From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
The Anxiety of His Influence
Naomi Wolf recalls a night from 20 years ago. She once wrote about it differently.
In college a friend of mine used to reduce us both to teary laughter by making up funny songs about what people's private parts would say if only they could speak. This vulgar amusement came to mind when I heard that the celebrated feminist writer Naomi Wolf had decided, after 20 years, to unmask the even more celebrated literary critic and Yale professor Harold Bloom as a groper of pretty co-eds; specifically, on one disastrous, candle-lit, Amontillado-fueled evening, of Naomi Wolf herself.
"You have the aura of election upon you," Prof. Bloom breathed meaningfully at Ms. Wolf, before dropping his "heavy, boneless hand" on her thigh, according to Ms. Wolf's account of the incident in this week's edition of New York magazine, which puts the story on its cover with the portentous heading "Sex & Silence at Yale." So upset was the young feminist, the article explains, that she immediately leaped up and vomited into a sink. Prof. Bloom pronounced her a "deeply troubled girl," corked his sherry and left.
A beastly incident--for both of them--if true. For Ms. Wolf, though, we are asked to believe that it was transformatively awful. Though she was sexually experienced, this unwanted touch of a teacher sparked in her a "moral crisis" that eventually shook her confidence in Yale University itself. She "was spiraling downward" in her grades and proceeded to suffer two decades of "spiritual discomfort" for not having reported Prof. Bloom's outrage to the Grievance Board. Friends persuaded her "not to speak to anyone official about what had happened," Ms. Wolf says, so she "did not feel it was safe to tell."
"What did we have to go on in 1983 but rumor?" Ms. Wolf writes of Yale, as if of Stalin's Kremlin. "In the absence of transparent procedures, decoding the right rumors was how you survived." As the world knows, Ms. Wolf did survive the apparently brutal, secretive culture of the Ivy League. That term she received a B for her course of independent study with the great professor--who did not meet with her again--and went on to write highly successful books about the intricacies of her sexuality.
Now, it is indeed dismaying to find that an older man whom you take to be a mentor, or who you believe is captivated by your sparkling young intellect, has secretly been hoping to get you undressed. Young women make this discovery all the time; it is a regrettable aspect of growing up in an oversexed society with no real norms, and perhaps was always thus.
But what brought my college friend's bawdy songs to mind is that when Naomi Wolf first told this story, her private parts sang, as it were, a different tune. A tune so different, indeed, that it might be another song. Instead of "he said, she said," it appears to be a case of "she said, she said."
In 1997, Ms. Wolf recounted the incident in her book "Promiscuities," albeit veiling the identity of the amorous professor. In the book she makes clear that students knew that "Dr. Johnson" occasionally would "elect" girls with the right aura. One Saturday night, by pre-arrangement, the professor came over to her apartment with her manuscript and a bottle. In thrilled expectation, she had put out flowers, lit candles and taken particular care to dress attractively. And over the course of the evening she got room-spinningly drunk--a detail that does not appear in the New York magazine piece.
It's not surprising that in "Promiscuities" she confesses to feelings of complicity in the brief hanky-panky that ensued. Yet in the New York magazine exposé, there is no acknowledgment of her inner excitement or her romantic preparations--there's just the frightened panting of a tender fawn chased by a big bad predator.
There's so much ugliness in this story, and in the publicizing of it, that it's difficult to know where to start. For one thing, Ms. Wolf's tale illustrates two impossibly contradictory strains in the feminist culture that she herself promotes. Women must be sexually shameless--meaning shame-free--and society should encourage female erotic exploration. Men, however, must observe a phenomenal degree of purity--in language, eye-movement, intentions and most definitely in the placing of heavy, boneless hands on women's thighs.
This reverse-Talibanism may make sense in the steamy atmosphere of a women's studies class, but it withers into absurdity in the fresh air of real life.
Let's say, for example, that Ms. Wolf had wanted to bed her famous professor. That would be cool, right? A young woman exercising her sexual power--who is to say that she can't sleep with whomever she likes? In this scenario, the professor makes his clumsy approach, she responds and the fireworks go off Love American Style. In short, if she had enjoyed his overture--a hand on a thigh!--it would have been hunky-dory, and she wouldn't have written about it save perhaps in an analysis of May-September couplings.
Instead, he touches her leg, she recoils and he leaves. And 20 years later, in the twilight of his scholarship, Harold Bloom comes out of his house to the accusing glare of television cameras. From this point onward, a whiff of goatiness will forever cling to his astonishingly humane, passionate and abundant oeuvre.
So why do it? Why reveal his identity now?
Naomi Wolf implies that she was forced to expose Prof. Bloom because over the past year Yale administrators failed to satisfy her concerns about current sexual-harassment procedures at the university. "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."
This is deeply disingenuous. If Ms. Wolf's problem is with Yale, it's with Yale. (University officials, meanwhile, express bafflement at Ms. Wolf's accusations of institutional indifference and point to Yale's long-standing policy of penalizing sexual miscreants.) And if Harold Bloom were an obscure math professor, instead of a towering man of letters, Naomi Wolf's "crisis of conscience" would never have made the cover story of New York magazine.
One is left with the unpleasant suspicion that Ms. Wolf wanted to get back into the spotlight and went rummaging in her basket of anecdotes until she found a juicy one to squeeze for publicity. And what do you know? It worked. For here we are again, talking about Naomi Wolf.
Mrs. Gurdon writes "The Fever Swamp," a column for National Review Online.
