Why Naomi Wolf's complaint is so distasteful

Naomi Wolf, the American feminist, first wrote about a sexual assault against her when she was a young student in her 1997 book Promiscuities. She did not name the man in the memoir cum socio-cultural analysis, but has named him now. He is Harold Bloom, the pre-eminent professor of English literature, passionate advocate of the English canon, and world-renowned scholar of Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton.

Ms Wolf's story, and those of several other women who claim sexual assault or rape by other professors or students at Yale, was published yesterday in New York magazine. She explains how, in 1983, she was an eager undergraduate while Professor Bloom was a powerful figure in her department, surrounded by acolytes, intimidating and charismatic.

At a dinner in her home, set up ostensibly to discuss her work, he placed a hand on Ms Wolf's inner thigh, which inspired the 20-year-old student of romantic poetry to vomit in the sink. In the wake of the incident Ms Wolf's academic grades went into a "tailspin" because it "set off ... a moral crisis, shaking my confidence in the institution I was in."

Part of the moral crisis focused on the fact of Ms Wolf's powerlessness. She was advised at the time that pursuing a complaint against the professor would result in more damage to her than to him. Haunted for years by her own cowardice, and hopeful that she might be reassured that things were different now, Ms Wolf recently got in touch with Yale again. She was stonewalled, after being told that there was a two-year statute of limitations on sexual harassment complaints.

Many people would agree with those applying the rules at Yale. Is all this the great big deal that Ms Wolf clearly considers it to be? Many women might suggest that a sharp and immediate slap to the professor's quivering jowls might have been more appropriate than throwing up, nursing the hurt for two decades, then exposing the man with the wandering hands on an international platform so many years after the event.

Camille Paglia, also a feminist, also a prominent Yale academic, and also a former student of Professor Bloom, is certainly one of them. Blasting Ms Wolf for her revelation, she told the New York Observer: "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 seventies 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 and a basic sense of fair play. Naomi Wolf, 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."

Ms Wolf, it appears, is not the only person who can't keep her mouth shut. By making the comments she did, Ms Paglia immediately drowned out all serious points Ms Wolf was attempting to make, by providing instead the enjoyable spectacle of a claws-out, tits-up feminist cat-fight.

Further, she made accusations against Ms Wolf that any male critic nowadays would hesitate to level. Essentially Ms Paglia suggests that Ms Wolf wants to have things both ways, using her sexual power to manipulate men, then applying her feminist profile to punish them for it. In other, more familiar words, Ms Paglia implies without a shred of evidence that Ms Wolf, somehow, had probably been "asking for it".

This, of course, is the stock response to accusations of sexual misdemeanour. The victim is blamed while the aggressor is presented as a confused innocent, out of his depth in the swirling waters of the modern female's sexual complexity. Or as Ms Wolf puts it in New York magazine, when discussing the usual arc of legal attempts to get redress for sexual misconduct, "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."

Professor Bloom must know this as well as the rest of us. He is staying silent, knowing that as long as he does, the focus will remain on Ms Wolf and her motivations. He has, though, instructed friends to dismiss Ms Wolf's allegation as a "vicious lie". Which should immediately silence those critics who suggest that a grope of the thigh is nothing to be upset about. Sworn enemies in all other aspects of the case, Professor Bloom and Ms Wolf seem united in their perception that such an imputation is extremely serious. They are both right on that.

Curiously though, Ms Wolf appears to view the incident and its effect on her as serious only within the context of the institution which, by its prolonged silence, condoned it. Indeed, she says that "an unwanted hand on a thigh from a date was nothing". It is the abuse of power, rather than the sexual advance, which concerns Ms Wolf.

Ms Wolf sees her quest as a noble one. She says that she has taken Yale to task because "the institution is not accountable when it comes to the equality of women". She wishes to make the ivy league universities of America safe places for the bloom of America's female youth to flourish.

I'm afraid, though, that while I'm willing to travel some of the way down Ms Wolf's primrose path alongside her. I actually find some of the attitudes she displays to be almost offensive. I do have sympathy with her inability to let go of this transgression against her past self. I do understand why she didn't complain at the time, but now feels that she is powerful enough to do so.

But I can't condone the idea that hierarchies only operate on campus or, as Ms Wolf briefly mentions "in the workplace". Inappropriate sexual behaviour is pretty much always about power, whether it's obvious or not, whether it's the power to grade a student or recommend her for a Rhodes Scholarship or just the power to loom in a threatening way and make a woman feel lucky that the minor assault of a squeeze to the thigh hasn't led to painful violence or rape.

The distasteful thing about this tale is not located among the bilge Camille Paglia has spouted, but the solipsism of it. Ms Wolf says she abhors what she alleges Professor Bloom has got away with because it is "a corruption of meritocracy". I abhor what Ms Wolf is saying because it suggests that women powerful enough in the "meritocracy" to take their place in important 'hierarchies" should have protection from sexual harassment, through their institutions.

In other words, such women should be protected by a layer of accountability more exacting than the mere law of the land, which is, apparently, good enough for other females. Fine, if this is aimed at establishing a gold standard to be extended to other women. But that is not what Ms Wolf implies. Ms Wolf finishes her piece by saying that if a Yale undergraduate came to her today having suffered the same encroachment, she would have to "with a heavy heart, advise that young woman, for her own protection, to get a good lawyer."

Even now, Ms Wolf would have been better off taking her own advice, than limiting her discussion of sexual harassment to such a narrow arena. A minor celebrity in a bar wields power over impressionable women in just the way Professor Bloom did over Ms Wolf. The law, not just élite hierarchies, should deal with this properly.

d.orr@independent.co.uk