Wolf II: Playing the Victim Role while Denying It

by Liberty and Power

(Continued from Part I)

It’s time for an inventory of what happened, assuming that Naomi Wolf’s story is semi-accurate. A 19-year-old female student has deified a male professor. She has gone to great lengths to attract his attention. Despite her intelligence and her self-proclaimed expertise at handling men (an unwanted hand on the thigh is no big deal, she insists), she has let him invite himself to a candlelight dinner at her place. She has gotten drunk with him. She is so drunk, and so grossed out to discover that the deity is an ugly, out-of-shape, 53-year-old man who finds her body of much more pressing interest than her poetry, that she vomits on the spot. (In her first published account of the incident, in which Bloom was given another name, she declared that her poetry manuscript was “the most important gift I had ever given any man.”) Witnessing her reaction, the (former?) deity remarks that she is a “deeply troubled girl,” and hastily departs.

(Wolf has actually told her story twice in print now, and the versions don’t fully agree. According to Rachel Donadio’s New York Observer article, Wolf first published an account in her 1997 memoir, Promiscuities. There she invited Bloom, who was given a made-up name and specialty, to her apartment to dine alone with her. The 1997 version also credited the quantity of Amontillado that Wolf had knocked back as a partial explanation of her vomiting. The 2004 version ascribes the vomiting entirely to the sheer horror of Bloom leaning close to her face and putting his hand on her thigh.)

From this encounter, Wolf might have learned that Bloom was not a god, that he was capable of acting like a fool, that his approval was not worth the cost to her self-respect, and that she could live a fulfilled life without being sponsored and validated by a “powerful man.” Or she might have seen her failure to be validated as an irretrievable loss, irrefutable proof that she was unworthy of the deity’s beneficence.

She writes as though Bloom had delivered irrefutable proof. Yet Roderick Long insists the incident did no real damage to her self-esteem: “Wolf says nothing of the kind.”

I believe this is something of the kind: “the encroachment, the transgression… had effects that went deep.” As is this: “What it set off was a moral crisis, shaking my confidence in the institution that I was in.” And this: “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.” (Incidentally, here is one part of Wolf’s story that fails to ring true. Even at an Ivy League institution, Rhodes Scholarships go only to the hoitiest of the toitiest, among those who envision themselves as future world-shapers. How could Wolf have won a Rhodes Scholarship, even on a second try, if her course grades had truly gone so far into the tank?)

Continuing, from her former roommate: “You were really nervous; you were anxious for the rest of the semester.” And finally: “Once you have been sexually encroached upon by a professor, your faith in your work corrodes.” Wolf insisted to Rachel Donadio that she never wrote another poem after the incident. When Donadio asked her to explain why, she burst into tears; she resumed the interview a few minutes later, without answering the question.

Picking up again with Donadio, she exclaimed, “Professor Bloom is not a bad guy! He’s a good guy in many ways! … One stupid action shouldn’t demonize someone or victimize someone. … I’ve talked to many people who have glowing things to say about him and whom he’d mentored. I wish I could have been mentored by him.”

It is also true that in the New York magazine article, Wolf denies presenting herself as a victim: “I was not traumatized personally, but my educational experience was corrupted.” In light of the foregoing, her denial has no credibility. As Zoe Williams wrote in The Guardian, “it really is debeateable 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.”

On rereading her New York magazine article, I was struck by how often Wolf would say something, then explicitly deny the plain intent of her own words. Readers need to be attentive to what Wolf is actually saying, and disinclined to credit what she says she is saying.

She talks of pestering Richard Brodhead, the Dean of Yale College, to take some kind of action against Harold Bloom. Brodhead says there have been no complaints against Bloom during the 11 years that he’s been in office, and he isn’t going to admonish a professor on the basis of unsubstantiated charges now 20 years old. Wolf talks as though punishing Harold Bloom is not the point, then says, “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.” I.e., he should have been punished, or faced the threat of punishment.

She focuses on the dreadful thing that was done to her, and her heavy-hearted decision not to complain to anyone in authority about it. Then she insists that she spent nine months phoning and emailing a bunch of Yale administrators, threatening to publish Bloom’s name, and finally delivering on her threat—all for the sake of other women.

To get the other women’s cases into the article, she had to splice together alleged offenses that range from a male professor putting his hand on a female student’s leg when she sat next to him at a local bar and making a snarky remark when she got up and left her seat, to a professor drugging and raping a grad student. In Fire with Fire, she not only rejected the idea of a simple continuum from unwanted propositions to rape, but went so far as to note that some women have called an awful sexual experience rape when they had obviously consented to it. In those days, she would have emphatically rejected tossing the other women’s cases into the same basket:

It is absolutely true that all sexual harassment lies on a spectrum, but let us not take the opportunity granted by the new attention given these issues to collapse that spectrum. Taking harassment and date rape seriously means demarcating the inappropriate from the criminal. (1993, p. 193).

This ought to make the reader wonder what the other women’s function might be, except to make it look as though she is getting back at Yale University for maintaining inadequate grievance procedures, not at Harold Bloom for putting a crude move on her.

To anyone who thinks I am being too harsh, I suggest a close reading of the last 7 paragraphs of Wolf’s article. What is she recommending be done about “sexual transgression in school and work”? What could she mean when she says it should be handled as a “civil rights” issue? (Federal law already classifies sexual harassment as a form of discrimination against women.) Does she really believe that Yale University has handled sexual transgressions against female students as badly as the Catholic Church has handled priests molesting boys? For that matter, does she really believe that “no one harasses upward in a hierarchy”? (Sexual-harassment experts like to say that a male student who makes sexual comments about a female professor is engaging in “contrapower harassment.”) Anyone who can extract a consistent proposal for reform out of these paragraphs will relieve me of my muddle by explaining what it is. In the meantime, I think I am on safe ground concluding that changing the way universities do their business was not the motivating force behind Wolf’s essay.

To be continued in Part III.

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Robert L. Campbell - 3/22/2004

Charles,

In Part III I'm going to address Wolf's decision not to go through Yale's grievance process in 1983, as well as some problems with grievance processes more generally. And in Part IV I'll be saying something about the things Wolf could have done between 1983 and 2003, if her goal was either to get an apology from Bloom or to induce somebody in authority at Yale to take some kind of action against him. (There was also plenty of time to push for changes in Yale’s grievance procedures, if that’s what she was after. Fire with Fire, published in 1993, specifically recommends action by alumnae against universities that, in their view, condone sexual harassment or other sexual improprieties. It exhorts women to use their power to "make scenes," about these issues and others.)

Parts III and IV are already written (as is Part V); I didn't want to clog the blog by putting them all on L and P at once. But I'll post III and IV this evening.

As far as exegesis goes, I recommend reading Wolf’s article carefully, in its entirety (I read it three times before completing these posts)—and reading Donadio’s piece in the New York Observer. According to Donadio, Dean Brodhead did supply more specific information to Wolf about the grievance process. She received his email before her article was ready to go to press, but apparently chose not to mention it.

You say: "Wolf says that she wanted an environment in place __then__ at Yale University so that Bloom would have faced disciplinary consequences for his piggish and **academically completely inappropriate** actions."

How does she know there wasn’t one? As cloudy as "hostile environment" rules against sexual harassment can get, what Bloom allegedly did was obviously against Yale’s rules in 1983. Naomi Wolf decided not to file a grievance against him. How was the system going to work, if she wouldn’t talk to an administrator and wouldn’t file a complaint?

More briefly, in regard to your other points:
Of course, Naomi Wolf is not obliged to give fundraising speeches for Yale if she doesn’t like the way Yale does its business. And if she doesn’t want to, the Vice President of Development (i.e., Chief Fund Raiser) is the right person to convey her refusal to.

But if she wants to change the way Yale conducts student grievance procedures, why bug the fund-raising guy about them, when he’s not in charge of such things? Why keep looping around from the VP for Development, to the President’s Office, to Women’s Studies Department, to the Literature Department, to the Dean of Yale College—when only the Dean of Yale College has direct authority over student grievances?

In my posts, I’ve actually tried to be generous to Wolf here. The way she describes her on-again, off-again confrontations with various Yale administrators, a reader might be pardoned for wondering whether her entire agenda was "occult," rather than "express," and whether she didn’t have "an awfully strange way of going after it" overall. (I purposely left out her reference to feeling like the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction. Fire with Fire was, shall we way, unusual in praising that movie for its salutary function of showing how women can be motivated by the desire for revenge.) In any event, if she described Bloom’s behavior toward her to administrators in anything like the terms she uses in her article, it would have been a perfectly reasonable inference on Dean Brodhead’s part that she wanted Bloom punished, now. (And let’s not forget that she was threatening to publish Bloom’s name, if Yale didn’t give her a satisfactory response.) Some of the statements she attributes to Brodhead sound to me like standard administrative dodge, just as they do to you--but I actually find myself sympathizing with an administrator when he says he won’t admonish Bloom 20 years after the fact.

Robert

Charles Johnson - 3/22/2004

Robert,

I have trouble taking your close reading of the Wolf article seriously when it involves statements such as this:

"She talks of pestering Richard Brodhead, the Dean of Yale College, to take some kind of action against Harold Bloom."

But Naomi Wolf never talks about this. She never talks about it because it never happened. She repeatedly stated, in her article and in her calls, that this was NOT her intent:

"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."

. . .

"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.'"

Is this an *unreasonable* request for someone to make if she is upset about the atmosphere at Yale, and if she is also a feminist writer who has frequently encountered women telling similar stories for the past decade, and if she is being asked by her alma mater to join a *fundraising* effort on their behalf? (If you had an outstanding issue with the administration of your alma mater and they were trying to cultivate you for a major fundraising effort, wouldn't you want to know whether they'd done anything about that outstanding issue in the past several years?)

You go on to say:

"Brodhead says there have been no complaints against Bloom during the 11 years that he’s been in office, and he isn’t going to admonish a professor on the basis of unsubstantiated charges now 20 years old."

Perhaps you are thinking of this conversation, presented towards the end of the article:

"'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."

But the context of the conversation, not to mention the rest of the article, makes it quite clear that Wolf is *not* particularly concerned here with getting Brodhead to do something about (or to) Harold Bloom 20 years after the fact. She is having a conversation with him to try and get just the information she has been trying to get for months -- i.e., information about how grievances over inappropriate sexual behavior are dealt with at Yale now. And Brodhead is following the same pattern of stonewalling, evasive, cover-your-ass behavior that she has dealt with for months now. It's natural in such a situation to ask "Look, here's this case that I'm concerned about. What do you think would be appropriate to do about it?" and try to get a straight answer. If her real agenda in the calls to Pagnam, Brodhead, etc. was to get direct disciplinary action taken against Harold Bloom 20 years after the fact, that seems to me to be an occult rather than an express agenda of hers, and it seems to me that she has picked an awfully strange way of going after it.

You don't seem quite as convinced as I am by this line of exegesis:

"Wolf talks as though punishing Harold Bloom is not the point, then says, '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.' I.e., he should have been punished, or faced the threat of punishment."

But this involves a clear confusion between two different issues. Wolf says that she wanted an environment in place __then__ at Yale University so that Bloom would have faced disciplinary consequences for his piggish and **academically completely inappropriate** actions. I can't for the life of me see why that is an unreasonable desire. And she also denies that she wants Yale University to take action __now__ to punish Bloom 20 years after the fact. I can't for the life of me see how that constitutes double-talk or going back on what she has said elsewhere in the article. What she wants is some assurance that the administrative environment that didn't exist __then__ does exist __now__; and if it had existed __then__, then it would have (among other things) meant that Harold Bloom would have gotten reprimanded for what he did. But it doesn't follow from that that she wants Harold Bloom reprimanded now (any more than endorsing, e.g., rape shield laws meant advocating the conviction, ex post facto, of rapists who had gotten acquittals through the use of abusive legal tactics before the law was passed).