The inevitable pun: Crying Wolf
Cathy Young | February 27, 2004, 11:52am
Nothing illustrates feminism's moribund state like the response to Naomi Wolf's charges of sexual harassment against Yale literary lion Harold Bloom. (See also here.) Wolf, as you may or may not recall, firsrt gained fame with her best-seller The Beauty Myth as the feminist glamor girl fulminating against woman-oppressing ideals of beauty. Now she claims in a New York magazine cover story that some 20 years ago when she was a student at Yale, Bloom, her mentor, came over to her apartment to read her poetry over a nice glass of amontillado, and ended up groping her thigh. The incident ended there, but Wolf says that it destroyed her self-esteem and is very upset that Yale did not pursue her recent complaint (even though the deadline for filing a formal harassment charge expired years ago, and it's not entirely clear from her account what it was that she wanted the university to do). While Wolf claims that she was motivated by a sense of duty toward other women at Yale, a cynic might be forgiven for thinking that her coming forward was a publicity ploy from a former mini-celebrity with a flagging career.
What's more interesting than Wolf's motives, though, is the fact that the reaction to her charges -- from other women -- has been uniformly negative. So far, Wolf has been lambasted by Meghan O'Rourke in Slate, Zoe Williams in The Guardian, Margaret Wente in The Globe and Mail, and Anne Applebaum in The Washington Post. The general consensus is that Wolf is giving feminism a bad name by using a petty charge of sexual harassment for a vendetta and perpetuating an image of women as helpless victims reduced to panic at the first sign of male piggery. Wente even quotes, approvingly, a rather unsisterly observation by the inimitable Camille Paglia: ""It really grates on me that Naomi Wolf for her entire life has been batting her eyes and bobbing her boobs in the face of men and made a profession out of courting male attention by flirting and offering her sexual allure." Ouch.
Clearly, the days of Anita Hill have passed.
Ron Hardin | February 29, 2004, 6:00am | #
My current essay...
Feminism is bitching made formal, where there is no possible accommodation in details. Women love to bitch. Now they can do it without actual men! Just sort of in general at men. Take, oh, a man of 20 years ago, that's abstract enough.
Bitching in an actual relationship has a place. It's a quest to send the man on. He returns with blue feathers or something that the women had desired, and she rewards him. That's a pattern that can be repeated forever. The woman gets to show from time to time that she's satisfied with the man; and he's willing to go on quests forever, because he's a dope.
Formalize it and you don't get the reward, just the quest. That's why feminism is marching in place, as Derrida put it, and has never done anything else. Marching is the point. We demand men change to fix what's wrong. This is the material of male jokes about what it takes to get laid today, and whether it's worth it. Women demand feathers, but no feather in particular is required.
Men are attracted to women because men have _extremely low standards_. Why does no woman see the advantage of that for women? Men being pigs means that women have a chance with them. Women are otherwise not great deals! Mencken called romance an anaesthetic built into men.
So is old Naomi (``I moan'' backwards, don't tell me that has no subliminal effect over 40 years) complaining that Bloom has low standards? Students really are as neuter as pine boards, is that the plan? Yeah, right, he should love her mind.
But then there's a faint well-bred sigh, a shifting of thighs that means she wants attention.
How to deal with this contradiction? You can always bitch.
I think there are well-established ways to say you're not interested, without the charade, and even without rudeness, or even with grace.
I think though that women buy into the idea that they really are attractive without any male desire to support the idea, in the abstract. No, you really do need the pigs to support it. Everything is about as attractive as, say, a kneecap without it.
Karen L Kleinfelder, in the overly-postmodernist _The Artist, His Model, Her Image, His Gaze: Picasso's Pursuit of the Model_, on Picasso's incessant and increasingly pornographic drawings of artist and model, noted that one day the images stopped, as if Picasso had finally found the answer he had been looking for. She felt that, on that day, Picasso had accepted his mortality. No, some neuron stopped firing. Leave it to a woman.
In the meantime, there's a rich and varied ritual that can be engaged in called the war of the sexes. Feminism is not what it claims to be, a transcendent moment of clarity, but a move within the war, a formalization of sending the male on a quest, but without the possibility of anything further that might come from it.
There's a sense coming out though that there's Something Wrong. Emma Goldman, ``If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.'' Say, that men and women differ not in ability but in interests.
Another feminism entirely is the one actually sought after. The present one displaces it.
Rad Geek | March 4, 2004, 6:53am | #
Cathy Young writes: "The incident ended there, but Wolf says that it destroyed her self-esteem and is very upset that Yale did not pursue her recent complaint."
At the risk of being too blunt, this is simply a lie. Like an unfortunately high number of the responses to Wolf's article (among them those by Anne Applebaum, Meghan O'Rourke, Camilla Paglia, etc.) the critique seems to be based on simply having skimmed over at least half of Wolf's article. Here is what Naomi Wolf says about why she has been upset with Yale:
'I was promptly called back, by Nina Glickson, assistant to the president. I explained once again why I was calling. "Unfortunately for you, Naomi, the statute of limitations has passed" was the first thing she said.
"I know that. I don’t want money or a lawsuit or to make this public . . . " I began again, going through my litany: I wanted to be sure the grievance process was effective. Her empathetic cooing suggested that Yale might have finally sensed something potentially awkward taking shape.
"I’ll get back to you," she promised. She did not do so. Five months later, having called again and yet again, she informed me that President Levin still hoped to speak to me. In fact, he had referred the matter to Brodhead.'
Wolf could not be more clear that she is not, and never has been, interested in trying to pursue some two-decades-after-the-fact disciplinary action against Bloom. She is pissed off at Yale because of the legalistic, cover-your-ass, evasive response to her perfectly reasonable requests to know about the greivance procedures over unwanted sexual advances by their instructors. Wolf underlines this point and what she takes to be the upshot in the closing paragraphs of her essay (which, again, seem simply not to have been read by her critics):
'There is something terribly wrong with the way the current sexual-harassment discussion is framed. Since damages for sexual misconduct are decided under tort law—tort means harm or wrong—those bringing complaints have had to prove that they have been harmed emotionally. 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. This victim construct in the law is one reason that women are often reluctant to go public.'
'But sexual encroachment in an educational context or a workplace is, most seriously, a corruption of meritocracy; it is in this sense parallel to bribery. I was not traumatized personally, but my educational experience was corrupted. If we rephrase sexual transgression in school and work as a civil-rights and civil-society issue, everything becomes less emotional, less personal. If we see this as a systemic-corruption issue, then when people bring allegations, the focus will be on whether the institution has been damaged in its larger mission.'
Young also claims: "What's more interesting than Wolf's motives, though, is the fact that the reaction to her charges -- from other women -- has been uniformly negative. So far, Wolf has been lambasted by Meghan O'Rourke in Slate, Zoe Williams in The Guardian, Margaret Wente in The Globe and Mail, and Anne Applebaum in The Washington Post. The general consensus is that Wolf is giving feminism a bad name by using a petty charge of sexual harassment for a vendetta and perpetuating an image of women as helpless victims reduced to panic at the first sign of male piggery."
But this is not true either. Of course, there have been negative reactions to Wolf -- some of them from women with prominently placed newspaper columns. But why in the world should we be surprised that professional critics of feminism such as Camille Paglia, Anne Applebaum, and -- not to put too fine a point on it -- Cathy Young herself have reacted negatively to Wolf's story? When have they ever reacted positively to anything that Naomi Wolf did?
For a very short but considerably more accurate survey of the differing responses (both critical and supportive of Wolf) that women have made to Wolf's article, one might want to see "Who's Crying Wolf?" from The Guardian 2/26/2004: http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,6000,1156825,00.html
