naomi wolf
Yale sucked into sex abuse storm
MARCUS WARREN
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| Naomi Wolf |
New York, Feb. 20: 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 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 spokesperson 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.
