Outside The Vales Of Har

A short while ago, RK posted the following in a comment on the Blooming-Wolf fiasco, and though I kept meaning to respond to it I never did. Since, though, that entry is about to fall into the archives, I thought I'd resurrect it here in primary text. Here's what RK wrote:

Well, I sort of stand partly corrected. By a lady of my own age, a good friend, with whom I've discussed this on e-mail, bitching about the New Puritanism, and saying that all the girl had to do was say bugger off, you're old and ugly and I've got a boyfriend and if you do it again I'll tell all my friends which is worse than telling the Dean.

So my friend, whom I respect absolutely, sent me the following, in which I have just suppressed a few names for discretion's sake. But I thought the argument was worth looking at.

"Well, you do have a point. But it isn't just changing times--it's also a curtain-lifting on a real, very real problem. When sex enters a relationship with unequal power it really, really is difficult for the less powerful. And it can work both ways-- X made a pass at a couple of guys I know (before she took to doing it to women) and they were seriously bothered precisely because she has power. It really is creepy when this happens, really upsetting. This is not recent PC, it's only recent willingness to do something, tell somebody, not take it anymore. I had heard tell about HB and I heard (but never asked her about it) that one reason Y came to Columbia for a bit was to get away from HB, who chased her around the desk once too often. This isn't love, after all, or Eros winging through the seminar room and leading to something pleasurable but *mutual*--this is an older guy doing creepy things to an impressed student. A hand on the thigh is not rape, but it is deeply upsetting when the guy is your university's superstar. If he tried this on me I'd react as you say (well, I would have at 45, say), but if oh say Z had done this to me when I was his student at Harvard--and he too had a roving eye--I would have freaked out. Oh well. The gender gap, I guess. I don't mind real Love at the university, just not older famous guys trying to cop a feel from the vulnerable and naive."

(You have to admire the layering functions, n'est-ce pas?)

I agree, copping a feel from the vulnerable and naive is wrong, and the dimensions of power are problematic. Did Bloom act inappropriately, assuming Wolf's narrative is factual (something I'm not willing to say, given Ms Wolf's answers to questions subsequently)? Probably. But here the conditions of context alter matters: at the very least, it's hard for me to read Wolf as being totally blameless in this scenario. So awestruck by Bloom's intellectual stature (recalling that she described him as a vortex of intellect and learning, or something to that effect) and so desperate for his approval on her own poetry, she no doubt sent Bloom some mixed signals, signals which he interpreted as sexual receptiveness but which she may not at all have intended. Suffice it to say, though, that it should have been obvious to her that 'things' were taking a very different course than she intended, and she should have put the kebosh on matters sooner. Why didn't she? Perhaps a bit of intimidation. Perhaps a bit of neediness on her part to have the great HB judge her poetry. But perhaps most of all, a conflictedness within herself between her intellectual attraction to him and her physical disinterest in him. Bloom probably read her intellectual attraction to him as an invitation. She, it certainly seems, hadn't reconciled matters within herself to be sufficiently clear with him. The trouble with this scenario is that it's not just the simple cut-and-dry harassment: there was no issued threat, even by Wolf's account; there's no indication whatsoever that Wolf was physically or romantically dis-interested in Bloom prior to him touching her thigh; and there's no indication either that once his pass had been spurned that he pressured her or threatened her in any way, shape, or form. This isn't the case of a professor manhandling his student for cheap thrills, nor one of him cooercing her sexually, nor one of repeated situation of her as a sexual object. It seems, at least to this observer, that somewhere along the road, the two of them misunderstood one another, and misunderstood one another very badly indeed. Such are the problems or hero-worship, sufficiently ambiguous as to confuse the worshipper as much as the worshipped. Reading Wolf's article, it's obvious that there's still a dimension of hero-worship there for Bloom, albeit now a jaded dimension.

This is why I think Wolf's reaction to this scenario was so extreme at the time, and which has only festered over the years. Why was her stomach so wrapped in knots that she supposedly vomitted after he made the pass? Her hero wasn't seeming so heroic anymore; she was torn between intellectual attraction and physical repulsion; she was in a situation of ugly desire coming from a man she didn't want to believe could possess such a thing, and worse she found herself on the receiving end of that desire. In short, she saw more of the man -- the male, the hu-man-- than she wanted to see, and she didn't know what to do. I'm not trying to minimize matters here. I'm trying to see matters from Wolf's perspective as sympathetically as I can. Here, though, the screw turns.

Much of her 'anguish' over this and over the years (and goodness knows, she makes it seem like her world collapsed around her) is, I suspect, the result of her own wondering if she consciously or subconsciously encouraged this scenario to happen, the scenario not just of an older man making a pass at a younger woman, but of an idol demonstrating and enacting his human weakness to an idolator. No wonder she couldn't then say "get your hand off me," and no wonder she hasn't been able to shrug the scenario off after twenty years, wielding the memory of the experience in flagellation of herself. Wolf's tale isn't as much about sexual harassment as it is about the injury of her imaginative innocence, and, at the risk of sounding a little Freudian, I think we all know that injuries to our innocence are always more damaging than can usually be explained with pure reason.

No wonder so many feminists and other pundits, this blog included, have dismissed her claims of injury. Twenty years later, and she's still traumatizing herself-- notice I'm using the word "traumatizing" in its active rather than its passive form-- with an incident that most of us would have "gotten over" eons ago. To those of us at a remove from this scenario, her story seems rather a trifle, when more serious instances of harassment and rape are elided over. Wolf's story really doesn't seem to be about power exerted by one to the subjection of another. Wolf is clearly the center of her story, not Bloom, not Yale, not even sexual harassment; her article is about herself, and about her own difficulties with dealing with this injury to her innocence. As much as she's tried to frame her story in the context of the institutional failures to deal with sexual harassment, that really seems more like a platform from which she could claim to legitimate her own desire to deal with this matter publicly, to reenact this scenario, perhaps with the subconscious desire to exorcise it from her. Think about it. Did she have to name said professor? Did she have to sketch matters in such detail? Did she have to go out of her way to claim that she doesn't want to hurt Bloom? No. She could, in theory, have told her story more vaguely, more discretely. But, as I've said, this story isn't about an issue per se; it's about one person struggling to deal with an event in her life, and it's one person doing it as a public expurgation. To a very great degree, this story is about Wolf reenacting as a form of thereapy, and the unstated question that lingers beneath this entire story (and seems to linger too in Wolf's very emotional responses to those questioning her story) is this: why can't I deal with this?

She's had twenty years. Twenty years. Some countries recover from civil war in faster time. She's deluded herself into thinking this story is about matters sociological and sexual rather than personal and emotional. Like so many, she's wearing victimization like a cloak, however appropriately or inappropriately, and not realizing why relatively few people can sympathize with her. Some say she's just brooking for attention, which she probably is; some say she's prostrating herself as a victim in the name of feminism, which she probably is; some say she's a frustratingly-frail figure who really should just get over herself, which she also probably is. As I see it, though, Wolf's story is about her own frustration and inability to deal with an injury to her innocence, a frustration that has now manifest itself in a very public attempt at self-exorcism. If Yale would deal with it, if the public will deal with it, the implicit logic seems to be, then perhaps I can deal with it. But the simple fact is that she can't and she won't-- at least not until she stops deluding herself in thinking the problems here about sexual harassment and gender politics than about her own damaged innocence. Let's face it: Wolf is no Lucrece, not even a Norma Rae. She's Blake's Thel, still outside the vales of Har.

With all that said and done, which (really) is just an extended rereading of her own article, it's very much worth reading this article by Imre Salusinszky about writing about this kafuffle. Very, very funny.

And this blog now promises, solemnly, never to mention this topic again. You're welcome. :-)