Victimhood?

PR firms worked overtime last week, hyping an article in New York Magazine by feminist author Naomi Wolf (search), in which she claims to have been sexually accosted by one of her university professors 20 years ago.

In the article, titled “Sex & Silence at Yale,” Ms. Wolf claims that Prof. Harold Bloom put his hand on her thigh while visiting her during a meeting in her room. Ms. Wolf says the encounter led to years of underachievement and “spiritual discomfort.”

But National Review columnist Meghan Cox has found a very different version of the same encounter in Ms. Wolf’s 1997 book, “Promiscuities.” In that book, Ms. Wolf describes a pre-arranged encounter she had with a professor, in which she was an active and willing participant. The encounter went poorly only after Ms. Wolf got too drunk, a detail left out of the magazine version.

As for Ms. Wolf’s claim to victimhood, the Washington Post’s Ann Applebaum doesn’t buy it. “Twenty years of fame, money, success, happy marriage and the children she has described in her books and Naomi Wolf … is still obsessed with her own exaggerated victimhood?”

And that’s the Asman Observer!