Whatever the truth of Naomi Wolf's sex-pest accusations against Harold Bloom, nobody, so far, is coming out of the business very well. Wolf picked a funny old time to come out with this charge - not within the two years that charges can be investigated by the authorities; some considerable time after she had made suggestions of harassment on a public forum, though refused to name names (owing to the "soft spot of complicity" in her soul); two full decades after the event itself. Bloom has declined to comment, using instead the "a friend says..." avenue (the friend, incidentally, has denounced this as a vicious lie), which I always find a bit lame. Sundry other commentators have unleashed a weird level of spite, specifi cally Camille Paglia, who raged: "It really grates on me that Naomi Wolf for her entire life has been batting her eyes and bobbing her boobs in the face of men and made a profession out of courting male attention."  An assessment of that kind has to be based upon pretty close personal intimacy - in other words, Paglia needs to have observed Wolf exhibiting that behaviour, at close range and over a period of years. Otherwise, all she's saying is: "This woman is pretty, and that disqualifies her from reasoned thought."  I'd also, in the interests of perfect clarity, conduct some research into how transfixed men really are by boobs that bob, but never mind that for the time being. This vitriol is, without question, disproportionate. Had Wolf written an essay claiming that, while at Yale, a professor or student stole from her, hit her over the head with a chair, involved her in a pyramid scheme that was really a scam, or perpetrated any crime at all against her that didn't involve sex, the response would have been different. There might have been some puzzlement that she'd left it so long. There would have been people who questioned her veracity or, at the very least, were prepared to withhold judgment until greater evidence could be provided than the word of the accuser. But there wouldn't be anything like this fury that gushes out like a geyser whenever a woman, especially so tardily, makes a charge of sexual assault, be she an academic or 'er off Shooting Stars (Ulrika Jonsson, I mean). And it almost always comes from other women, handily, if bizarrely uniting feminists, post-feminists, non-feminists and the undecided, in a single voice of unsisterly incandescence. Why should the response be so vehement? What is it about sex crimes, or charges thereof, which riles not men, defending each other in an old-boy stylie, but other women?  It's partly that the dangerous predator in question is often characterised not as an individual who behaved badly, but as a symptom of the rottenness at the core of all of society. For instance, Bloom's behaviour "devastated" Wolf's sense of "being valuable to Yale as a student rather than as a pawn of powerful men". Wolf depicts Bloom as the personification not just of an intellectual landscape (Yale), but of an entire gender ("powerful men"). In so doing, she styles herself as the binary opposite, the personification of her own gender, the eternal pawn or victim. And this is where, as someone who shares that gender, something rises in my throat (and no doubt in Paglia's) - it really is debateable whether or not some drunk bloke putting his face quite near yours and his hand on your thigh, when you thought he'd come round to read poetry, undermines your value to an entire institution. In the barometer that runs from "misunderstanding" to "act of violence", it leans irrefutably towards the former. So, sure, object to it, at the time or many years afterwards, but not in the name of your gender. Not in the name of people who see no possibility of gender-parity in a world where women achieve victim status simply by being women. Not in my name - object to it in your own name.  Moreover, women making claims of sexual harassment or violation many years after the event often bat off "why now?" critics by saying they're doing it for other women; that, at the time, they were too afraid/ young/ powerless to object. Again, this is a flawed position - as an individual, it's up to you when you make an allegation. But if you're doing it under the guise of being a role model, then frankly, you're making a terrible fist of it. You're basically saying, as much confidence and rage and mettle and verbal aplomb as I had 20 years ago, it was still too daunting and too humiliating to report this crime. It's better to wait till you're famous, which in all probability you won't be, before you let this kind of thing out of the bag.  Ultimately, sexual politics is the one thing that really dates feminism, that makes it "old school" and lets it down. Equal pay for equal work will never go out of fashion. But blanket assumptions of female victimhood and weakness, the inevitability of male exploitation, the drive to politicise every ambiguous physical gesture as if we're all working shoulder to shoulder against malevolent men - this is not feminism. To bundle it all together as such catches a lot of us who cannot agree, like dolphins in a tuna net. No wonder we thrash about so much.