she said the current framework at Yale for handling complaints of sexual harassment was inadequate.
"This man [Bloom] did something, at least once, that was self-centered and harmful," Wolf said in the article. "But his harmful impulse would not have entered his or my real life -- then or now -- if Yale made the consequences of such behavior both clear and real."
Tala Gharagozlou '06, who took Bloom's class last semester, said she does not think he is the type of person who would sexually harass a student.
"He has a tendency to call everybody sweetheart, but no sexual connotations in any way," Gharagozlou said. "He seemed more like he cares a lot about his students."
Bloom is a world-renowned scholar of Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton. He has written over 20 books, including "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" and "How to Read and Why."
____________________________________________________________________________________
Who's crying Wolf?
Interviews by Laura Barton
The Guardian (UK) - Thursday February 26, 2004
Naomi Wolf's decision to accuse Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom of sexual assault 20 years after the alleged event at Yale has triggered a furious row, with Camille Paglia branding it a witchhunt. Was Wolf right to speak out?
"He leaned towards me and put his face inches from mine. 'You have the aura of election upon you,' he breathed ... The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh. I lurched away ... The floor spun. By now my back was against the sink. He came at me. I turned away toward the sink and found myself vomiting in shock. Bloom disappeared."
Naomi Wolf, New York Magazine
"It really smacks of the Salem witch-hunts and all the accompanying hysteria. 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."
Camille Paglia
Lynne Segal
I remember when I was a young faculty member in the 70s I was pounced on - I mean, people phoning me up at home. And, in fact, about 10 years ago [something similar to what happened to Naomi Wolf] happened to me, but he was clearly drunk. Then, perhaps, it would not have been so unusual for an attractive young student to be harassed and to feel her grades would be jeopardised unless she went through with something. But I'm almost certain that this is a situation that has changed dramatically.
I would see Wolf's revelations about Harold Bloom and sexual harrassment as a response to the backlash against feminism. Feminism is always attacked for being too extreme, and one of the ways it has been attacked is by people saying that "feminists were always crying wolf", that women exaggerate the extent of sexual harassment. That may be one reason Wolf has said this now - to counter that type of anti-feminist rhetoric.
Bloom is such a big, powerful figure that I'm sure he has very little to worry about. He loves to attack feminists, he is one of the leaders of the backlash against feminism and the feminist readings of the canon. He is a conservative influence trying to preserve the world as it was, before minority groups had a voice. For Bloom to seem fair game to Wolf is quid pro quo.
Camille Paglia is simply a media creation. Perhaps she exists. But whether or not she exists does not matter - she is just a media fantasy, a nobody. She just mouths. She is just a screeching female character who attacks other women and calls herself a feminist.
· Lynne Segal is professor of psychology and gender studies at Birkbeck College
Elizabeth Wurtzel
I'm not sure why she would come out with these revelations now. Most of the stuff Wolf writes about doesn't seem crazy. She doesn't seem like a bitter person.
I've got to say I'm sorry to hear the allegations. I went to Harvard, but I think Yale has a pretty clean bill of health where sexual harassment is concerned. I don't remember having an experience like that at college. Maybe that's just because I wasn't very attractive. But I can't think of anything like that happening to anyone I know. No one ever had that kind of problem with a professor. Weird things happened with guys that people dated, but not lecturers. They were such a distant group of people. And anyone on Bloom's level of prominence would not be talking to undergraduates. Most people don't know or care who Bloom is. I've met him, and he's really kinda creepy.
There are so many instances where men and women have to work together that people have to be not so bothered by things. People are just disgusting. Can you imagine if you were offended by every disgusting thing someone said?
I don't know how Wolf acted around Bloom. There is this kind of thing that you can be young and attractive and flirtatious. You can act like this, and then the person in power is not supposed to respond. It's the Clinton thing, like he was supposed to say: "Y'know Monica, you're lovely but ... " But you can't be flirtatious and expect people not to react. That's really the catch.
A lot of people find Wolf extremely irritating. And there is something irritating about her. But, generally, everything she does seems to make sense. Every once in a while she'll do something silly. Like she got herself mixed up in the stupid Al Gore campaign [working as an adviser to Gore in the 2000 presidential elections].
But the truth is she does things that are worthwhile. Bloom was, I think, Paglia's mentor. Paglia can't stand Wolf. She's had a bee in her bonnet about her from day one. She thinks she's really prissy and one of those girls who aren't any fun. The thing is, Paglia is consistently crazy.
I watch all these people mud-slinging and I think, I hope they're having fun.
· Elizabeth Wurtzel is the author of Prozac Nation and The Bitch Rules
Andrea Dworkin
I'm certain Wolf is telling the truth. She would never lie. She and I are not allies. We are not friends. I dislike everything she has ever written. But she would not lie or exaggerate, especially not about a matter of sexual harassment. She has done her time in a rape counselling service - she knows what women go through when they come out with allegations of sexual harassment, the backlash they experience.
I think Wolf will experience a lot of hostility. Everyone is against sexual harassment, everyone is against the rapist or the harasser. But when you name a name you become the subject of the inquiry. She will be accused of wanting publicity.
But in her previous books, Wolf has always started from the point of herself. This is no different. Even if the revelations are explosive because they involve Bloom, the methodology is the same. It's a very hard thing to do, to come out and say, "This person hurt me", especially if the person is famous and, heretofore, such an irreproachable figure. But women rarely lie about rape or attempted rape, and I assume they rarely lie about sexual harassment.
Sexual harassment in academic institutions is still commonplace - we're currently having a big exposé in Colorado, where the football coach promised the team women, drink and rock 'n' roll. Perhaps we expect that of athletes, but intellectuals do behave the same way. I don't know Bloom. I repect him. I respect his work. But I don't doubt that Wolf is telling the truth.
· Andrea Dworkin is the author of Intercourse and Pornography: Men Possessing Women
Jenni Murray
I would very much doubt that sexual harassment is still rife in academic institutions, and I think it would be a foolish academic or lecturer who would do that now because young women know they have redress. As far as Wolf is concerned, it's a little bit late, frankly. And I would have thought that someone with such a mouth on her would have said something at the time. It's only 20 years ago - people were discussing issues of sexual harassment then. We're not talking about the dark ages. And I think we've moved on now - we're not delicate little flowers who sit in the corner and say, "Isn't it terrible what happened to me?" So I don't have much patience with her doing this, I'm afraid.
I've always thought she was a sensible, solid young woman, who wrote well. I certainly don't believe that because she's pretty she should not have an opinion. But young women need strong role models who don't portray themselves as victims.
· Jenni Murray presents Woman's Hour on Radio 4
Julie Burchill
I think Paglia is a frustrated, jealous bitch, whose star is very much on the wane and who has always wanted to fuck Wolf. And, of course, she could barely pull a skunk without money changing hands, she's so disgusting. And that's my considered opinion on the matter.
· Julie Burchill is a writer and journalist
Marcelle d'Argy Smith
When The Beauty Myth came out, it wasn't new thinking. But done by a dazzlingly attractive girl, it was a big thing. Wolf is the Nigella Lawson of the feminist world. So much of the publicity was to do with her stunning good looks, despite the unoriginality of the book.
I find it extraordinary she should make these allegations 20 years later. The rules of sexual harassment were different then. When I started working in an office, the managing director took me out to lunch. I was sitting next to him, and he put his hand on my thigh and said, "I hope you are going to be very happy working here." But the rules were different then. He was just a jovial flirt.
My favourite writer is Scott Fitzgerald and, if I look closely at his writing, I can see examples of anti-semitism. But they were different times, it was acceptable then.
So I think she has done us no favours. I think she sounds ludicrous. I thought she was going to say he put his tongue down her throat or something. Man puts hand on thigh: well, wow! I think to make these allegations now is cruel, self-serving and unnecessary. If she was outraged at the time, it's not as if she was a woman without ammunition. It's not like trying to claim compensation from the Nazis. I'm sure tons of lecturers have put hands on thighs.
Interviews by Laura Barton
The Guardian (UK) - Thursday February 26, 2004
Naomi Wolf's decision to accuse Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom of sexual assault 20 years after the alleged event at Yale has triggered a furious row, with Camille Paglia branding it a witchhunt. Was Wolf right to speak out?
"He leaned towards me and put his face inches from mine. 'You have the aura of election upon you,' he breathed ... The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh. I lurched away ... The floor spun. By now my back was against the sink. He came at me. I turned away toward the sink and found myself vomiting in shock. Bloom disappeared."
Naomi Wolf, New York Magazine
"It really smacks of the Salem witch-hunts and all the accompanying hysteria. 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."
Camille Paglia
Lynne Segal
I remember when I was a young faculty member in the 70s I was pounced on - I mean, people phoning me up at home. And, in fact, about 10 years ago [something similar to what happened to Naomi Wolf] happened to me, but he was clearly drunk. Then, perhaps, it would not have been so unusual for an attractive young student to be harassed and to feel her grades would be jeopardised unless she went through with something. But I'm almost certain that this is a situation that has changed dramatically.
I would see Wolf's revelations about Harold Bloom and sexual harrassment as a response to the backlash against feminism. Feminism is always attacked for being too extreme, and one of the ways it has been attacked is by people saying that "feminists were always crying wolf", that women exaggerate the extent of sexual harassment. That may be one reason Wolf has said this now - to counter that type of anti-feminist rhetoric.
Bloom is such a big, powerful figure that I'm sure he has very little to worry about. He loves to attack feminists, he is one of the leaders of the backlash against feminism and the feminist readings of the canon. He is a conservative influence trying to preserve the world as it was, before minority groups had a voice. For Bloom to seem fair game to Wolf is quid pro quo.
Camille Paglia is simply a media creation. Perhaps she exists. But whether or not she exists does not matter - she is just a media fantasy, a nobody. She just mouths. She is just a screeching female character who attacks other women and calls herself a feminist.
· Lynne Segal is professor of psychology and gender studies at Birkbeck College
Elizabeth Wurtzel
I'm not sure why she would come out with these revelations now. Most of the stuff Wolf writes about doesn't seem crazy. She doesn't seem like a bitter person.
I've got to say I'm sorry to hear the allegations. I went to Harvard, but I think Yale has a pretty clean bill of health where sexual harassment is concerned. I don't remember having an experience like that at college. Maybe that's just because I wasn't very attractive. But I can't think of anything like that happening to anyone I know. No one ever had that kind of problem with a professor. Weird things happened with guys that people dated, but not lecturers. They were such a distant group of people. And anyone on Bloom's level of prominence would not be talking to undergraduates. Most people don't know or care who Bloom is. I've met him, and he's really kinda creepy.
There are so many instances where men and women have to work together that people have to be not so bothered by things. People are just disgusting. Can you imagine if you were offended by every disgusting thing someone said?
I don't know how Wolf acted around Bloom. There is this kind of thing that you can be young and attractive and flirtatious. You can act like this, and then the person in power is not supposed to respond. It's the Clinton thing, like he was supposed to say: "Y'know Monica, you're lovely but ... " But you can't be flirtatious and expect people not to react. That's really the catch.
A lot of people find Wolf extremely irritating. And there is something irritating about her. But, generally, everything she does seems to make sense. Every once in a while she'll do something silly. Like she got herself mixed up in the stupid Al Gore campaign [working as an adviser to Gore in the 2000 presidential elections].
But the truth is she does things that are worthwhile. Bloom was, I think, Paglia's mentor. Paglia can't stand Wolf. She's had a bee in her bonnet about her from day one. She thinks she's really prissy and one of those girls who aren't any fun. The thing is, Paglia is consistently crazy.
I watch all these people mud-slinging and I think, I hope they're having fun.
· Elizabeth Wurtzel is the author of Prozac Nation and The Bitch Rules
Andrea Dworkin
I'm certain Wolf is telling the truth. She would never lie. She and I are not allies. We are not friends. I dislike everything she has ever written. But she would not lie or exaggerate, especially not about a matter of sexual harassment. She has done her time in a rape counselling service - she knows what women go through when they come out with allegations of sexual harassment, the backlash they experience.
I think Wolf will experience a lot of hostility. Everyone is against sexual harassment, everyone is against the rapist or the harasser. But when you name a name you become the subject of the inquiry. She will be accused of wanting publicity.
But in her previous books, Wolf has always started from the point of herself. This is no different. Even if the revelations are explosive because they involve Bloom, the methodology is the same. It's a very hard thing to do, to come out and say, "This person hurt me", especially if the person is famous and, heretofore, such an irreproachable figure. But women rarely lie about rape or attempted rape, and I assume they rarely lie about sexual harassment.
Sexual harassment in academic institutions is still commonplace - we're currently having a big exposé in Colorado, where the football coach promised the team women, drink and rock 'n' roll. Perhaps we expect that of athletes, but intellectuals do behave the same way. I don't know Bloom. I repect him. I respect his work. But I don't doubt that Wolf is telling the truth.
· Andrea Dworkin is the author of Intercourse and Pornography: Men Possessing Women
Jenni Murray
I would very much doubt that sexual harassment is still rife in academic institutions, and I think it would be a foolish academic or lecturer who would do that now because young women know they have redress. As far as Wolf is concerned, it's a little bit late, frankly. And I would have thought that someone with such a mouth on her would have said something at the time. It's only 20 years ago - people were discussing issues of sexual harassment then. We're not talking about the dark ages. And I think we've moved on now - we're not delicate little flowers who sit in the corner and say, "Isn't it terrible what happened to me?" So I don't have much patience with her doing this, I'm afraid.
I've always thought she was a sensible, solid young woman, who wrote well. I certainly don't believe that because she's pretty she should not have an opinion. But young women need strong role models who don't portray themselves as victims.
· Jenni Murray presents Woman's Hour on Radio 4
Julie Burchill
I think Paglia is a frustrated, jealous bitch, whose star is very much on the wane and who has always wanted to fuck Wolf. And, of course, she could barely pull a skunk without money changing hands, she's so disgusting. And that's my considered opinion on the matter.
· Julie Burchill is a writer and journalist
Marcelle d'Argy Smith
When The Beauty Myth came out, it wasn't new thinking. But done by a dazzlingly attractive girl, it was a big thing. Wolf is the Nigella Lawson of the feminist world. So much of the publicity was to do with her stunning good looks, despite the unoriginality of the book.
I find it extraordinary she should make these allegations 20 years later. The rules of sexual harassment were different then. When I started working in an office, the managing director took me out to lunch. I was sitting next to him, and he put his hand on my thigh and said, "I hope you are going to be very happy working here." But the rules were different then. He was just a jovial flirt.
My favourite writer is Scott Fitzgerald and, if I look closely at his writing, I can see examples of anti-semitism. But they were different times, it was acceptable then.
So I think she has done us no favours. I think she sounds ludicrous. I thought she was going to say he put his tongue down her throat or something. Man puts hand on thigh: well, wow! I think to make these allegations now is cruel, self-serving and unnecessary. If she was outraged at the time, it's not as if she was a woman without ammunition. It's not like trying to claim compensation from the Nazis. I'm sure tons of lecturers have put hands on thighs.
Marcelle d'Argy Smith is the former editor of Cosmopolitan
____________________________________________________________________________________
Yale reacts to Wolf accusations against Bloom
By Helen Eckinger
Yale Herald - February 27, 2004
Sadly, it's a classic story in the academic world: a bright young student achieves a seeming coup when renowned Professor X agrees to be her mentor, only for X to present her with sexual demands. The student's confidence is ruined, she forever questions whether her intellectual achievements were won by her own merit or simply her figure, and out of shame and fear for her academic career, she tells no one of Professor X's proposition.
Professor Harold Bloom will not comment on Naomi Wolf's accusations.
But, last week, Naomi Wolf, DC '84, threw a wrench into the story's formula when, after 20 years, she broke her silence and, in an article written for New York magazine, accused Humanities Professor Harold Bloom of sexually harassing her while serving as Wolf's advisor for an independent study.
The alleged event might have gone unnoticed by the general populace if it were not for the celebrity of its two key players. Wolf is the author of three feminism-inspired books, including the bestseller The Beauty Myth, and gained notoriety when she served as an advisor to Al Gore during his 2000 presidential campaign and encouraged him to act as more of an Alpha male and wear earth tones to attract female voters. Bloom, for his part, has written over 20 books, primarily dealing with English literature, and is a longtime Yale faculty member, where he is considered an expert on Shakespeare and several English poets.
According to Wolf, the incident occurred in the fall of '83 when, after eluding her for much of the semester, Bloom agreed to attend a dinner with her and a few friends and then discuss the poetry Wolf had prepared for their independent study. After dinner, Wolf wrote that she found herself alone with Bloom. When she offered him her manuscript, Bloom, according to Wolf, "leaned toward me and put his face inches from mine. 'You have the aura of election upon you,' he breathed...The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh."
Wolf claims she rebuked Bloom's advances, and the two never met for their independent study. She did, however, receive a B in the class.
The most obvious question sparked by Wolf's story is why she chose to come forward after 20 years of silence. In her article, Wolf claims that she remained silent as an undergraduate out of shame and a fear for her future at Yale, and that the shame lingered and prevented her from speaking out once she graduated. Now, she says, she wants to ensure that Yale has implemented measures to prevent professors from taking advantage of their students.
Wolf said she began attempts to conduct a dialogue with the administration regarding her complaint about Bloom approximately a year ago. "She contacted a number of individuals and offices at the University," Tom Conroy, deputy director of public affairs, said. "She wanted an apology from the university and was informed there had never been any finding of wrongdoing. She was told there could be no apology without any finding of wrongdoing."
The timing of Wolf's accusation caused even more tension between herself and Yale. The University has a two-year period after an incident of harassment, during which a victim can file a claim. In Wolf's case, the period had long since passed. "She was informed that the university policies are clear and that she could not file a complaint about something that happened two decades ago," Conroy stated.
While admitting to lengthy conversations with Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead, BR '68, GRD '72, and Nina Glickson, assistant to University President Richard Levin, GRD '74, Wolf claims in her article that she was shuffled between offices and departments, and that numerous promises by the Administration to call her back were left unfulfilled.
According to Conroy, however, the Administration attempted to explain to Wolf on several occasions that it was far too late to file a complaint against Bloom. And, with regards to her desire to see female undergraduates protected, he added that "the University's procedures regarding sexual harassment are crystal clear and readily available." In other words, in the eyes of the Administration, there was little else they could do for Wolf.
Despite her frustration with Yale's response to her accusations, there are no reports at this time of Wolf planning to file a lawsuit against Bloom. "I don't believe in any of her conversations with anyone at Yale she said anything about pursuing a legal claim," Conroy confirmed.
Bloom, however, may be considering taking action against Wolf. The Hartford Courant reported Friday that Bloom refuses to speak to reporters in case he decides to file a defamation suit.
Regardless of the criticism, Bloom is currently receiving from the media, his current students at Yale have denied witnessing any of the behavior he is accused of. "The very idea of someone asking me whether or not I have seen Professor Bloom make a student feel uncomfortable through verbal/physical action seems preposterous," Petrina Crockford, ES '05, wrote in an E-mail. "Anyone who knows Bloom should have the same reaction." Sophie Bloom, JE '04, expressed an opinion similar to Crockford's, adding that "[Professor Bloom] cares very much about teaching and about his students, and it is difficult for me to imagine him willfully abusing his power over a student." Both Crockford and Bloom are taking Bloom-led seminars this semester.
"I've heard him pay women compliments in and around class, which is somewhat odd for a professor, but I really couldn't comment on how that made the recipients feel," Matt Morello, PC '04, another Bloom student, admitted. But Morello did maintain that he, like Bloom and Crockford, had never seen Bloom behave towards students in a way that would constitute sexual harassment.
While Morello's initial reaction to Wolf's allegations against Bloom was one of outrage, his perception of the situation changed once he read Wolf's article. "Upon actually reading the article," he stated, "I realized that I was simply embarrassed for everyone involved."
By Helen Eckinger
Yale Herald - February 27, 2004
Sadly, it's a classic story in the academic world: a bright young student achieves a seeming coup when renowned Professor X agrees to be her mentor, only for X to present her with sexual demands. The student's confidence is ruined, she forever questions whether her intellectual achievements were won by her own merit or simply her figure, and out of shame and fear for her academic career, she tells no one of Professor X's proposition.Professor Harold Bloom will not comment on Naomi Wolf's accusations.
But, last week, Naomi Wolf, DC '84, threw a wrench into the story's formula when, after 20 years, she broke her silence and, in an article written for New York magazine, accused Humanities Professor Harold Bloom of sexually harassing her while serving as Wolf's advisor for an independent study.
The alleged event might have gone unnoticed by the general populace if it were not for the celebrity of its two key players. Wolf is the author of three feminism-inspired books, including the bestseller The Beauty Myth, and gained notoriety when she served as an advisor to Al Gore during his 2000 presidential campaign and encouraged him to act as more of an Alpha male and wear earth tones to attract female voters. Bloom, for his part, has written over 20 books, primarily dealing with English literature, and is a longtime Yale faculty member, where he is considered an expert on Shakespeare and several English poets.
According to Wolf, the incident occurred in the fall of '83 when, after eluding her for much of the semester, Bloom agreed to attend a dinner with her and a few friends and then discuss the poetry Wolf had prepared for their independent study. After dinner, Wolf wrote that she found herself alone with Bloom. When she offered him her manuscript, Bloom, according to Wolf, "leaned toward me and put his face inches from mine. 'You have the aura of election upon you,' he breathed...The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh."
Wolf claims she rebuked Bloom's advances, and the two never met for their independent study. She did, however, receive a B in the class.
The most obvious question sparked by Wolf's story is why she chose to come forward after 20 years of silence. In her article, Wolf claims that she remained silent as an undergraduate out of shame and a fear for her future at Yale, and that the shame lingered and prevented her from speaking out once she graduated. Now, she says, she wants to ensure that Yale has implemented measures to prevent professors from taking advantage of their students.
Wolf said she began attempts to conduct a dialogue with the administration regarding her complaint about Bloom approximately a year ago. "She contacted a number of individuals and offices at the University," Tom Conroy, deputy director of public affairs, said. "She wanted an apology from the university and was informed there had never been any finding of wrongdoing. She was told there could be no apology without any finding of wrongdoing."
The timing of Wolf's accusation caused even more tension between herself and Yale. The University has a two-year period after an incident of harassment, during which a victim can file a claim. In Wolf's case, the period had long since passed. "She was informed that the university policies are clear and that she could not file a complaint about something that happened two decades ago," Conroy stated.
While admitting to lengthy conversations with Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead, BR '68, GRD '72, and Nina Glickson, assistant to University President Richard Levin, GRD '74, Wolf claims in her article that she was shuffled between offices and departments, and that numerous promises by the Administration to call her back were left unfulfilled.
According to Conroy, however, the Administration attempted to explain to Wolf on several occasions that it was far too late to file a complaint against Bloom. And, with regards to her desire to see female undergraduates protected, he added that "the University's procedures regarding sexual harassment are crystal clear and readily available." In other words, in the eyes of the Administration, there was little else they could do for Wolf.
Despite her frustration with Yale's response to her accusations, there are no reports at this time of Wolf planning to file a lawsuit against Bloom. "I don't believe in any of her conversations with anyone at Yale she said anything about pursuing a legal claim," Conroy confirmed.
Bloom, however, may be considering taking action against Wolf. The Hartford Courant reported Friday that Bloom refuses to speak to reporters in case he decides to file a defamation suit.
Regardless of the criticism, Bloom is currently receiving from the media, his current students at Yale have denied witnessing any of the behavior he is accused of. "The very idea of someone asking me whether or not I have seen Professor Bloom make a student feel uncomfortable through verbal/physical action seems preposterous," Petrina Crockford, ES '05, wrote in an E-mail. "Anyone who knows Bloom should have the same reaction." Sophie Bloom, JE '04, expressed an opinion similar to Crockford's, adding that "[Professor Bloom] cares very much about teaching and about his students, and it is difficult for me to imagine him willfully abusing his power over a student." Both Crockford and Bloom are taking Bloom-led seminars this semester.
"I've heard him pay women compliments in and around class, which is somewhat odd for a professor, but I really couldn't comment on how that made the recipients feel," Matt Morello, PC '04, another Bloom student, admitted. But Morello did maintain that he, like Bloom and Crockford, had never seen Bloom behave towards students in a way that would constitute sexual harassment.
While Morello's initial reaction to Wolf's allegations against Bloom was one of outrage, his perception of the situation changed once he read Wolf's article. "Upon actually reading the article," he stated, "I realized that I was simply embarrassed for everyone involved."
____________________________________________________________________________________
Crying wolf
Sydney Morning News (Austrailia) - February 28, 2004
Naomi Wolf has been keeping a secret. For 20 years, she has hidden the fact that an English professor at Yale put his hand on her thigh. Wolf, author of the feminist bestseller The Beauty Myth, says the incident damaged her soul.
Here are the details, as Wolf tells them: in 1983, when she was a 20-year-old English major, she invited Harold Bloom - one of America's leading English scholars - to her house.
Wolf says she wanted Bloom to read some poetry she had written. They had dinner, drank sherry by candlelight and, when the other guests left, she put her manuscript on the table, between them. Bloom did not look at it. Instead, he put his "heavy, boneless hand" on her thigh. Wolf retreated to the kitchen sink and vomited. Bloom left.
Wolf, now 42 and a mother of two, did not complain about Bloom. She kept the incident pretty much to herself until this week, when she told the world about it in a cover story for New York magazine. "I have obviously survived," Wolf wrote of the "one-time sexual encroachment". "My career was fine. My soul was not fine."
If Wolf expected sympathy, she will be disappointed. Her story sparked outrage, but most of it was directed at her. Wolf has been berated for overreacting to something that many women would, today, regard as nothing more than a pass by an old drunk. Why didn't she just slap away Bloom's hand? Why didn't she complain much earlier? After all, Wolf has been rich and powerful and famous since she wrote The Beauty Myth at the age of 30. Does she expect readers to believe she is a victim of male oppression?
If there is a victim in this drama, many believe it to be Bloom, who is something of an academic giant (and a physical one, too).
Born in the East Bronx in 1930, Bloom is the youngest child of orthodox Jewish immigrants from Russia, neither of whom ever learnt to read English. His first books were volumes of Yiddish verse but, from the age of seven, he could read Somerset Maugham. He went to Cornell University, and then, after one of his advisers, H.M. Abrams, insisted that he leave "because we couldn't teach him anything more", Bloom went to Yale. "Even as an undergraduate, he was a prodigy, beyond anything I'd ever seen,' said Abrams. "And nothing since has come close."
Bloom is today Sterling professor of humanities at Yale and the Berg professor of English at New York University. He is the author of more than 20 books, including the extraordinary The Western Canon, which The New York Times has described as "essentially a survey of all Western literature, from Dante to Borges, in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Russian". He can - literally - recite Milton and Shakespeare backward, and he has had blisters on his fingers from reading up to 1000 pages a day.
Outside academic circles, Bloom is most famous for savaging J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books. It happened last year, when The Wall Street Journal asked him to review The Sorcerer's Stone. "I suffered a great deal in the process," he wrote. "The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible."
There are some who say that to meet Bloom is to fall violently in love - or at least be in awe. Wolf was certainly not immune to his charm. She says in her New York essay that she became "sick with excitement when he agreed to read her poetry".
Others felt the same, which is why Bloom - who is married and the father of two sons - is a sitting duck for allegations. He has what might delicately be called "a reputation".
In 1994 The New York Times writer Adam Begley said rumours of Bloom's affairs with Yale students were legion. A friend of Bloom, unnamed, was quoted as saying: "I hate to say it, but he rather bragged about it, so that wasn't very secret for a number of years."
In 1990 writer Martin Kihn interviewed Bloom for GQ magazine. He reported that a woman opened Bloom's door and she "did not look like his wife of three decades. Jeanne Bloom is silver-haired, slightly overweight, a chain-smoking child psychologist with a cabbie's hard voice. This woman is strawberry blonde, low-fat - she tells me she just dropped by, but I doubt it."
The girl sat just metres from Bloom throughout the interview. Kihn did not say they were lovers, but wrote: "Any honest Yale undergraduate will tell you of Bloom's unusually close friendships with hand-picked proteges."
He asked Bloom about his reputation, but Bloom said: "That's ridiculous - absolutely not true."
But let's assume for a minute that it is true. Let's say Bloom did put his hand on Wolf's thigh. Is that such a big deal? Was Wolf right to complain after all these years?
There was a similar case in Australia in the 1990s, which Helen Garner wrote about in The First Stone. Two young students said they were harassed by a professor; they complained at the time and their complaints were ignored. Wolf's case is slightly different: the professor in the Australian case had some degree of control over the students' academic careers, but Wolf was not in Bloom's class and, although he once agreed to meet her weekly to oversee some "independent study", she never got those meetings. Indeed, she says in her essay that she did not see Bloom again after that disastrous dinner in 1983.
Many of Wolf's peers have savaged her for presenting herself as a victim and complaining about what many see as a drunken pass by an ageing Lothario. In The Globe and Mail, writer Margaret Wente said that Wolf's version of feminism is "out of date" and noted that when she was at university she spent her 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."
Feminist Katie Roiphe said Wolf was making a "desperate power grab. People didn't pay attention to her last book on motherhood." In the New Statesman, Cristina Odone said: "Wolf's most unforgiveable disservice to feminism lies in her constant portrayal of herself as a victim. Thus, we have had Naomi, the victim of her youthful good looks (The Beauty Myth), Naomi, the victim of her sexual allure (Promiscuities), Naomi, the victim of motherhood (Misconceptions). I'm not sure she can bank on our sympathy for much longer."
But, in her New York essay, Wolf is at pains to say that she does not feel like a victim. She says she would have let the matter slide if only Yale had moved, in a series of private conversations over the past year, to reassure her that steps had been taken to ensure that such things weren't still happening.
Yale tells a different story. The university claims Wolf demanded a "public apology for the alleged incident and a private meeting with Bloom". In an open letter on the university's website, provost Susan Hockfield says: "Wolf's article suggests that Yale does not take registered complaints seriously and that there are no consequences. To the contrary [they are handled] with the utmost seriousness." She notes that harassers have in the past been "separated from Yale".
Bloom has been silent. When contacted by one of Yale's newspapers this week, his wife, Jeanne, said he had no comment. Another newspaper said he was "contemplating his legal options". His friends are not so circumspect. Camille Paglia, who also studied with Bloom at Yale, raged against Wolf, saying: "How many times do we have to relive Naomi Wolf's growing up? How many books, how many articles, Naomi, are you going to impose on us so we have to be dragged back to your teenage-heartbreak years? This is regressive! It's childish! Move on! Move on! Get on to menopause next!"
It's probably not bad advice.
THE PLAYERS
Naomi Wolf: feminist, Rhodes scholar, author, mother. Claims that Yale professor Harold Bloom put his hand on her thigh and that this put her in a state of "spiritual discomfort".
Harold Bloom: Sterling professor of humanities at Yale, Berg professor of English at New York University, and the author of more than 20 books, including The Western Canon. Had no comment on Wolf's allegation.
Camille Paglia: feminist writer who also studied under Bloom at Yale: "For her entire life [Wolf] has been batting her eyes and bobbing her boobs in the face of men".
Zoe Williams: British feminist: "Equal pay for equal work will never go out of fashion. But the drive to politicise every ambiguous physical gesture as if we're all working shoulder to shoulder against malevolent men - this is not feminism."
Margaret Wente, writer: "Harold Bloom is a man of dazzling intellect. According to 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."
Sydney Morning News (Austrailia) - February 28, 2004
Naomi Wolf has been keeping a secret. For 20 years, she has hidden the fact that an English professor at Yale put his hand on her thigh. Wolf, author of the feminist bestseller The Beauty Myth, says the incident damaged her soul.
Here are the details, as Wolf tells them: in 1983, when she was a 20-year-old English major, she invited Harold Bloom - one of America's leading English scholars - to her house.
Wolf says she wanted Bloom to read some poetry she had written. They had dinner, drank sherry by candlelight and, when the other guests left, she put her manuscript on the table, between them. Bloom did not look at it. Instead, he put his "heavy, boneless hand" on her thigh. Wolf retreated to the kitchen sink and vomited. Bloom left.
Wolf, now 42 and a mother of two, did not complain about Bloom. She kept the incident pretty much to herself until this week, when she told the world about it in a cover story for New York magazine. "I have obviously survived," Wolf wrote of the "one-time sexual encroachment". "My career was fine. My soul was not fine."
If Wolf expected sympathy, she will be disappointed. Her story sparked outrage, but most of it was directed at her. Wolf has been berated for overreacting to something that many women would, today, regard as nothing more than a pass by an old drunk. Why didn't she just slap away Bloom's hand? Why didn't she complain much earlier? After all, Wolf has been rich and powerful and famous since she wrote The Beauty Myth at the age of 30. Does she expect readers to believe she is a victim of male oppression?
If there is a victim in this drama, many believe it to be Bloom, who is something of an academic giant (and a physical one, too).
Born in the East Bronx in 1930, Bloom is the youngest child of orthodox Jewish immigrants from Russia, neither of whom ever learnt to read English. His first books were volumes of Yiddish verse but, from the age of seven, he could read Somerset Maugham. He went to Cornell University, and then, after one of his advisers, H.M. Abrams, insisted that he leave "because we couldn't teach him anything more", Bloom went to Yale. "Even as an undergraduate, he was a prodigy, beyond anything I'd ever seen,' said Abrams. "And nothing since has come close."
Bloom is today Sterling professor of humanities at Yale and the Berg professor of English at New York University. He is the author of more than 20 books, including the extraordinary The Western Canon, which The New York Times has described as "essentially a survey of all Western literature, from Dante to Borges, in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Russian". He can - literally - recite Milton and Shakespeare backward, and he has had blisters on his fingers from reading up to 1000 pages a day.
Outside academic circles, Bloom is most famous for savaging J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books. It happened last year, when The Wall Street Journal asked him to review The Sorcerer's Stone. "I suffered a great deal in the process," he wrote. "The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible."
There are some who say that to meet Bloom is to fall violently in love - or at least be in awe. Wolf was certainly not immune to his charm. She says in her New York essay that she became "sick with excitement when he agreed to read her poetry".
Others felt the same, which is why Bloom - who is married and the father of two sons - is a sitting duck for allegations. He has what might delicately be called "a reputation".
In 1994 The New York Times writer Adam Begley said rumours of Bloom's affairs with Yale students were legion. A friend of Bloom, unnamed, was quoted as saying: "I hate to say it, but he rather bragged about it, so that wasn't very secret for a number of years."
In 1990 writer Martin Kihn interviewed Bloom for GQ magazine. He reported that a woman opened Bloom's door and she "did not look like his wife of three decades. Jeanne Bloom is silver-haired, slightly overweight, a chain-smoking child psychologist with a cabbie's hard voice. This woman is strawberry blonde, low-fat - she tells me she just dropped by, but I doubt it."
The girl sat just metres from Bloom throughout the interview. Kihn did not say they were lovers, but wrote: "Any honest Yale undergraduate will tell you of Bloom's unusually close friendships with hand-picked proteges."
He asked Bloom about his reputation, but Bloom said: "That's ridiculous - absolutely not true."
But let's assume for a minute that it is true. Let's say Bloom did put his hand on Wolf's thigh. Is that such a big deal? Was Wolf right to complain after all these years?
There was a similar case in Australia in the 1990s, which Helen Garner wrote about in The First Stone. Two young students said they were harassed by a professor; they complained at the time and their complaints were ignored. Wolf's case is slightly different: the professor in the Australian case had some degree of control over the students' academic careers, but Wolf was not in Bloom's class and, although he once agreed to meet her weekly to oversee some "independent study", she never got those meetings. Indeed, she says in her essay that she did not see Bloom again after that disastrous dinner in 1983.
Many of Wolf's peers have savaged her for presenting herself as a victim and complaining about what many see as a drunken pass by an ageing Lothario. In The Globe and Mail, writer Margaret Wente said that Wolf's version of feminism is "out of date" and noted that when she was at university she spent her 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."
Feminist Katie Roiphe said Wolf was making a "desperate power grab. People didn't pay attention to her last book on motherhood." In the New Statesman, Cristina Odone said: "Wolf's most unforgiveable disservice to feminism lies in her constant portrayal of herself as a victim. Thus, we have had Naomi, the victim of her youthful good looks (The Beauty Myth), Naomi, the victim of her sexual allure (Promiscuities), Naomi, the victim of motherhood (Misconceptions). I'm not sure she can bank on our sympathy for much longer."
But, in her New York essay, Wolf is at pains to say that she does not feel like a victim. She says she would have let the matter slide if only Yale had moved, in a series of private conversations over the past year, to reassure her that steps had been taken to ensure that such things weren't still happening.
Yale tells a different story. The university claims Wolf demanded a "public apology for the alleged incident and a private meeting with Bloom". In an open letter on the university's website, provost Susan Hockfield says: "Wolf's article suggests that Yale does not take registered complaints seriously and that there are no consequences. To the contrary [they are handled] with the utmost seriousness." She notes that harassers have in the past been "separated from Yale".
Bloom has been silent. When contacted by one of Yale's newspapers this week, his wife, Jeanne, said he had no comment. Another newspaper said he was "contemplating his legal options". His friends are not so circumspect. Camille Paglia, who also studied with Bloom at Yale, raged against Wolf, saying: "How many times do we have to relive Naomi Wolf's growing up? How many books, how many articles, Naomi, are you going to impose on us so we have to be dragged back to your teenage-heartbreak years? This is regressive! It's childish! Move on! Move on! Get on to menopause next!"
It's probably not bad advice.
THE PLAYERS
Naomi Wolf: feminist, Rhodes scholar, author, mother. Claims that Yale professor Harold Bloom put his hand on her thigh and that this put her in a state of "spiritual discomfort".
Harold Bloom: Sterling professor of humanities at Yale, Berg professor of English at New York University, and the author of more than 20 books, including The Western Canon. Had no comment on Wolf's allegation.
Camille Paglia: feminist writer who also studied under Bloom at Yale: "For her entire life [Wolf] has been batting her eyes and bobbing her boobs in the face of men".
Zoe Williams: British feminist: "Equal pay for equal work will never go out of fashion. But the drive to politicise every ambiguous physical gesture as if we're all working shoulder to shoulder against malevolent men - this is not feminism."
Margaret Wente, writer: "Harold Bloom is a man of dazzling intellect. According to 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."
____________________________________________________________________________________
All together, boys, for a weekend roast
By Julia Baird
Sydney Morning News - February 28, 2004
Roasting: cook (esp meat) by exposure to open fire or in oven; heat in preparation for grinding; expose (victim for torture, oneself or some part for warmth) to fire or great heat; very hot; ridicule, banter, chaff; censure. - Oxford Dictionary
It took 20 years for Naomi Wolf to name Harold Bloom as the professor who had placed a "boneless" white hand on her thigh after a dinner at her home in 1983, arranged so he could read her poetry. She vomited in disgust, he called her a troubled woman, corked his sherry and left. While a global success as an author and commentator, she says she has not written a poem since.
The full text of her article, in New York magazine, invites more sympathy than just the bones of the story. She is frequently asked, she wrote, to appear as a Yale alumnae pin-up girl, and when asked to raise money for her university, decided to seek assurances that harassment procedures were in place for young women today. She said she was stonewalled for nearly a year and in frustration wrote her story.
Her case would have been better served by a forensic detailing of the problems that exist today, not centring on her own decades-old experience. And her argument was undermined by the fact that Yale does have sexual harassment complaint procedures in place.
But the attacks on her beauty were curious. Camille Paglia, the Queen Bitch of celebrity feminism, complained 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". Journalists described her as a "telegenic feminist", a "lipstick feminist", a "pouting, glossy-haired feminist" who had been "photographed in various glamorous poses". As though her thighs were twinkling, provocative, waiting to be groped.
But chicks are like that. Just ask some of the Bulldogs fans. The reported allegations against some members of their club's squad last weekend made the complaints by Wolf seem minor. The allegations of sexual assault by a group of footballers of a young woman - orally, anally and vaginally - were outrageous.
Some of the responses have been extraordinary - that, if true, it was unacceptable behaviour that breached the code's rule of conduct. Unacceptable? A 21-year-old woman says she was sexually assaulted by six men. If her claims prove to be true then her life is bound to have been screwed up.
According to some of the fans, however, girls from Coffs Harbour are just a bunch of "hos" who, if seen laughing with men, are clearly expressing their unfettered sexual availability. Or who, if they have sex with one man once, are fair game for all. A fan, Elmagic, said on one website, "My mum said she was probably being a slut, then after they 'did' her, she decided 2 say summin coz she thought she could get money or summin out of it."
Ian C took a forensic approach: "All available evidence suggests that the woman in question actively sought out the players, willingly accompanied them back to the hotel and was seen laughing and joking with them. The story goes that after consensual sex with one or two of them they treated her disdainfully and she got hysterical ... Sounds like yet another 'been there, done that' scenario."
When two female Herald sports reporters, Jacquelin Magnay and Jessica Halloran, wrote a piece about a league culture of sharing women last year they were savagely criticised for what was called a beat-up. They wrote: "The 'gang bang' has almost been a rite of passage in rugby league. So condoned has the act been in the past that one league coach encouraged his representative team to indulge in the practice in a bid to enhance the male-bonding process - although on that occasion prostitutes were paid to provide the service ... There are numerous tales of women being paid off to shut up. And the players' mates ... are often their strongest allies."
You worry when a Bulldogs player says within earshot of a photographer they should "pull our dicks out and come all over" the waiting media.
We don't know what happened last Sunday morning and it's up to the police to find out. But there is clearly some kind of cultural problem.
In The End of Equality, Anne Summers documented that between 1993 and 2001 the number of sexual assault victims increased by 37 per cent - and only an estimated 15 per cent of women who are sexually assaulted report it. The manager of the NSW Rape Crisis Centre, Karen Willis, claimed: "Women are being gang raped most weekends in Australia."
One study, by the Family Planning Association of Australia, found one in three men aged 15 to 25 thought it was "OK for a male to force a female to have sex" in some situations.
The curious part of the league stories is the culture of sharing women. It's called "roasting" - getting a piece of meat and stuffing it as women are passed around as part of initiation rites.
If there is actually a violently misogynist culture legitimised by football clubs, shame on them. Female fans should be using their support to demand accountability, courses for players and swift action. Sponsors should clear out if the culture is not dealt with immediately and effectively.
It is not "unacceptable", or "inappropriate" behaviour. It is criminal.
By Julia Baird
Sydney Morning News - February 28, 2004
Roasting: cook (esp meat) by exposure to open fire or in oven; heat in preparation for grinding; expose (victim for torture, oneself or some part for warmth) to fire or great heat; very hot; ridicule, banter, chaff; censure. - Oxford Dictionary
It took 20 years for Naomi Wolf to name Harold Bloom as the professor who had placed a "boneless" white hand on her thigh after a dinner at her home in 1983, arranged so he could read her poetry. She vomited in disgust, he called her a troubled woman, corked his sherry and left. While a global success as an author and commentator, she says she has not written a poem since.
The full text of her article, in New York magazine, invites more sympathy than just the bones of the story. She is frequently asked, she wrote, to appear as a Yale alumnae pin-up girl, and when asked to raise money for her university, decided to seek assurances that harassment procedures were in place for young women today. She said she was stonewalled for nearly a year and in frustration wrote her story.
Her case would have been better served by a forensic detailing of the problems that exist today, not centring on her own decades-old experience. And her argument was undermined by the fact that Yale does have sexual harassment complaint procedures in place.
But the attacks on her beauty were curious. Camille Paglia, the Queen Bitch of celebrity feminism, complained 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". Journalists described her as a "telegenic feminist", a "lipstick feminist", a "pouting, glossy-haired feminist" who had been "photographed in various glamorous poses". As though her thighs were twinkling, provocative, waiting to be groped.
But chicks are like that. Just ask some of the Bulldogs fans. The reported allegations against some members of their club's squad last weekend made the complaints by Wolf seem minor. The allegations of sexual assault by a group of footballers of a young woman - orally, anally and vaginally - were outrageous.
Some of the responses have been extraordinary - that, if true, it was unacceptable behaviour that breached the code's rule of conduct. Unacceptable? A 21-year-old woman says she was sexually assaulted by six men. If her claims prove to be true then her life is bound to have been screwed up.
According to some of the fans, however, girls from Coffs Harbour are just a bunch of "hos" who, if seen laughing with men, are clearly expressing their unfettered sexual availability. Or who, if they have sex with one man once, are fair game for all. A fan, Elmagic, said on one website, "My mum said she was probably being a slut, then after they 'did' her, she decided 2 say summin coz she thought she could get money or summin out of it."
Ian C took a forensic approach: "All available evidence suggests that the woman in question actively sought out the players, willingly accompanied them back to the hotel and was seen laughing and joking with them. The story goes that after consensual sex with one or two of them they treated her disdainfully and she got hysterical ... Sounds like yet another 'been there, done that' scenario."
When two female Herald sports reporters, Jacquelin Magnay and Jessica Halloran, wrote a piece about a league culture of sharing women last year they were savagely criticised for what was called a beat-up. They wrote: "The 'gang bang' has almost been a rite of passage in rugby league. So condoned has the act been in the past that one league coach encouraged his representative team to indulge in the practice in a bid to enhance the male-bonding process - although on that occasion prostitutes were paid to provide the service ... There are numerous tales of women being paid off to shut up. And the players' mates ... are often their strongest allies."
You worry when a Bulldogs player says within earshot of a photographer they should "pull our dicks out and come all over" the waiting media.
We don't know what happened last Sunday morning and it's up to the police to find out. But there is clearly some kind of cultural problem.
In The End of Equality, Anne Summers documented that between 1993 and 2001 the number of sexual assault victims increased by 37 per cent - and only an estimated 15 per cent of women who are sexually assaulted report it. The manager of the NSW Rape Crisis Centre, Karen Willis, claimed: "Women are being gang raped most weekends in Australia."
One study, by the Family Planning Association of Australia, found one in three men aged 15 to 25 thought it was "OK for a male to force a female to have sex" in some situations.
The curious part of the league stories is the culture of sharing women. It's called "roasting" - getting a piece of meat and stuffing it as women are passed around as part of initiation rites.
If there is actually a violently misogynist culture legitimised by football clubs, shame on them. Female fans should be using their support to demand accountability, courses for players and swift action. Sponsors should clear out if the culture is not dealt with immediately and effectively.
It is not "unacceptable", or "inappropriate" behaviour. It is criminal.
____________________________________________________________________________________
The hand that rocked the critics
The Age - February 28, 2004
Naomi Wolf has been keeping a secret. For 20 years, she has hidden the fact that an English professor at Yale put his hand on her thigh. Wolf, the author of the feminist bestseller The Beauty Myth, says the incident damaged her soul.
Here are the details, as Wolf tells them: in 1983, when she was a 20-year-old English major, she invited Harold Bloom, one of America's leading English scholars, to her house. Wolf says she wanted Bloom to read poetry she had written. They had dinner, drank sherry by candlelight and, when the other guests left, she put her manuscript on the table between them.
Bloom did not look at it. Instead, he put his "heavy, boneless hand" on her thigh. Wolf retreated to the kitchen sink and vomited. Bloom departed.
Wolf, now 42 and a mother of two, did not file a complaint about Bloom. She kept the incident pretty much to herself until this week, when she told the world about it in a cover story for New York magazine.
"I have obviously survived," Wolf wrote of the "one-time sexual encroachment" she experienced. "My career was fine. My soul was not fine."
If Wolf expected sympathy, she will be disappointed. Her story sparked outrage, but most of it was directed at her. Wolf has been berated for over-reacting to something that many women would, today, regard as nothing more than a pass by an old drunk. Why didn't she just slap Bloom's hand away? Why didn't she complain much earlier? And anyway, even by her account, when he was rebuffed, he left.
If there is a victim in this drama, many believe it is Bloom, who is something of an academic giant. In pictures, he looks a bit like Australia's Bob Ellis: dishevelled and overweight. By most accounts, he is a genuine genius.
Bloom was born in the East Bronx in 1930, the youngest child of Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Russia, neither of whom ever learned to read English. His first books were volumes of Yiddish verse but, from the age of seven, he read the likes of Somerset Maugham. He went to Cornell University and then, after an adviser at Cornell, H.M. Abrams, insisted he leave "because we couldn't teach him anything more", Bloom went to Yale.
"Even as an undergraduate, he was a prodigy, beyond anything I'd ever seen," said Abrams. "And nothing since has come close."
Bloom is today Sterling professor of humanities at Yale and the Berg professor of English at New York University. He is the author of more than 20 books, including the extraordinary The Western Canon, which The New York Times has described as "essentially a survey of all Western literature, from Dante to Borges, in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Russian". He can literally recite Milton and Shakespeare backward, and he has blisters on his fingers from reading up to 1000 pages a day.
Outside academic circles, Bloom is most famous for savaging the author of the Harry Potter books. It happened last year, when The Wall Street Journal asked him to review one of J.K. Rowling's novels. Bloom shuffled over to the Yale University bookstore where he read a copy of The Sorcerer's Stone. "I suffered a great deal in the process," he wrote. "The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible." He noted horror writer Stephen King had penned a "lavish, loving review of the same book, saying something to the effect of: 'If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King.' And he was quite right. He was not being ironic."
There are some who say that to meet Bloom is to fall violently in love with him - or at least violently in awe him. Wolf was certainly not immune to his charm. She says in her New York essay that she became "sick with excitement when he agreed to read her poetry". Others felt the same, which is why Bloom (who is married and the father of two sons) is a sitting duck for allegations of the type Wolf has made.
It must be said, Bloom has what might delicately be called a reputation. In 1994, New York Times writer Adam Begley said "rumours of his (Bloom's) affairs with Yale graduate students are legion". A friend of Bloom, unnamed, was quoted in the article, saying: "I hate to say it but he rather bragged about it."
In 1990, writer Martin Kihn interviewed Bloom for GQ magazine. He reported that a woman opened Bloom's door, and she "did not look like his wife of three decades. Jeanne Bloom is silver-haired, slightly overweight, a chain-smoking child psychologist with a cabbie's hard voice. This woman is strawberry blonde, low-fat. She tells me she just dropped by, but I doubt it."
The girl, whose name was Jenny, sat just metres from Bloom throughout the interview. Kihn did not say there were lovers, but wrote: "Any honest Yale undergraduate will tell you of Bloom's unusually close friendships with hand-picked proteges." He asked Bloom about his reputation but Bloom said: "That's ridiculous, absolutely not true."
But let's assume for a minute that it is true. Let's say Bloom did put his hand on Wolf's thigh. Is that such a big deal? Was Wolf right to complain after all these years?
Many of Wolf's peers have savaged her for presenting herself as a victim and complaining about what many see as a drunken pass by an ageing Lothario. Wolf says she decided to reveal her secret because she "can't bear to carry it around any more", and because she has an obligation to protect others. Wolf says the incident "had effects that went deep. Once you have been sexually encroached upon by a professor, your faith in your work corrodes".
Wolf was not one of Bloom's students. Moreover, if a pass was made, even Wolf's own account acknowledges that the rejection was accepted; he took no for an answer.
In The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, writer Margaret Wente said Wolf's version of feminism was out of date and noted that when she herself was at university she spent her 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."
Feminist Katie Roiphe said Wolf was making a "desperate power grab. People didn't pay attention to her last book on motherhood." In the New Statesman, Cristina Odone said: "Wolf's most unforgivable disservice to feminism lies in her constant portrayal of herself as a victim. Thus, we have had Naomi, the victim of her youthful good looks (The Beauty Myth), Naomi, the victim of her sexual allure (Promiscuities), Naomi, the victim of motherhood (Misconceptions). I'm not sure that she can bank on our sympathy for much longer."
But in her New York essay, Wolf is at pains to say that she does not feel like a victim. Indeed, she says she would have let the whole matter slide if only Yale had moved, in a series of private conversations over the past year, to reassure her that "steps had been taken to ensure that such things weren't still happening".
Yale tells a different story. The university claims that Wolf demanded a public apology for the alleged incident and a private meeting with Bloom. In an open letter on the university's website, provost Susan Hockfield says that "Wolf's article suggests that Yale does not take registered complaints seriously and that there are no consequences. To the contrary, (they are handled) with the utmost seriousness." She notes that harassers have, in the past, been "separated from Yale".
Bloom has been silent. When contacted by one of Yale's newspapers this week, his wife, Jeanne, said he had no comment. Another newspaper said he was contemplating his legal options.
His friends are not so circumspect. Feminist author Camille Paglia, who also studied with Bloom at Yale, raged against Wolf, saying: "How many times do we have to relive Naomi Wolf's growing up? How many books, how many articles, Naomi, are you going to impose on us so we have to be dragged back to your teenage-heartbreak years? This is regressive! It's childish! Move on! Move on! Get on to menopause next!"
It's probably not bad advice. Wolf is about as successful as a woman can be: she's rich, she's famous, she's well-educated and well-travelled. It is hard to believe that her "soul" was damaged when Bloom ignored her poetry, reached under the table and touched her thigh. More likely, it was her ego, and this is her revenge.
The Age - February 28, 2004
Naomi Wolf has been keeping a secret. For 20 years, she has hidden the fact that an English professor at Yale put his hand on her thigh. Wolf, the author of the feminist bestseller The Beauty Myth, says the incident damaged her soul.
Here are the details, as Wolf tells them: in 1983, when she was a 20-year-old English major, she invited Harold Bloom, one of America's leading English scholars, to her house. Wolf says she wanted Bloom to read poetry she had written. They had dinner, drank sherry by candlelight and, when the other guests left, she put her manuscript on the table between them.
Bloom did not look at it. Instead, he put his "heavy, boneless hand" on her thigh. Wolf retreated to the kitchen sink and vomited. Bloom departed.
Wolf, now 42 and a mother of two, did not file a complaint about Bloom. She kept the incident pretty much to herself until this week, when she told the world about it in a cover story for New York magazine.
"I have obviously survived," Wolf wrote of the "one-time sexual encroachment" she experienced. "My career was fine. My soul was not fine."
If Wolf expected sympathy, she will be disappointed. Her story sparked outrage, but most of it was directed at her. Wolf has been berated for over-reacting to something that many women would, today, regard as nothing more than a pass by an old drunk. Why didn't she just slap Bloom's hand away? Why didn't she complain much earlier? And anyway, even by her account, when he was rebuffed, he left.
If there is a victim in this drama, many believe it is Bloom, who is something of an academic giant. In pictures, he looks a bit like Australia's Bob Ellis: dishevelled and overweight. By most accounts, he is a genuine genius.
Bloom was born in the East Bronx in 1930, the youngest child of Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Russia, neither of whom ever learned to read English. His first books were volumes of Yiddish verse but, from the age of seven, he read the likes of Somerset Maugham. He went to Cornell University and then, after an adviser at Cornell, H.M. Abrams, insisted he leave "because we couldn't teach him anything more", Bloom went to Yale.
"Even as an undergraduate, he was a prodigy, beyond anything I'd ever seen," said Abrams. "And nothing since has come close."
Bloom is today Sterling professor of humanities at Yale and the Berg professor of English at New York University. He is the author of more than 20 books, including the extraordinary The Western Canon, which The New York Times has described as "essentially a survey of all Western literature, from Dante to Borges, in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Russian". He can literally recite Milton and Shakespeare backward, and he has blisters on his fingers from reading up to 1000 pages a day.
Outside academic circles, Bloom is most famous for savaging the author of the Harry Potter books. It happened last year, when The Wall Street Journal asked him to review one of J.K. Rowling's novels. Bloom shuffled over to the Yale University bookstore where he read a copy of The Sorcerer's Stone. "I suffered a great deal in the process," he wrote. "The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible." He noted horror writer Stephen King had penned a "lavish, loving review of the same book, saying something to the effect of: 'If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King.' And he was quite right. He was not being ironic."
There are some who say that to meet Bloom is to fall violently in love with him - or at least violently in awe him. Wolf was certainly not immune to his charm. She says in her New York essay that she became "sick with excitement when he agreed to read her poetry". Others felt the same, which is why Bloom (who is married and the father of two sons) is a sitting duck for allegations of the type Wolf has made.
It must be said, Bloom has what might delicately be called a reputation. In 1994, New York Times writer Adam Begley said "rumours of his (Bloom's) affairs with Yale graduate students are legion". A friend of Bloom, unnamed, was quoted in the article, saying: "I hate to say it but he rather bragged about it."
In 1990, writer Martin Kihn interviewed Bloom for GQ magazine. He reported that a woman opened Bloom's door, and she "did not look like his wife of three decades. Jeanne Bloom is silver-haired, slightly overweight, a chain-smoking child psychologist with a cabbie's hard voice. This woman is strawberry blonde, low-fat. She tells me she just dropped by, but I doubt it."
The girl, whose name was Jenny, sat just metres from Bloom throughout the interview. Kihn did not say there were lovers, but wrote: "Any honest Yale undergraduate will tell you of Bloom's unusually close friendships with hand-picked proteges." He asked Bloom about his reputation but Bloom said: "That's ridiculous, absolutely not true."
But let's assume for a minute that it is true. Let's say Bloom did put his hand on Wolf's thigh. Is that such a big deal? Was Wolf right to complain after all these years?
Many of Wolf's peers have savaged her for presenting herself as a victim and complaining about what many see as a drunken pass by an ageing Lothario. Wolf says she decided to reveal her secret because she "can't bear to carry it around any more", and because she has an obligation to protect others. Wolf says the incident "had effects that went deep. Once you have been sexually encroached upon by a professor, your faith in your work corrodes".
Wolf was not one of Bloom's students. Moreover, if a pass was made, even Wolf's own account acknowledges that the rejection was accepted; he took no for an answer.
In The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, writer Margaret Wente said Wolf's version of feminism was out of date and noted that when she herself was at university she spent her 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."
Feminist Katie Roiphe said Wolf was making a "desperate power grab. People didn't pay attention to her last book on motherhood." In the New Statesman, Cristina Odone said: "Wolf's most unforgivable disservice to feminism lies in her constant portrayal of herself as a victim. Thus, we have had Naomi, the victim of her youthful good looks (The Beauty Myth), Naomi, the victim of her sexual allure (Promiscuities), Naomi, the victim of motherhood (Misconceptions). I'm not sure that she can bank on our sympathy for much longer."
But in her New York essay, Wolf is at pains to say that she does not feel like a victim. Indeed, she says she would have let the whole matter slide if only Yale had moved, in a series of private conversations over the past year, to reassure her that "steps had been taken to ensure that such things weren't still happening".
Yale tells a different story. The university claims that Wolf demanded a public apology for the alleged incident and a private meeting with Bloom. In an open letter on the university's website, provost Susan Hockfield says that "Wolf's article suggests that Yale does not take registered complaints seriously and that there are no consequences. To the contrary, (they are handled) with the utmost seriousness." She notes that harassers have, in the past, been "separated from Yale".
Bloom has been silent. When contacted by one of Yale's newspapers this week, his wife, Jeanne, said he had no comment. Another newspaper said he was contemplating his legal options.
His friends are not so circumspect. Feminist author Camille Paglia, who also studied with Bloom at Yale, raged against Wolf, saying: "How many times do we have to relive Naomi Wolf's growing up? How many books, how many articles, Naomi, are you going to impose on us so we have to be dragged back to your teenage-heartbreak years? This is regressive! It's childish! Move on! Move on! Get on to menopause next!"
It's probably not bad advice. Wolf is about as successful as a woman can be: she's rich, she's famous, she's well-educated and well-travelled. It is hard to believe that her "soul" was damaged when Bloom ignored her poetry, reached under the table and touched her thigh. More likely, it was her ego, and this is her revenge.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Enough of this whingeing Wolf
By Zoe Heller
By Zoe Heller
The Telegraph (UK) - February 28, 2004
The other night, I came across the writer Naomi Wolf participating in a TV panel discussion about the Patriot Act. When one of her fellow guests, David Horowitz, turned in his chair to look at her, Wolf angrily broke off from the point she was making, to upbraid him.
"Don't try to shut me up!" she shouted. Horowitz looked at her, mystified. "What did I do?" he asked. "It's all in your body language!" Wolf said, indicating the movement he had just made in his chair.
"But Naomi," Horowitz replied in some confusion, "you told me during the last commercial break that I should turn and face you the next time you spoke. I was trying to do just that."
Before turning over, I remember thinking what a daft old brush Wolf was and how unfortunate it was that a humourless silly like her has come to be so widely regarded as the authentic voice of American feminism.
These sentiments cross my mind every couple of years or so, whenever Wolf comes out with another one of her pious blockbusters about the international conspiracy to stop women feeling good about themselves.
Experience has taught me that allowing myself to dwell on the subject of Wolf for too long is bad for my spirits. Usually, if I hum loudly to myself, I can make the wearying thought of her go away.
This week, however, after reading the New York magazine article in which Wolf accuses the eminent literary scholar Harold Bloom of having "sexually encroached" on her 20 years ago at Yale University, no amount of humming would do the trick.
Her maddening, apple-cheeked face kept dancing before my eyes; her drama-queen prose style kept haunting me like a bad smell.
In the article, Wolf describes how, as a 20-year-old undergraduate, she invited Prof Bloom to a candlelit dinner at her place. She thought she was inviting him in his capacity as her independent study adviser. (She was hoping to get his thoughts on her poetry.)
But after dinner, she claims, he ignored her portfolio of poems and placed his hand on the inside of her thigh. This gesture was so shocking and repulsive to her that she leapt up and vomited in the kitchen sink, whereupon Prof Bloom - who knew a brush-off when he saw one - hastily departed, but not before pronouncing Wolf a "deeply troubled girl".
Wolf goes on to describe the grave ramifications of this incident. She did not, she admits, experience a full-blown emotional crisis. But her brief run-in with Bloom had, she writes, "devastated my sense of being valuable to Yale as a student rather than as a pawn of powerful men".
And as a result, her grades spiralled downwards. "I had gotten a C-, a D and an F. I was put on academic probation."
She could of course, have gone to the college grievance board but she didn't feel "safe" doing so. The procedures for dealing with sexual harassment complaints were insufficiently "transparent", you see. She had heard rumours that Bloom's dalliances with his students were known about and tolerated by the school administration.
She feared that if she made a stink, she might be denied scholarship money. (And, as she explains in a tremulous, sotto voce aside, she was not rich; her father only earned $35,000 a year.)
Now, let us not dally over the fact that if you ask a professor round for a candlelit dinner to discuss your poetry, there is, at the very least, an area of ambiguity in the invitation.
Let us take Wolf's word for it that she was absolutely gobsmacked when old man Bloom put the moves on her. (That Wolf was naïve does not necessarily nullify her complaint: Bloom, as her instructor, ought not to have placed his hand on her thigh.)
Let us even accept her rather flimsy justification for not reporting the terrible wrong done to her at the time. Let us ponder instead, why she has chosen to dredge up this anecdote now.
Clearly Bloom and his wandering hands have had no lasting effect on her career. On the contrary, life has been very good to Wolf - as it generally is to bright, attractive, white women with Ivy League educations.
Her books have been bestsellers. She has a happy marriage and two children. She is well-off, healthy and gainfully employed. Even so, the episode at Yale has left a mark on her, she believes - a spiritual bruise.
Every year, at Yom Kippur, when Jews are required to atone for their sins, she feels sick at heart, she claims, thinking about "the young women who might have suffered because I was too scared to tell the truth to the people whose job it is to make sure the institution is clean. I am not at peace when the sun sets and the Book of Life is sealed: I always see that soft spot of complicity."
With its eyelid-batting religiosity and its more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger sanctimony, this is classic Wolf. (Imagine: the only blemish she finds when she looks into her soul is her failure to out an old man who once made a pass at her.) But to claim altruism as the pretext for her overwrought "confession" won't wash.
If she has any legitimate point to make about the current procedures for dealing with sexual harassment at Yale - and it is not at all clear that she does - it has been entirely overshadowed by the gossip value of her personal recollection. (When reporting this story, CNN's first impulse was not to interview the deans at Yale, but to doorstep the 73-year-old Bloom at his home in New Haven.)
There is no shortage of cause for righteous feminist outrage in the world: child prostitution in South Asia, women being stoned to death under sharia law in Africa.
Were Wolf to bother looking, she would no doubt find a fair portion of genuine female oppression in her own home town of Washington DC. Instead, she has chosen to expend her considerable clout detailing the terror she suffered two decades ago, when a man touched her thigh.
Perhaps the professor had it right, after all: that Wolf is "deeply troubled" may be the kindest conclusion one can draw from her freakish self-absorption.
The other night, I came across the writer Naomi Wolf participating in a TV panel discussion about the Patriot Act. When one of her fellow guests, David Horowitz, turned in his chair to look at her, Wolf angrily broke off from the point she was making, to upbraid him.
"Don't try to shut me up!" she shouted. Horowitz looked at her, mystified. "What did I do?" he asked. "It's all in your body language!" Wolf said, indicating the movement he had just made in his chair.
"But Naomi," Horowitz replied in some confusion, "you told me during the last commercial break that I should turn and face you the next time you spoke. I was trying to do just that."
Before turning over, I remember thinking what a daft old brush Wolf was and how unfortunate it was that a humourless silly like her has come to be so widely regarded as the authentic voice of American feminism.
These sentiments cross my mind every couple of years or so, whenever Wolf comes out with another one of her pious blockbusters about the international conspiracy to stop women feeling good about themselves.
Experience has taught me that allowing myself to dwell on the subject of Wolf for too long is bad for my spirits. Usually, if I hum loudly to myself, I can make the wearying thought of her go away.
This week, however, after reading the New York magazine article in which Wolf accuses the eminent literary scholar Harold Bloom of having "sexually encroached" on her 20 years ago at Yale University, no amount of humming would do the trick.
Her maddening, apple-cheeked face kept dancing before my eyes; her drama-queen prose style kept haunting me like a bad smell.
In the article, Wolf describes how, as a 20-year-old undergraduate, she invited Prof Bloom to a candlelit dinner at her place. She thought she was inviting him in his capacity as her independent study adviser. (She was hoping to get his thoughts on her poetry.)
But after dinner, she claims, he ignored her portfolio of poems and placed his hand on the inside of her thigh. This gesture was so shocking and repulsive to her that she leapt up and vomited in the kitchen sink, whereupon Prof Bloom - who knew a brush-off when he saw one - hastily departed, but not before pronouncing Wolf a "deeply troubled girl".
Wolf goes on to describe the grave ramifications of this incident. She did not, she admits, experience a full-blown emotional crisis. But her brief run-in with Bloom had, she writes, "devastated my sense of being valuable to Yale as a student rather than as a pawn of powerful men".
And as a result, her grades spiralled downwards. "I had gotten a C-, a D and an F. I was put on academic probation."
She could of course, have gone to the college grievance board but she didn't feel "safe" doing so. The procedures for dealing with sexual harassment complaints were insufficiently "transparent", you see. She had heard rumours that Bloom's dalliances with his students were known about and tolerated by the school administration.
She feared that if she made a stink, she might be denied scholarship money. (And, as she explains in a tremulous, sotto voce aside, she was not rich; her father only earned $35,000 a year.)
Now, let us not dally over the fact that if you ask a professor round for a candlelit dinner to discuss your poetry, there is, at the very least, an area of ambiguity in the invitation.
Let us take Wolf's word for it that she was absolutely gobsmacked when old man Bloom put the moves on her. (That Wolf was naïve does not necessarily nullify her complaint: Bloom, as her instructor, ought not to have placed his hand on her thigh.)
Let us even accept her rather flimsy justification for not reporting the terrible wrong done to her at the time. Let us ponder instead, why she has chosen to dredge up this anecdote now.
Clearly Bloom and his wandering hands have had no lasting effect on her career. On the contrary, life has been very good to Wolf - as it generally is to bright, attractive, white women with Ivy League educations.
Her books have been bestsellers. She has a happy marriage and two children. She is well-off, healthy and gainfully employed. Even so, the episode at Yale has left a mark on her, she believes - a spiritual bruise.
Every year, at Yom Kippur, when Jews are required to atone for their sins, she feels sick at heart, she claims, thinking about "the young women who might have suffered because I was too scared to tell the truth to the people whose job it is to make sure the institution is clean. I am not at peace when the sun sets and the Book of Life is sealed: I always see that soft spot of complicity."
With its eyelid-batting religiosity and its more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger sanctimony, this is classic Wolf. (Imagine: the only blemish she finds when she looks into her soul is her failure to out an old man who once made a pass at her.) But to claim altruism as the pretext for her overwrought "confession" won't wash.
If she has any legitimate point to make about the current procedures for dealing with sexual harassment at Yale - and it is not at all clear that she does - it has been entirely overshadowed by the gossip value of her personal recollection. (When reporting this story, CNN's first impulse was not to interview the deans at Yale, but to doorstep the 73-year-old Bloom at his home in New Haven.)
There is no shortage of cause for righteous feminist outrage in the world: child prostitution in South Asia, women being stoned to death under sharia law in Africa.
Were Wolf to bother looking, she would no doubt find a fair portion of genuine female oppression in her own home town of Washington DC. Instead, she has chosen to expend her considerable clout detailing the terror she suffered two decades ago, when a man touched her thigh.
Perhaps the professor had it right, after all: that Wolf is "deeply troubled" may be the kindest conclusion one can draw from her freakish self-absorption.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Sex and Silence at Yale
By Naomi Wolf
New York Magazine - March 01, 2004
She was a Yale senior. He was the superstar professor she'd hoped to impress—until he put his hand on her thigh. Two decades later, she's speaking out. But her alma mater still isn't listening. A story of sex, secrets, and Ivy League denial.Twenty years on, I am handing over a secret to its rightful owner. I can't bear to carry it around anymore.
In the late fall of 1983, professor Harold Bloom did something banal, human, and destructive: He put his hand on a student's inner thigh—a student whom he was tasked with teaching and grading. The student was me, a 20-year-old senior at Yale. Here is why I am telling this story now: I began, nearly a year ago, to try—privately—to start a conversation with my alma mater that would reassure me that steps had been taken in the ensuing years to ensure that unwanted sexual advances of this sort weren't still occurring. I expected Yale to be responsive. After nine months and many calls and e-mails, I was shocked to conclude that the atmosphere of collusion that had helped to keep me quiet twenty years ago was still intact—as secretive as a Masonic lodge.
How did this all begin? For years now, Yale has been contacting me: Would I come speak at a celebration of women at Yale? Would I be in a film about Jewish graduates? Would I be interviewed for the alumni magazine?
I have usually declined, for a reason that I explain to my (mostly female) college audiences: The institution is not accountable when it comes to the equality of women. I explain that I was the object of an unwanted sexual advance from a professor at Yale—and that his advances seemed to be part of an open secret. I tell them that I had believed that many Yale decision-makers had known about his relations with students, and nothing I was aware of had happened to stop it.
Where is the professor now? they ask. He is still there, I explain: famous, productive, revered. I describe what the transgression did to me—devastated my sense of being valuable to Yale as a student, rather than as a pawn of powerful men.
Then, heartbreakingly, a young woman will ask: "Did you tell?"
I answer her honestly: "No. I did nothing."
"Have you never named the guy, all these years on?"
"No," I answer. "Never."
"But," she will ask hesitantly, "don't you have an obligation to protect other women students who might be targets now?"
"Yes," I answer. "I do have that obligation. I have not lived up to it. I have not been brave enough." And then there is always, among those young, hopeful women, a long, sad silence.
After such speeches, a young woman will come up to me—in Texas, in Indiana, in Chicago—in tears: My music professor is harassing me, she'll say. I tried to tell the grievance board, but they told me it is my word against his, and that there is no point in pursuing it. I know I won't get a job if I do anything about it. My lit professor made a pass at me; he is grading my senior thesis. My female adviser basically told me to drop it if I want to graduate; to switch classes; to start all over with another subject. My lab instructor keeps putting his hands on my body, and his mentor is on the grievance committee. I can't sleep. What should I do?
I am ashamed of what I tell them: that they should indeed worry about making an accusation because what they fear is likely to come true. Not one of the women I have heard from had an outcome that was not worse for her than silence. One, I recall, was drummed out of the school by peer pressure. Many faced bureaucratic stonewalling. Some women said they lost their academic status as golden girls overnight; grants dried up, letters of recommendation were no longer forthcoming. No one was met with a coherent process that was not weighted against them. Usually, the key decision-makers in the college or university—especially if it was a private university—joined forces to, in effect, collude with the faculty member accused; to protect not him necessarily but the reputation of the university, and to keep information from surfacing in a way that could protect other women. The goal seemed to be not to provide a balanced forum, but damage control.
Finally, last summer, I could no longer bear my own collusive silence. Yale had reached out to me once again. The Office of Development had assigned an alumna to cultivate me: She sent a flattering letter inviting me to join a group of women to raise money for Yale.
I wrote my own letter back to Charles Pagnam, vice-president of development. I could not join such an effort because I had been sexually encroached upon at Yale twenty years ago, I explained. The professor involved was still a very visible presence on campus. I wrote that I did not know what steps Yale had taken to protect students, and I wanted to know about the effectiveness of the grievance procedures now. I asked for a private meeting. I heard nothing.
Weeks later, I called Pagnam, told my story to his staff, and re-sent the letter. Again, no response. More waiting. I called the dean of Yale College, Richard Brodhead. He took my call right away. I told him I was calling because I was sexually encroached upon twenty years ago by someone on his faculty, and I wanted to set up a confidential meeting to address it. I wanted to be sure, I said, that Yale's grievance procedures are now strong.
Brodhead seemed to know who I was talking about. He implied the man in question was not well. "I don't think you understand why I am calling," I said. "I don't want to bring a lawsuit against Yale or Harold Bloom. I don't want the meeting, or this experience, to be public. I simply need to know that the institution is accountable."
"I'll get back to you," he said. He didn't.
After months of silence, I called Pagnam again, determined to reach him. I was starting to feel like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. One assistant responded brightly: "You should try the Women's Studies Program!"
It was now about six months since I had first sought a response from Yale. To my amazement, I was facing a blank wall.
I was also in a state of spiritual discomfort. Keeping bad secrets hurts. Is a one-time sexual encroachment by Harold Bloom, two decades ago, a major secret or a minor one? Minor, when it comes to a practical effect on my life; I have obviously survived. This is the argument often made against accusers in sexual-harassment cases: Look, no big deal, you're fine. My career was fine; my soul was not fine. I had an obligation to protect others from which I had run away.
Every Yom Kippur, Jewish tradition requires a strict spiritual inventory. You aren't supposed to just sit around feeling guilty, but to take action in the real world to set things right. We pray, "Ashamnu. Bagadnu. We have acted shamefully . . . behaved wickedly." The sin of omission is as serious as the sin of commission.
Every year, I wonder about the young women who might have suffered because I was too scared to tell the truth to the people whose job it is to make sure the institution is clean. I am not at peace when the sun sets and the Book of Life is sealed: I always see that soft spot of complicity.
My next calls were to President Richard Levin's office. I left a very long message with details. No answer. Finally I left another message saying I had been trying for months to get an off-the-record meeting on this issue. I was getting no response. And if I kept getting no answer, I would have no compunction about raising this issue in the Yale Daily News.
I was promptly called back, by Nina Glickson, assistant to the president. I explained once again why I was calling. "Unfortunately for you, Naomi, the statute of limitations has passed" was the first thing she said.
"I know that. I don't want money or a lawsuit or to make this public . . . " I began again, going through my litany: I wanted to be sure the grievance process was effective. Her empathetic cooing suggested that Yale might have finally sensed something potentially awkward taking shape.
"I'll get back to you," she promised. She did not do so. Five months later, having called again and yet again, she informed me that President Levin still hoped to speak to me. In fact, he had referred the matter to Brodhead.
What decade do they think they are living in? I wondered. Surely you did not dismiss angry alumnae, let alone journalists calling to follow up on sexual misconduct, in the post-Clinton, post-Tailhook, post–Air Force Academy world of 2004.
Then, Pagnam called. I explained what had happened to me. I offered to meet, look at the grievance procedures, and, if I felt they were adequate, help, as Yale had requested, with fund-raising. "What outcome do you want?" he asked.
I explained that in a transparent, accountable institution, it is Yale's job to have crafted a standard response to complaints of this kind, not mine.
"I'll get back to you," said Pagnam. It was the last I heard from him.
What actually happened in late fall, 1983? I was a senior, majoring in English. Harold Bloom was one of Yale's most illustrious professors. Most of my friends in the Literature department were his acolytes, clustering around him at office hours for his bon mots about Pater and Wilde. He called students, male and female both, "my dear" and "my child." Beautiful, brilliant students surrounded him. He was a vortex of power and intellectual charisma.
I, personally, was at once drawn to him intellectually and slightly scared of him. I had audited a famous course he taught, and he had reached out to me then and invited me to talk with him. Since he was so intellectually selective, I was "sick with excitement" at the prospect, as I wrote in an account—details changed to disguise his identity—in one of my books, Promiscuities.
His aura was compelling—and intimidating. Lit majors who surrounded him were also chatting with Jacques Derrida and throwing around words like jouissance; English majors like me were poring over Beowulf and using words like index. But my trusted senior adviser, the poet John Hollander, liked my poetry; and based on that work, he urged me to take an independent study in the fall with professor Bloom, who was a friend.
Bloom agreed to meet with me weekly. At my adviser's suggestion, he wrote me a letter of reference for my Rhodes Scholarship application. Then I could not get a meeting with him. The semester was slipping away. When I saw him on campus, he would promise to go over my poetry manuscript "over a glass of Amontillado." I'd heard that some faculty met with students at Mory's, and that Bloom drank often with his male students there. I also knew that there was an atmosphere at Yale in which female students were expected to be sociable with male professors. I had discussed with my friends the pressure to be charming but still seen as serious.
Finally, Bloom suggested that he come to the house I shared with one of his editorial assistants and her boyfriend. At dinnertime. I agreed.
The four of us ate a meal. He had, as promised, brought a bottle of Amontillado, which he drank continually. I also drank. We had set out candles—a grown-up occasion. The others eventually left and—finally!—I thought we could discuss my poetry manuscript. I set it between us. He did not open it. He did not look at it. He leaned toward me and put his face inches from mine. "You have the aura of election upon you," he breathed.
I hoped he was talking about my poetry. I moved back and took the manuscript and turned it around so he could read.
The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh.
I lurched away. "This is not what I meant," I stammered. The whole thing had suddenly taken on the quality of a bad horror film. The floor spun. By now my back was against the sink, which was as far away as I could get. He moved toward me. I turned away from him toward the sink and found myself vomiting. Bloom disappeared.
When he reemerged—from the bedroom with his coat—a moment later, I was still frozen, my back against the sink. He said: "You are a deeply troubled girl." Then he went to the table, took the rest of his sherry, corked the bottle, and left.
Is that all? yes—that's all. But the encroachment, the transgression—those words are so much more accurate, emotionally as well as legally, than "harassment"—had effects that went deep. What Harold Bloom's hand on his student's thigh set off was not a sexual crisis. I was sexually active—and not even especially modest. An unwanted hand on a thigh from a date was nothing. Nor was it an emotional crisis. I wasn't that vulnerable. What it set off was a moral crisis, shaking my confidence in the institution I was in.
I wanted to go to the Grievance Board. The semester was passing, but I was terrified of being in a room alone again with Bloom. Still, I needed to know what to do about the rest of the term. Some women friends, however, persuaded me not to speak to anyone official about what had happened. It was one of those perfect blue days in autumn; the sun was still strong; we were with our books on the Cross Campus grass. I told my story. Someone said she had heard things about Bloom and other students, and that administrators had heard about it as well. But the university saw him as untouchable, my friends warned. Don't do it.
Were these rumors accurate? It matters. A professor of mine at the time told me last month that "professors and graduate students within the department gossiped that Bloom was romantically and sexually involved with one or more of his graduate students. The irony is that whether or not that was true, in a specific case, it affected how professors viewed female graduate students' work." Another woman, who was then a graduate student and is now a tenured professor of literature, confirmed, "It was known; it was in the air."
What did we have to go on in 1983 but rumor? In the absence of transparent procedures, decoding the right rumors was how you survived. One friend reminded me of a young woman who had been assaulted by a graduate student and, she said, had gone to the grievance committee. The grad student's male mentors, my friend said, defended the man, explaining that he was under pressure and just stealing a kiss. The woman's complaint would jeopardize a young man's entire future career, they had protested. The woman had had a breakdown and left campus, we'd heard.
If I had come from wealth, perhaps I would have had the confidence to speak out. But my father at that time made $35,000 a year; Yale cost $13,000. My mother had lost her job. My parents were going deeply into debt. If I was going to grad school, it would have to be on a scholarship; even to finish college, I needed to be in the good graces of the faculty and the financial-aid office.
I wanted to tell Patricia Pierce, my residential college dean. She had called me in because I was spiraling downward; I had gotten a C-, a D, and an F, and was put on academic probation. My confidence shaken, I failed in my effort to win the Rhodes Scholarship at the end of the term. When Pierce asked me what was wrong, I felt it was not safe to tell. I had also heard that a secretary in the Women's & Gender Studies Program, worried about the safety of female students, had posted on her door a handmade sign about a "guilty" ruling from the Grievance Board in a case of a professor harassing a student. Pierce, I'd heard, had run down the hall and torn it off, saying "You can't do that!" Pierce, now dean of the School of Management, e-mailed me to say, "I have no recollection of the incident."
When I described to my parents what had happened, they had gone to a friend of theirs, a scholar of Middle Eastern literature, who was close to Bloom. "You were outraged; you felt violated," my mother, Deborah Wolf, recalled recently. They begged him to speak with Bloom and ask him to leave me alone. "He refused," my mother said. "He said it would be awkward. We felt so helpless. We had no power to protect you." (My roommate, now an editor, who asked not to be named—"I'm still terrified," she confessed—said: "We knew something had happened that night. You were really nervous; you were anxious for the rest of the semester.") I longed to go to my thesis adviser. But John Hollander was Bloom's close friend.
Harold Bloom never met with me again that semester. Not knowing what to do about my grade, I went to his department mailbox and dropped off the collection of poems I had tried to show him at our dinner. I never heard back from him. When I got my grades for a class he had never taught me, he had given me a B.
Once you have been sexually encroached upon by a professor, your faith in your work corrodes. If the administration knew and did nothing—because the teacher was valuable to them—they had made a conscious calculation about his and our respective futures: It was okay to do nothing because I—and other young women who could be expected to remain silent—would never be worth what someone like Bloom was worth.
After months of futile calls to Yale, I began to understand why there had been so much silence on their end of the phone: Even though I wasn't asking for legal redress, what I was reporting to Yale raised major legal issues. According to equal-opportunity law, if administrators know of a faculty member's tendency to approach students sexually, and do not take sufficient action, the university may then be responsible for condoning a hostile environment. If a member of faculty does reward a student who agreed to sleep with him or her with a plum job, or downgrade students who reject advances, that can be considered "quid pro quo," one of the definitions of actionable sexual harassment. If there is a pattern of concealing and covering up instances of sexual harassment and even sexual assault, or acts of retaliation against students who complain, then a university can be charged with having failed to take corrective action.
Still getting nowhere with Yale authorities, I called around to see if someone else could reassure me so I could drop the matter. Linda Anderson, a brave senior administrative assistant in the Women's & Gender Studies Program (the one who had posted the sign two decades ago), told me that the issue was far from settled. As I started to investigate further, several women willing to tell me their stories came forward.
They were a distinguished group, including a lawyer, a college dean, and a chaplain. What made their stories even more disturbing was that as early as 1980 Yale had already assured a court in Alexander v. Yale that it had adopted effective procedures for managing harassment complaints. The case had been brought by five Yale women, alleging sexual harassment. All their claims were dismissed. But the court took "important . . . note" of these measures.
Then, more women began to call me, several of whom had followed the university's grievance procedures and were dismayed with what they felt to be bureaucratic stonewalling, and even the use of the procedures to protect faculty and the university at the student's expense.
Deborah Amory was the first to talk. In 1985, when she was 23, Amory, now a dean at a suny campus, was a senior in the Scholar of the House Program. She was at a program dinner at Mory's, seated next to a faculty member. He got drunk and put his hand on her leg. She was startled—another student asked her later if she was okay. She excused herself to get away from him. When she returned, he leered at her and said, "It's okay. I talked to your family, and they say it's fine."
Amory immediately told the head of the program what had happened; he said he was shocked, but did nothing further. Amory filed a grievance. She, too, like me, went into an academic tailspin. "It is a miracle that I finished my thesis," she said. When the grievance committee made its judgment, she was told that "I had been right in considering his behavior inappropriate."
When she asked what the sanctions were, she was told no one would tell her. She was also forbidden to see a copy of the report. "The secrecy around the sanctions was more traumatic than the original event," she told me. "I just understood that students were not safe and the university was not accountable."
Another gutsy secretary mailed Amory a copy of the committee's findings; Amory recalls that the document suggested the faculty member get alcohol counseling, and to stay away from students when he was drinking. There was no mention of professional consequences.
I had assumed that such cases were all in the distant past, but then I received a call from a lawyer called Cynthia Powell. In 1992, she was an American Studies graduate student and a law student. Powell says that one of her tenured professors assaulted her sexually. The professor asked her to dinner, she said, with himself and a dean. At the last minute, she was told the dean could not come. After dinner, he insisted they have a drink at his pied-à-terre nearby, and she had one glass of wine. He started making advances; she resisted, saying "No, no" several times, but then started experiencing blackouts. When she regained intermittent consciousness, she says, he had removed her clothes and penetrated her.
Deeply traumatized, Powell had her bruises documented at the hospital. She also called the police, but was made to feel there would be no point in bringing a criminal charge against someone she knew. "But I filed a grievance at Yale. Immediately, they brought in the university's counsel. I was not allowed to have a lawyer there. Because I am an attorney, I understand that their principal concern was litigation. Their attorney said to me several times: `We are really glad you are not going to make a crusade about this.
"The committee said he was tenured, so they couldn't just terminate him. Off the record, the university's attorney told me they wanted quietly to push him out. I didn't know why it had to be `quietly.'
"They said he'd been `careless,' `reckless.' They didn't want to use the word rape."
Powell says she was never given a copy of the report and was able to read it only by going to a specified room where it was kept in a drawer. A few months later, the professor resigned and was promptly hired by another university. According to Powell, Yale offered her $30,000, which she rejected.
In 1996, the Yale Daily News reported that the Grievance Board had found that assistant math professor Jay Jorgenson had consensual sex with a freshman whom he was grading. The board recommended that Jorgenson not teach undergraduates that term. But Dean Brodhead allowed him to continue teaching because, as he told the Yale Daily News, he "didn't think it would be possible to find a replacement that quickly." (The paper also reported that the head of the math department said no one had ever called to ask if there was someone else to teach the course.)
Until this point, Yale had informally discouraged sexual relationships between faculty and students, but after the Jorgenson case, which generated a lot of publicity, the university deemed such relationships a conflict of interest and decided to take a firmer stand: The Guide for Faculty, Students and Staff states clearly: "No teacher shall have a sexual relationship with a student over whom he or she has direct supervisory responsibilities."
Another Yale alumna alerted me to the Kelly case, which was more serious. In 1999, Kathryn Kelly brought a civil action under Title IX against Yale, accusing it of "inadequately responding to her complaints regarding an incident of alleged sexual assault" by another student, Robert Nolan, who lived in the same dormitory.
After the assault, Kelly immediately filed a grievance, which eventually resulted in Nolan's being required to take a leave of absence until Kelly's expected graduation. But Kelly claimed that in the aftermath of the assault, the college was too slow to respond to her concerns—not least that she was living in the same place as, and attending a class with, her attacker. She also alleged that, in an open forum to discuss the attack with students, Dean Richard Wood defamed her by telling those gathered that what Nolan had done was "not legal rape." Kelly was so distraught that she dropped out of her courses and eventually finished her studies late.
In March 2003, Judge Janet Hall permitted the matter to proceed to a trial, stating that a jury could find that "Yale's failure to provide Kelly with accommodations, either academic, or residential, immediately following Nolan's assault of her, was clearly unreasonable given all the circumstances of which it was aware." Six months later, Yale settled for an undisclosed sum.
Stephanie Urie, a former graduate student at the Divinity School and now a hospice chaplain, filed her lawsuit against Yale just last month. Her most alarming allegation was that from 1997 onward, the Divinity School faculty had knowledge that the Reverend Gilbert Bond, an associate professor at the Divinity School and Urie's mentor, "had engaged in gender discrimination and sexual harassment towards female students" but that they had failed to take "reasonable action to prevent the recurrence of gender discrimination and sexual harassment." She also claimed Yale failed to protect her from Bond after she filed a grievance.
Bond denied the allegations to the Yale Daily News and also stated he was not her mentor, and a spokesman for Yale, Tom Conroy, said: "We don't believe the allegations against Yale are supported by the facts and we trust that will be the judgment."
According to Urie's complaint, Bond took "advantage of the trust he had gained from her as her YDS mentor . . . and engaged in coercive sexual relations" with her and then "repeatedly engaged in intimidating behavior."
When Urie filed her grievance, she claims, the academic dean of the Divinity School, David Bartlett, requested she write a statement that she learned was later shown to Bond. But Bond's own statement, in contrast, was never disclosed to Urie.
She explained to Bartlett that, as cited in the complaint, she had a "justifiable fear" of Bond when she used the library or went to Divinity School events. The dean recommended she get police protection. The Yale police did offer to escort her to one destination, but suggested she stay off campus at night and, if she was still frightened, that she "run between buildings."
Bond, when I called asking him earlier this month for his response to Urie's story, said that he was still an associate professor at Yale. Not named as a defendant in Urie's case, he denied her claims, saying, "we shared consensual, physical intimacies."
"I exhausted every internal means for resolution," says Urie, who is now also an affiliate of one of Yale's residential colleges. "But not achieving that, I am taking this step in the hope that no one else will have the same array of problems and vulnerabilities. In spite of many people's support, as it stands, the process adds insult to injury." The case is pending; Yale's response has not yet been filed.
Yale's public face is not what it seems. Though the college Website now has a seemingly exemplary description of its grievance procedures, students reading the fine print will discover that a "full description of the way in which a specific complaint would be treated by the Board" is only "obtained from the Yale College Dean's Office." A trip that, for many, could be intimidating. A member of the grievance committee claims that information about the procedures is placed on dining tables annually. More than a month ago, I asked Brodhead to send me a copy, and he agreed. I have never received it.
I called the Yale Office of Public Affairs: I was writing a story about this issue, I said. "Harold Bloom?" asked press officer Gila Reinstein. "He hits on everybody!" She backpedaled: " . . . in a bizarre way, I mean: `My child,' `my dear' . . . " "This wasn't that," I said. "This was a hand on my thigh." "I am sorry," she said.
I called the Yale English Department to get Harold Bloom's response. A tense secretary said she could not take my message. She claimed that he had changed his number and that even they did not have his number. "He is barely a member of the English faculty," she said. I explained why I was calling—surely she would want to pass on my request to the department head. "She won't care," she said, repeating that he was barely on faculty. Then she hung up on me.
I called back to get Bloom's fax number. Someone who sounded like a student answered. Was Bloom a member of the faculty. "Yes," she said. Teaching? "Yes." She read me his course number. She gave me his phone number. I called the number repeatedly; no answer, no machine.
I called Dean Brodhead again and asked him if anyone had known about Bloom's approaches to students. He said that in his tenure as dean, "no one came to me" with a formal complaint. I said that was not what I was asking. We went back and forth. Finally, he said in exasperation: "Am I saying that no one ever went to anyone in the whole of history? I am not in a position to answer it." I asked again. Eventually he exclaimed, "Naomi, please understand I am not in a position to say. I am not telling you there might not be students who share your thoughts or even your experience about this. I am saying they did not come to me."
I asked Dean Brodhead how often the committee met last year. "It met more than no times and not many times."
"What's `not many'?"
"This isn't a court."
"Are these matters of public record?"
"No, they are not. To open the matter to public record is to expose the person who made the charge." Not true; many universities make statistics about sexual-misconduct complaints available without naming people. "How do I know as a concerned alum, since these proceedings are confidential, that there are actual penalties?"
"I am an honorable and truthful person. These things are dealt with."
"But how many complaints are brought?"
"I can't answer that . . . I'm not in a position to give you the statistical information. I have no . . . the number of cases . . . I have not gathered a statistical abstract."
"Can the student's attorney be present?"
"The process is not designed as a judicial one . . . We do not have attorneys present." I told him my story—again—and asked what he would do.
"Harold Bloom is someone I almost never see," he said.
"Are you not concerned about other young women?" I asked.
"Do you want me to call him?"
"I am asking what you think is appropriate," I said.
Because of the time lapse, he said, he would not have even an informal conversation with Bloom on behalf of students today. Then, as if he had never heard of the letter that had begun my first conversation with him months before, Brodhead noted that I could send him a letter.
"I'm going to have a successor," he said with relief. "You can send a letter to my successor."
Is Harold Bloom a bad man? No. Harold Bloom's demons are no more demonic than those of any other complex human being's. Does this complex, brilliant man's one bad choice make him a monster? No, of course not; nor does this one experience make me a "victim." But the current discourse of accused and accuser, aggressor and victim is more damaging than constructive.
Here is a more helpful reading: This man did something, at least once, that was self-centered and harmful. But his harmful impulse would not have entered his or my real life—then or now—if Yale made the consequences of such behavior both clear and real.
All the women who have come forward want only to fix what is broken. Critics of sexual-harassment standards argue that you can't legislate passions; true enough. But you can legislate what to do about people who act on them improperly. Powerful men and woman who belittle and humiliate their subordinates manage not to belittle or humiliate their supervisors. Neither men nor women tend to harass upward in a hierarchy.
There is something terribly wrong with the way the current sexual-harassment discussion is framed. Since damages for sexual misconduct are decided under tort law—tort means harm or wrong—those bringing complaints have had to prove that they have been harmed emotionally. Their lawyers must bring out any distress they may have suffered, such as nightmares, sexual dysfunction, trauma, and so on. Thus, it is the woman and her "frailties" under scrutiny, instead of the institution and its frailties. This victim construct in the law is one reason that women are often reluctant to go public.But sexual encroachment in an educational context or a workplace is, most seriously, a corruption of meritocracy; it is in this sense parallel to bribery. I was not traumatized personally, but my educational experience was corrupted. If we rephrase sexual transgression in school and work as a civil-rights and civil-society issue, everything becomes less emotional, less personal. If we see this as a systemic-corruption issue, then when people bring allegations, the focus will be on whether the institution has been damaged in its larger mission. The Catholic Church is a good example: The public understood that church leaders' maintaining silence about systemic sexual transgressions corrupted the mission of an organization that had a great responsibility to society as a whole. Even the military is starting to understand that systemic sexual harassment of cadets corrupts its social mission.If we change the framework to this kind of transparency and accountability question, then instead of asking, "What were you wearing?" or "Why disrupt this man's life?" we would ask: "What are we—together—going to do about it?"
The saddest part? If a Yale undergraduate came to me today with a bad secret to tell, I still could not urge her to speak up confidently to those tasked with educating, supporting, and mentoring her. I would not direct her to her faculty adviser, the grievance committee, or her dean. Wishing that Bart Giamatti's beautiful welcoming speech to my class about Yale's meritocracy were really true, I would, with a heavy heart, advise that young woman, for her own protection, to get a good lawyer.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Rotation
One Last Grope - And the cult of victimhood dissolves
By Celia Farber
New York Press - March 2, 2004
This is pretty damn interesting. Follow the action: As New York magazine changes hands from Caroline Miller to Adam Moss, a curveball story appears overhead, leaving spectators to wonder who threw that weird ball and which way is it going to bounce? Turns out it was Miller's brainchild. You can picture the well-intentioned editors believing this was going to be a surefire, indignant bang of contemporary succès de scandale: A revelation from the nation's "leading feminist" (Naomi Wolf) about a severe grope to the "upper thigh" from an academic icon at Yale (Harold Bloom). The lengthy article came dressed in all the right tones of feminist rue, well-worded self-reflection and moral indictment. All the familiar features earmarked the story: crippling loss of self-confidence, a "tailspin," an academic paralysis, an overwhelming sense of guilt, fear and confusion, and at the center of it all, that amorphous, complex crime—lecherousness—that has held the feminist orthodoxy in orbit since the late 80s.
What's interesting is what happened next.
I keep a close watch on my cultural windmills, and I can tell you categorically that a few years ago, this story would have had them spinning furiously, unanimously, in favor of Wolf. Bloom would have gotten about as much sympathy as Chiang Kai-Shek alone in a dark alley with an angry mob of Red Guards. The imperative would have been simple: Kill.
A "heavy, boneless hand" on her inner thigh?
Show no mercy.
These were the years when college professors were liquidated in quiet rooms across the nation without a stitch of due process or a feather of protection. As in any revolution, people were deranged with fear.
The finest and most ironic feature of the inquisition was that the accusers were not even expected to face the accused, lest their trauma be further exacerbated. An excellent book on this miserable subject is Australian feminist Helen Garner's masterpiece The First Stone, about a professor at Ormond College who is swiftly destroyed after he is accused of falling on bended knee to declare his infatuation (verbally) to a young student at a campus party.
And who, Garner rightly asked, has the "power" in a scene such as that? An elderly man on bended knee in front of a strapping beauty in her prime.
Let's leave it to future historians to unfurl those impossible threads about sex and power and return to our windmills. It's now 2004, and Naomi Wolf throws a lit match into a cultural sphere she believed to be filled with the right kind of moral gas. And what happens?
Nothing.
I spent the whole week reading essays, reports and blogs. Stories about the story. Be they left or right, pro-feminist or contrarian—they all had a tone of sober repudiation, a shrug, a sense of, Oh for Christ's sake, leave the man alone, this was 20 years ago. As my father put it, "That's not even history; that's archeology."
The outrage is directed back at Wolf—not at Bloom. Even party-line periodicals like the New York Observer, Slate, Salon, with their Alessandras and Alexandras and Larissas. Nobody bought. Anne Applebaum, writing in the Washington Post, soberly and dryly called for an end to "exaggerated victimhood"—as embodied by Wolf.
The jig is up. And Camille Paglia wasn't even called to the frontlines. Women chimed in from all corners, and Camille's voice almost drowned in the din.
It is galling, is it not, when paradigms shift? Nobody yells, "Strap yourselves in, we are changing our minds, we're lurching suddenly and inexplicably to the other side of the scale." They just change positions and then pretend to have never even heard of the previous belief system. Victim feminism has fallen out of fashion—and nobody warned Naomi Wolf about the tanking stocks.
In Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds (1841), he invokes the term "moral pandemics" and charts the phenomenon of mass fevers that have swept nations through history, burning down reason, and in some cases destroying whole societies. One chapter deals with the tulip frenzy that seized the upper classes of Europe in the 17th century, driving the entire economy until one day, interest waned, the fever passed and noblemen who'd sunk their fortunes into a few rare tulip bulbs became suicidal.
So it is with hot political ideas. They have electric currency for years, and then suddenly, they lose value, because in fact, they never were real; their value lay only in what we were willing to imbue them with and project onto them. Fevers break, thank God, and it is when they break that humanity returns to its senses, and sees, for the first time, how the fever itself distorted everything—made shadows look like monsters.
Wolf appears now like a helpless vendor trying to peddle a Semper Augustus tulip bulb in Rotterdam circa 1769. I almost feel sorry for her, but not as sorry as I feel for the countless victims of the sexual inquisition that is now apparently over. I wonder what kind of recourse, if any, they will get.
I don't take "sexual harassment" lightly, and I refuse to be bullied by the charge that I'm leading lambs to slaughter by diminishing the "very real" anguish that "these women feel." I think lechery is very distressing and should be discouraged at every turn.
Raise your hand if you are pro-lechery.
My point has always been that what feminism did was to take seeds of "very real anguish" and create a climate of fear so total that the entire nation was plunged into "very real anguish." An inferno of anguish. The worst thing about it was, it gave women a ghastly power we don't want: the power of the victim, which flared, along frayed cables of sexual politics leftover from the 1960s, into something akin to social terrorism.
Once again, women were thrown back into their shackles as sexual beings first and foremost—by their would-be liberators, the feminist establishment. It was feminism's fatal wrong turn to take the victim road, because down that road, all accomplishments, all dreams, all voices, all identities are vanquished, in order to feed the victim fire. Even someone as successful as Naomi Wolf had to perform a final, ritualistic harikari and throw herself on the pyre in order to assuage the raging gods of the victim cult. It's like watching a bunch of prisoners standing before a prison door flung open. You know how it always ends—they prefer the prison. It's safer there.
I don't take glee in seeing Naomi Wolf pilloried. Though she's not my cup of tea, it would be extreme snobbery not to concede that she has meant a great deal to millions of young women. Somebody should, however, tell Harold Bloom to come out of hiding, come out onto the porch. Times have changed. He's undoubtedly a bit of a lech, but he also has contributed something great to society. Maybe this is the Lord's mysterious work:
We have been spared very little this past century. One thing we were spared, as a result of that "heavy, boneless hand" coming down where it did that fateful night 20 years ago, was Naomi Wolf the great feminist poet.
One Last Grope - And the cult of victimhood dissolves
By Celia Farber
New York Press - March 2, 2004
This is pretty damn interesting. Follow the action: As New York magazine changes hands from Caroline Miller to Adam Moss, a curveball story appears overhead, leaving spectators to wonder who threw that weird ball and which way is it going to bounce? Turns out it was Miller's brainchild. You can picture the well-intentioned editors believing this was going to be a surefire, indignant bang of contemporary succès de scandale: A revelation from the nation's "leading feminist" (Naomi Wolf) about a severe grope to the "upper thigh" from an academic icon at Yale (Harold Bloom). The lengthy article came dressed in all the right tones of feminist rue, well-worded self-reflection and moral indictment. All the familiar features earmarked the story: crippling loss of self-confidence, a "tailspin," an academic paralysis, an overwhelming sense of guilt, fear and confusion, and at the center of it all, that amorphous, complex crime—lecherousness—that has held the feminist orthodoxy in orbit since the late 80s.
What's interesting is what happened next.
I keep a close watch on my cultural windmills, and I can tell you categorically that a few years ago, this story would have had them spinning furiously, unanimously, in favor of Wolf. Bloom would have gotten about as much sympathy as Chiang Kai-Shek alone in a dark alley with an angry mob of Red Guards. The imperative would have been simple: Kill.
A "heavy, boneless hand" on her inner thigh?
Show no mercy.
These were the years when college professors were liquidated in quiet rooms across the nation without a stitch of due process or a feather of protection. As in any revolution, people were deranged with fear.
The finest and most ironic feature of the inquisition was that the accusers were not even expected to face the accused, lest their trauma be further exacerbated. An excellent book on this miserable subject is Australian feminist Helen Garner's masterpiece The First Stone, about a professor at Ormond College who is swiftly destroyed after he is accused of falling on bended knee to declare his infatuation (verbally) to a young student at a campus party.
And who, Garner rightly asked, has the "power" in a scene such as that? An elderly man on bended knee in front of a strapping beauty in her prime.
Let's leave it to future historians to unfurl those impossible threads about sex and power and return to our windmills. It's now 2004, and Naomi Wolf throws a lit match into a cultural sphere she believed to be filled with the right kind of moral gas. And what happens?
Nothing.
I spent the whole week reading essays, reports and blogs. Stories about the story. Be they left or right, pro-feminist or contrarian—they all had a tone of sober repudiation, a shrug, a sense of, Oh for Christ's sake, leave the man alone, this was 20 years ago. As my father put it, "That's not even history; that's archeology."
The outrage is directed back at Wolf—not at Bloom. Even party-line periodicals like the New York Observer, Slate, Salon, with their Alessandras and Alexandras and Larissas. Nobody bought. Anne Applebaum, writing in the Washington Post, soberly and dryly called for an end to "exaggerated victimhood"—as embodied by Wolf.
The jig is up. And Camille Paglia wasn't even called to the frontlines. Women chimed in from all corners, and Camille's voice almost drowned in the din.
It is galling, is it not, when paradigms shift? Nobody yells, "Strap yourselves in, we are changing our minds, we're lurching suddenly and inexplicably to the other side of the scale." They just change positions and then pretend to have never even heard of the previous belief system. Victim feminism has fallen out of fashion—and nobody warned Naomi Wolf about the tanking stocks.
In Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds (1841), he invokes the term "moral pandemics" and charts the phenomenon of mass fevers that have swept nations through history, burning down reason, and in some cases destroying whole societies. One chapter deals with the tulip frenzy that seized the upper classes of Europe in the 17th century, driving the entire economy until one day, interest waned, the fever passed and noblemen who'd sunk their fortunes into a few rare tulip bulbs became suicidal.
So it is with hot political ideas. They have electric currency for years, and then suddenly, they lose value, because in fact, they never were real; their value lay only in what we were willing to imbue them with and project onto them. Fevers break, thank God, and it is when they break that humanity returns to its senses, and sees, for the first time, how the fever itself distorted everything—made shadows look like monsters.
Wolf appears now like a helpless vendor trying to peddle a Semper Augustus tulip bulb in Rotterdam circa 1769. I almost feel sorry for her, but not as sorry as I feel for the countless victims of the sexual inquisition that is now apparently over. I wonder what kind of recourse, if any, they will get.
I don't take "sexual harassment" lightly, and I refuse to be bullied by the charge that I'm leading lambs to slaughter by diminishing the "very real" anguish that "these women feel." I think lechery is very distressing and should be discouraged at every turn.
Raise your hand if you are pro-lechery.
My point has always been that what feminism did was to take seeds of "very real anguish" and create a climate of fear so total that the entire nation was plunged into "very real anguish." An inferno of anguish. The worst thing about it was, it gave women a ghastly power we don't want: the power of the victim, which flared, along frayed cables of sexual politics leftover from the 1960s, into something akin to social terrorism.
Once again, women were thrown back into their shackles as sexual beings first and foremost—by their would-be liberators, the feminist establishment. It was feminism's fatal wrong turn to take the victim road, because down that road, all accomplishments, all dreams, all voices, all identities are vanquished, in order to feed the victim fire. Even someone as successful as Naomi Wolf had to perform a final, ritualistic harikari and throw herself on the pyre in order to assuage the raging gods of the victim cult. It's like watching a bunch of prisoners standing before a prison door flung open. You know how it always ends—they prefer the prison. It's safer there.
I don't take glee in seeing Naomi Wolf pilloried. Though she's not my cup of tea, it would be extreme snobbery not to concede that she has meant a great deal to millions of young women. Somebody should, however, tell Harold Bloom to come out of hiding, come out onto the porch. Times have changed. He's undoubtedly a bit of a lech, but he also has contributed something great to society. Maybe this is the Lord's mysterious work:
We have been spared very little this past century. One thing we were spared, as a result of that "heavy, boneless hand" coming down where it did that fateful night 20 years ago, was Naomi Wolf the great feminist poet.
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"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead
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