The Wolf/Bloom Story Is Out

Two decades later, she’s speaking out. But her alma mater still isn’t listening.

New York presents Naomi Wolf on "Sex and Silence at Yale." Mind you, it's wrong to say that "her alma mater still isn't listening," because they didn't have anything to listen to two decades ago; Wolf never told authorities about what she says Bloom did to her. (Speaking of Bloom, geez, could the magazine have found a photo where his face wasn't melting off under the glare of the stagelights?)

Are they not listening now? It's clear they're stonewalling on her questions regarding current grievance procedures at Yale, a rather disturbing lack of transparency on their part. But nobody quoted in the article appears to be brushing off her testimony or suggesting that the alleged incident didn't happen. They just can't do anything about it now because she's kept all the details to herself for too long (although she's used a pared-down version of the story for years in speeches and in Promiscuities).

Once you have been sexually encroached upon by a professor, your faith in your work corrodes. If the administration knew and did nothing—because the teacher was valuable to them—they had made a conscious calculation about his and our respective futures.

But how would the administration have known? Wolf admits that she never filed a formal grievance because (a) she was afraid of how the proceedings would turn out, and (b) she didn't want to jeopardize her chances of getting into graduate school. I won't fault her for that; I knew a young man at my college who had the courage to go to the university after a (male) professor initiated inappropriate sexual conduct, and I saw how hard it was for him to make the decision to come forward. So I can understand why a similarly young Wolf would end up staying silent. Fortunately, much of the second half of her article consists of stories of women who did report what happened to them, and though those accounts don't necessarily offer a sufficient degree of hope, they do offer some.

As to how Wolf's presented the story, I'd like to interpret that fairly generously and not write her off as a publicity-mongerer. True, she didn't "have" to name Bloom this time, either, but after all the women she met in the course of researching this article who did name names, continuing to hold back may have struck her as continuing cowardice.