taking sides: Naomi Wolf vs Camille Paglia

One must fantasise only about pr0n stars, or strangers? Am I allowed to fantasise about my wife? Other people I have had sex w/?

On balance I like CP more than NW because she is madder. I can't really answer about the case in hand, but I think there is something in what CP is saying about how it's a bit late to be now bandying about accusations of sexual harrassment from twenty years ago.

Also the author of possibly the worst, and among the dottiest, books on Shakespeare I've ever read. I've no idea if he sexually harrassed Wolf, but if he did this smug, sanctimonious charlatan deserves all the discomforting revelations she can dish out.

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--02/19/2004--On Monday, February 23, a story will run in New York Magazine about sexual misconduct at Yale University.

In it, I include an account of Professor Harold Bloom's sexual approach toward me when I was an undergraduate student at Yale in 1983, as well as the stories of a number of other Yale students who experienced sexual misconduct involving other Yale faculty members and students over the past twenty years.

After Yale contacted me to help them raise money, I felt I had to tell them why I was reluctant to do so. I then had many conversations with Yale authorities over a period of recent months, telling my story, hoping for an off-the-record meeting to address my concerns about the school's grievance procedures. I got nowhere.

Several distinguished women have come forward in my piece to attest to the fact that there is a systemic problem at Yale University. Their intention in doing so, as is mine, is simply to make sure that women students are as safe today as they deserve to be.

To clarify reports in recent news stories, a letter Professor Bloom wrote to support my application for a Rhodes scholarship in 1983 was written before the incident I describe. That application was rejected. I was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1985, and Bloom was not one of my seven referees.

SOURCE: New York Magazine

From another listserv:

In her 1997 book Promiscuities, Ms. Wolf wrote about an unnamed college professor who placed his hand between her legs after showing up at her apartment to discuss her poetry. Other classmates, she claimed, had had similar experiences, but she thought she could resist. "My whole body, my whole self-image, once again, again, burned with culpability," she wrote. "It felt so familiar: this sense of being exposed as if in a slow-moving dream of shame. I could practically hear my own pulse: What had I done, done, done?"

having read 1,340,000,000 papers on shakespeare in general and Hhenry IV in particular last year for a college paper i can say that bloom's interpretation of falstaff is (mostly) right-on and refreshingly anti-monarchist. (he is especially OTM about the merry wives of windsor being a rotten play and a travesty of the character)

i don't think that was his interpretation of titus at all: as i remember he argues AGAINST that view of the play. if you want pomo readings of shakespeare there's plenty of em out there already, but i think bloom's intensely personal, pseudo-gnostic take on the plays is worthy in its own right.

my main problem with the book is that it is HORRIBLY organized and under-edited: you could chop two-thirds out of the text and it'd be a lot more readable.

agreed on the sonnets.

I had no idea Wolf was all-in on chemtrail and HAARP conspiracy theories these days.

yeah she went weird. also I keep mentally confusing her with Naomi Klein who is not a nutter which makes it doubly confusing to me.

she now sounds like someone who was/is very bright but also spends 99% of their waking (and possibly sleeping) life stoned.

lol

(tbf, that legalese is quite something)

Sweet's Inventing the Victorians is great.

I am so not surprised that Wolf has incorrect information in her books.

kinda ouch but mostly lol

dropping "a major premise of your book is completely wrong" in the middle of an interview makes for some great dialogue

Naomi Wolf suspended from Twitter, presumably for some bonkers tweet suggesting the feces of covid-vaccinated people could be harmful to others

Let's see *you* eat it, then. Trust the science!

Wolf’s science presupposed that the problem was not knowing which faeces is not vaccine-tainted and therefore safe to eat

she should put that hypothesis to the test

She literally called for the sewage of vaccinated people to be separated from the general sewage, so that the water supply wouldn't be contaminated with mRNA. I fail to see any downside to this plan.

Btw the Johnson & Johnson vaccine doesn't use mRNA so if you had that one, your shit's good.

Wolf has also been posting about how nice conservatives turn out to be and how empowering shooting a gun is, seems like only a matter of time before she apologizes to Harold Bloom for saying groping was bad

I keep saying this! pic.twitter.com/R6nLAAJ32Z

— Zack Budryk (@BudrykZack) June 5, 2021

I recently read N Klein’s 2014 book on climate change & there is a recurrent healthy scepticism of miraculous technological solutions from “the scientific community” as an article of faith that saves anyone from having to think about necessary political/economic change; in light of this shit it’s very “you vs the Naomi she told you not to worry about”

what
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E3GFv7fXIAMnPUS.jpg

That must have been posted up thread, instant classic

oh 2019 I assumed it was new

no!!! pic.twitter.com/H3qa3X4eQg

— flglmn (@flglmn) May 29, 2021

My one Naomi Wolf story is that my wife and I were at a public lakeside beach with our two kids when Wolf, a complete stranger to us, asked us to watch her two kids. She disappeared to god-knows-where for 90 minutes. Upon reappearing, she did not thank us. Fin.

— David Kamp (@MrKamp) June 5, 2021

that’s hilarious but also kinda genuinely horrifying

telling thread

Now that Naomi Wolf has been suspended, worth remembering that her Beauty Myth was published in the same year as Black Feminist Thought by Parricia Hill Collins. In 1990.

Publishing CHOSE to make shoddy non-feminist hot air its ‘big’ book and the aithor into THE feminist.

— Sunny Singh (@ProfSunnySingh) June 6, 2021

LOL @ that Belfast post.

Very nice.

Naomi Wolf is headlining an anti-vax "liberation" event on Juneteenth.

Organizers told me conflating the holiday celebrating the end of chattel slavery and Covid restrictions was appropriate because "we have been enslaved by our government."https://t.co/eAytxIyFxd

— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) June 8, 2021

She's leaning in

oh...my god.

If you help smuggle people out of heavily vaccinated areas into places where they can freely get themselves and others sick is it an Underground Ailroad

It’s too bad they’re not dumb enough to have that shit in Texas.

She's still at it.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/may/09/gb-news-censured-after-naomi-wolf-compared-covid-jab-to-mass-murder