Oh well, can't remember who exactly, but does it really matter? 
Posted on 02/27/2004 6:06:15 PM PST by quidnunc
The other night, I came across the writer Naomi Wolf participating in a TV panel discussion about the Patriot Act. When one of her fellow guests, David Horowitz, turned in his chair to look at her, Wolf angrily broke off from the point she was making, to upbraid him.
"Don't try to shut me up!" she shouted. Horowitz looked at her, mystified. "What did I do?" he asked. "It's all in your body language!" Wolf said, indicating the movement he had just made in his chair.
"But Naomi," Horowitz replied in some confusion, "you told me during the last commercial break that I should turn and face you the next time you spoke. I was trying to do just that."
Before turning over, I remember thinking what a daft old brush Wolf was and how unfortunate it was that a humourless silly like her has come to be so widely regarded as the authentic voice of American feminism.
These sentiments cross my mind every couple of years or so, whenever Wolf comes out with another one of her pious blockbusters about the international conspiracy to stop women feeling good about themselves.
Experience has taught me that allowing myself to dwell on the subject of Wolf for too long is bad for my spirits. Usually, if I hum loudly to myself, I can make the wearying thought of her go away.
This week, however, after reading the New York magazine article in which Wolf accuses the eminent literary scholar Harold Bloom of having "sexually encroached" on her 20 years ago at Yale University, no amount of humming would do the trick.
Her maddening, apple-cheeked face kept dancing before my eyes; her drama-queen prose style kept haunting me like a bad smell.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Twenty years on, I am handing over a secret to its rightful owner. I can’t bear to carry it around anymore.
In the late fall of 1983, professor Harold Bloom did something banal, human, and destructive: He put his hand on a student’s inner thigh — a student whom he was tasked with teaching and grading. The student was me, a 20-year-old senior at Yale. 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.
How did this all begin? For years now, Yale has been contacting me: Would I come speak at a celebration of women at Yale? Would I be in a film about Jewish graduates? Would I be interviewed for the alumni magazine?
I have usually declined, for a reason that I explain to my (mostly female) college audiences: The institution is not accountable when it comes to the equality of women. I explain that I was the object of an unwanted sexual advance from a professor at Yale — and that his advances seemed to be part of an open secret. I tell them that I had believed that many Yale decision-makers had known about his relations with students, and nothing I was aware of had happened to stop it.
Where is the professor now? they ask. He is still there, I explain: famous, productive, revered. I describe what the transgression did to me — devastated my sense of being valuable to Yale as a student, rather than as a pawn of powerful men.
Then, heartbreakingly, a young woman will ask: “Did you tell?”
I answer her honestly: “No. I did nothing.”
“Have you never named the guy, all these years on?”
“No,” I answer. “Never.”
“But,” she will ask hesitantly, “don’t you have an obligation to protect other women students who might be targets now?”
“Yes,” I answer. “I do have that obligation. I have not lived up to it. I have not been brave enough.” And then there is always, among those young, hopeful women, a long, sad silence.
After such speeches, a young woman will come up to me — in Texas, in Indiana, in Chicago — in tears: My music professor is harassing me, she’ll say. I tried to tell the grievance board, but they told me it is my word against his, and that there is no point in pursuing it. I know I won’t get a job if I do anything about it. My lit professor made a pass at me; he is grading my senior thesis. My female adviser basically told me to drop it if I want to graduate; to switch classes; to start all over with another subject. My lab instructor keeps putting his hands on my body, and his mentor is on the grievance committee. I can’t sleep. What should I do?
I am ashamed of what I tell them: that they should indeed worry about making an accusation because what they fear is likely to come true. Not one of the women I have heard from had an outcome that was not worse for her than silence. One, I recall, was drummed out of the school by peer pressure. Many faced bureaucratic stonewalling. Some women said they lost their academic status as golden girls overnight; grants dried up, letters of recommendation were no longer forthcoming. No one was met with a coherent process that was not weighted against them. Usually, the key decision-makers in the college or university — especially if it was a private university — joined forces to, in effect, collude with the faculty member accused; to protect not him necessarily but the reputation of the university, and to keep information from surfacing in a way that could protect other women. The goal seemed to be not to provide a balanced forum, but damage control.
Finally, last summer, I could no longer bear my own collusive silence. Yale had reached out to me once again. The Office of Development had assigned an alumna to cultivate me: She sent a flattering letter inviting me to join a group of women to raise money for Yale.
-snip-
(Naomi Wolf in New York Magazine, March 1, 2004
To Read This Article Click Here
To hear American feminists tell it, no one in the world suffers as much as they suffer.
Kvetching. An old Yankee word.
"Whingeing" in Britspeak = "whining" in Amerispeak.
P.S. I can also assert that Naomi is a disgrace to Yale, as well as being s disgrace to women and to intellectuals.
Congressman Billybob
They. . .themselves, make feminine power, not a mystique. . .but a mistake.
The question is not 'how' they do it; but why?
Oh well, can't remember who exactly, but does it really matter?
Whether that community is disempowered Blacks or just inferiority-complexed women; the dynamics of leadership and it's goals are the same.
The only things which don't have to be excerpted are those in the public domain, and I very seldom post any of those.
It's the law.
Me too. She was insufferable as an undergraduate.
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