Sometimes if you wait long enough, questions will answer themselves.
Such as this one explored by feminist Naomi Wolf in her 1993 book, "Fire With Fire": Why are women so reluctant to declare themselves feminists?
Fast-forward to February 2004 and Wolf solved her own riddle in a long piece she wrote for New York magazine. The answer is Naomi Wolf.
Women busy being women rather than building resumes around the incidental fact of their womanhood, see feminists like Wolf as part of the problem. How can any grown-up take seriously, for instance, a woman who 20 years after the fact must - simply must! - come clean about the professor who once put his hand on her leg.
The story Wolf portentously tells revolves around her senior year at Yale when Harold Bloom, the revered literature professor, put his hand on her thigh following a candlelit dinner lubricated with a bottle of sherry at her apartment. In prose that suggests Wolf missed her calling as a romance novelist, she writes that Bloom leaned toward her and breathed:
"You have the aura of election upon you." Wolf was seeking Bloom's recommendation for a Rhodes scholarship as well as a review of her poetry.
The next thing little ol' Naomi knew, Bloom's "heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh."
Gad. What's a girl to do? Just so "no"? It's always an option, but instead Wolf lurched to the sink and "found myself vomiting," whereupon Bloom corked his bottle of Amontillado and took his leave. As a gentleman might, one could argue. But not Wolf.
For Wolf, this episode of "sexual encroachment" when she was 20 and not yet a feminist of waning fame, caused her "spiritual discomfort." To her minimal credit, Wolf admits that she hasn't suffered materially. She managed to write a few books, briefly turned Al Gore into an Alpha Male and continues to enjoy speaking invitations.
But her soul, alas, was not rested. "Keeping bad secrets hurts," she writes.
Telling insignificant secrets to resurrect one's career, while ruining another's life (Bloom is 80 and reportedly in declining health) is, on the other hand, presumably painless.
Why the sudden need to verbally purge what her 20-year-old tummy apparently failed to cede? Feminist duty and Jewish guilt, according to Wolf.
As a feminist author and activist, Wolf says she is haunted by the possibility that others might have suffered because she failed to report Bloom's advances. According to her faith, Wolf says she is a sinner of omission, complicit in Bloom's and Yale's tyranny of secrecy.