Wolf and Wolf

Naomi "Beauty Myth" Wolf, last in the news for charging Al Gore like a million bucks for telling him to wear earth tones, is accusing literary heavyweight (really--even his "boneless [?] hand" is heavy) Harold Bloom of making a creepy and awkward pass at her two decades ago. She was a senior at Yale. He was her professor. He brought "a bottle of Amontillado" to her apartment. (A flask of Amontillado? You've got to be kidding me. I guess that like Montressor, she likes her revenge served cold):

The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh.

I lurched away. “This is not what I meant,” I stammered. The whole thing had suddenly taken on the quality of a bad horror film. The floor spun. By now my back was against the sink, which was as far away as I could get. He moved toward me. I turned away from him toward the sink and found myself vomiting.

I find the very last part of that story hard to credit, unless there was a lot more booze involved than she's letting on.

Then again, hmm. Maybe she's on the level.

I don't think I'm suggesting sexual harassment is no big deal if I say it's really not very iron-jawed-angel for Ms. Wolf to be typing breathlessly about this incident twenty years after the fact. But it probably is pretty tasteless for me to recount the first thing I thought when I read this story: there should be a Page Six or an US Weekly aimed at the pseudointellectual class, recounting the pecadillos of academics, jurists, authors, and suchlike creatures. I'd read it daily.

Posted by Gene Healy on Wednesday, February 25, 2004 at 3:04 PM

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