Posted on 02/19/2004 7:19:32 PM PST by mondonico
America's most telegenic feminist, Naomi Wolf, has touched off a media firestorm with a forthcoming condemnation of two decades of alleged sexual harassment against women at Yale, her former university.
According to advance "tasters" of the expose, she describes herself as a victim of harassment and names a senior professor as her tormentor.
Her high-profile denunciation of alleged sexual misconduct at the Ivy League university has already drawn a furious response from one of her feminist sisters and another former student of the professor.
Camille Paglia accused Wolf of launching a witch hunt similar to those that swept New England in the 17th century and, in distinctly unfeminist fashion, of exploiting her looks to advance her career.
"It really smacks of the Salem witch hunts and all the accompanying hysteria," Paglia said.
"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."
The professor, who has been described as "destructively seductive", has maintained a dignified silence during the furore. "He has no comment," his wife said yesterday.
Wolf, a former Rhodes Scholar and the author of bestselling books such as The Beauty Myth, is reported to make her allegations in a piece to be published in next week's issue of New York magazine.
Yale has confirmed that she contacted the university with her claims but was told that the two-year statute of limitations for such offences had already passed. She studied there in the early 1980s.
When she asked for an apology for her alleged ordeal, she was told that none would be forthcoming "when there is no finding of wrong-doing".
Her piece is understood to catalogue the experiences of 10 women at Yale.
Tolerance of sexual harassment "is much bigger than one person or one incident and it needs to be addressed", a spokesman for the magazine said.
Sharp-eyed readers of Wolf's work have already spotted a passage from her book Promiscuities in which a professor visits her at home, supposedly to discuss her poetry, but then gropes her between her legs.
"It felt so familiar: this sense of being exposed as if in a slow-moving dream of shame," she wrote. "I could practically hear my own pulse: What had I done, done, done?"
The professor inspires fierce loyalty from many of his students and his learning, warmth and charisma have been described as "overwhelmingly, destructively, seductive" for female undergraduates.
After making her name with The Beauty Myth, Wolf won the status of an international celebrity and is not averse to appearing on middle-brow television talk shows.
A controversial figure, she is an easy target for the likes of Paglia who, in the light of the new allegations, unleashed a stream of vitriol at her fellow feminist. It was "indecent" of her to wait for 20 years "to bring all of this down on an elderly man who has health problems, to drag him into a 'he said/she said' scenario so late in the game", she raged.
"How many books, how many articles, Naomi, are you going to impose on us so we have to be dragged back to your teenage heartbreak years?"
She added: "This is regressive. It's childish. Move on! Get on to menopause next!"
She's still playing that game to this day. Check her out on Dennis Miller's show sometime.
His estate, ie. his family. Even after his death, they can continue litigation well into the 21st century. They have standing to do so.
I've noticed it's either
"Come here -- OK, I'm reassured of my ability to attract men, I'm done with you now, you can leave",
or
"I was trying to attract a SPECIFIC kind of guy, not YOU! Ewww.."
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