The Other Charlotte and I seem to be forced to write about odious women today–she writes about Omarosa, the wicked witch of The Apprentice, and I want to address the latest on another wicked witch–celebrity feminist Naomi Wolf. She may have gone too far this time. Ms. Wolf is reportedly accusing eminent, 73-year-old Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom of sexual harassment–twenty years ago!
New York Daily News gossip Lloyd Grove broke the story that the celeb feminist will say this in an upcoming story in New York magazine. Wolf also approached Yale about filing a complaint but was told that the time to do so was within two years of the alleged incident, not when you have a book or an article coming out.
The New York Observer reports that “sources close to Mr. Bloom said that Ms. Wolf never tried reaching the professor at home–his number is listed” but went directly to the university instead.
Ms. Wolf arguably owed more to the man who wrote her a recommendation for the Rhodes Scholarship, which she did indeed win. Bloom has told associates that the accusation is a “vicious lie.”
Camille Paglia, who’s gone a number of rounds with Wolf in the past, is rightly outraged. “I just feel it’s indecent thaqt Naomi Wolf did not have the courage to pursue the matter at the time, or in the 1990s, and put her own reputation on the line, then to bring down a man in his 70s–who has become a culture hero to readers in the humanities around the world–to drag him into a ‘he said/she said’ scenario so late in the game to me demonstrates a lack of proportion and basic sense of fair play.”
Wolf, for whom the term “lipstick feminist” was coined, made headlines most recently before this as the $15,000 a month advisor to Al Gore who urged him to wear “earth tones.”
Her own (flimsy) wardrobe attracted attention some years earlier when Carlin Romano, a Philadelphia writer, showed up to interview her for her 1991 book, The Beauty Myth, and she answered the door wearing “a pair of flimsy see through orange harem pants, scarcely obscuring black panties.”
In Wolf’s 1997 book Promiscuities, she did claim that a professor had harassed her and that it made her feel guilty: “I could practically hear my pulse. What had I done, done, done?”
Written badly, badly, badly.