Feminist author Naomi Wolf has been attacked for reigniting a sexual harassment claim by naming her college professor, writes Ian Kilroy
As this week progressed, Naomi Wolf, prominent American feminist and author of The Beauty Myth, looked more and more like Joan of Arc. There she was, sacrificing herself martyr-like for a cause, while the flames of critical opinion rose higher and higher against her.
Her critics said she had started a witch-hunt. If so, it was one where she herself ended up burning unexpectedly at the stake. It all started with an article published last Monday in New York Magazine. In the piece, Wolf accuses respected Yale professor and literary critic, Harold Bloom, of sexual harassment. It happened while she was one of his senior students at Yale university in the 1980s, she says.
At her house for dinner, she and Bloom drank a bit of alcohol with their meal. As Wolf tells it, Bloom placed his hand on her thigh. She rejected his advances, backed away and vomited in the sink. He mumbled something and left, taking with him, apparently, Wolf's faith in Yale university and leaving her feeling that her "educational experience was corrupted".
This is an incident that Wolf says she "can't bear to carry around anymore". She had mentioned the incident in her 1997 book Promiscuities, without naming the man involved. As she suggests in her article, she is only going public with Bloom's identity now because she has "an obligation to protect other woman students who might be targets now". In the piece she indicates, without evidence, that Bloom had made something of a habit of sexually harassing students. So far Bloom has declined to comment on the accusations.
Citing other cases of alleged sexual harassment at Yale, Wolf goes on in her piece to suggest that there is something rotten at the heart of the Ivy League, that her revered Connecticut alma mater makes a habit of dealing inadequately with sexual harassment claims.
Despite numerous attempts in 2003 and 2004 to get a response from Yale on the 1983 Bloom incident, Wolf heard nothing back from the university for months. She appears unconcerned that there is a two-year statute of limitations on such harassment investigations, limiting the ability of the university to do anything 20 years later.
It seems that the whole old debate about the dangers of intimate interpersonal relationships on US campuses has been reopened. What is appropriate and inappropriate behaviour? How should universities deal with the problem of sexual harassment between students and faculty members? How should rules and regulations be enforced in a manner that protects both students and staff, as well as protecting the trust and intimacy necessary to the teaching process?
The robust and colourful Camille Paglia - another leading US feminist - was one of the first to cry Wolf when the piece was published. In a muscular critique of the magazine article in the New York Observer, Paglia goes where no male critic would dare go.
"I just feel it's indecent that if Naomi Wolf did not have the courage to pursue the matter at the time, then to bring all of this down on a man who is in his 70s and has health problems, to drag him into a 'he said, she said' scenario so late in the game, to me demonstrates a lack of proportion," says Paglia.
"Naomi Wolf," she adds, "for her entire life, has been batting her eyes and bobbing her boobs and made a profession out of courting male attention by flirting and offering her sexual allure."
Feminist critics are saying Wolf is obsessed with her own exaggerated victimhood. Most, however, feel that Paglia's "you were asking for it" attitude is an undesirable throwback to an out-dated way of thinking about sexual harassment. And yet there is a lot of sympathy for Paglia's thesis that a kind of unhealthy Victorian prudishness has run riot on the puritan campuses of New England. Human beings have relationships, make advances and are rejected - maybe that's a part of interpersonal interaction that seems more of a problem in Anglo-American culture than it does in, say, French culture.
Yale, for its part, has responded to Wolf's claims with an open letter by the university provost to the Yale Daily News. In it, provost Susan Hockfield insists that Yale has an "abhorrence of sexual harassment" and that since 1979 an effective grievance procedure has been in place. Hockfield draws attention to the fact that Wolf did not bring the problem forward "in a timely fashion" and that silence "limits the university's ability to redress violations for the benefit of all".
The letter also responds to Wolf's criticisms that the Yale grievance procedure does not take place in public with lawyers involved. "For obvious reasons," the provost's letter reads, "our policies and practices include the protection of the confidentiality of all parties." It is worth noting that, if it were a court of law, more evidence would need to be brought forward than last Monday's article offered.
Whatever her motivation to go public with this story now, the critical backlash against her suggests that the whole enterprise has backfired. Wolf is an intelligent, confident and financially and professionally successful person. Her portrayal of herself as powerless victim just doesn't wash with most.
While many pundits this week commented that sexual harassment remains unacceptable and needs to be dealt with, many of those same pundits also seemed to feel that human relationships are more complex than portrayed in Wolf's piece.