Without irony, Wolf says she felt like Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" as she recently tried to discuss with Yale its procedures for welcoming and resolving claims of sexual encroachment. She made numerous phone calls over a six-month period, promising that she only wanted personal assurance, not a public forum. After being ignored, Wolf threatened to go public.
Yale has learned that Wolf makes no idle threats; no word on Bloom's bunny.
However Yale may respond to Wolf's petit mal, her expose permits a glimpse into the confused world of victim feminism, which even Wolf once held in contempt. In "Fire With Fire," she demonstrated a capacity for even-handedness toward the sexual complexities among men and women, urging for instance that we not trivialize genuine sex crimes by exaggerating minor insults.
Such as, perhaps, Bloom's clumsy attempt at seducing an attractive young woman who agreed to a candlelit dinner in her apartment and enjoyed his wine while convincing herself that he was interested only in her poetry? Come on. Even a Yalie with a Rhodes scholarship isn't that stupid. Or, oh, so innocent.
I've always maintained that any woman with a checkbook is a feminist, so I'm not anti-feminist. But something happened to the swashbuckling sisterhood on the way to the bank. Once an ideology has its own accountant and bureaucratic organization, it seems, all allegiance to first principles is off.
One of those principles was that women are not so sensitive and vulnerable as to need constant protection from men. If Wolf's description of that long-ago evening is accurate, any jungle girl would know that Bloom might misjudge her sexual reluctance.
The fact that Bloom's boneless hand prompted Wolf to regurgitate her dinner inarguably put an immediate and explicit end to this would-be tale of sexual harassment, with no harm to any except perhaps to poor Bloom's withered self-esteem. Given Wolf's then-considerable gifts of youth, beauty and guile, I should think she owes the dear fellow an apology.