Naomi Wolf on her sexual harassment in 2004:

Slate recalls a time before Naomi Wolf  dismissed the Assange rape charges as concoctions of the dating police. It was when she came out with her sexual harassment encroachment story, 20 years after the event:

“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………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……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—………. 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.”………..

Most of Wolf’s broader case against Bloom—and the oppressive atmosphere at Yale in 1983—rests on hearsay:……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.”……..

……. 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.)……

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 damp our sympathy………..

What’s particularly frustrating about Wolf’s piece is that it is raising an important question irresponsibly. Sexual harassment continues to occur on campuses……? 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.”

Lila:

So, let’s see.  In 2004, a boneless hand sent Naomi Wolf into a “moral crisis” from which she barely staggered out 20 years later….

Then, in 2012, in her book, Vagina, Wolf claims to have even been traumatized by salaciously named pasta.

I repeat. Traumatized. By pasta.  Named Cuntini, if you want to know.

But what was  Naomi Wolf’s response to  the rape charges against Assange?

“Dear Interpol:

As a longtime feminist activist, I have been overjoyed to discover your new commitment to engaging in global manhunts to arrest and prosecute men who behave like narcissistic jerks to women they are dating.

I see that Julian Assange is accused of having consensual sex with two women, in one case using a condom that broke. I understand, from the alleged victims’ complaints to the media, that Assange is also accused of texting and tweeting in the taxi on the way to one of the women’s apartments while on a date, and, disgustingly enough, ‘reading stories about himself online’ in the cab.”

Lila:

Actually, Assange was accused (rightly or wrongly) of rape by two women, one claiming force, and the other that she was asleep.

Look at  the charges against Assange that Wolf claimed  were concoctions of the “dating police”:

Forced sex, forced unprotected sex, physical violence.

Only allegations, true, but surely in need of something better than a glib laugh from a woman who publicized a 20-year old evidence-bereft story about an octogenarian…