One Last Grope.

One Last Grope And the cult of victimhood dissolves. This is pretty damn interesting. Follow the action: As New York magazine changes hands from Caroline Miller to Adam Moss, a curveball story appears overhead, leaving spectators to wonder who threw that weird ball and which way is it going to bounce? Turns out it was Miller's brainchild. You can picture the well-intentioned editors believing this was going to be a surefire, indignant bang of contemporary succès de scandale: A revelation from the nation's "leading feminist" (Naomi Wolf) about a severe grope to the "upper thigh" from an academic icon at Yale (Harold Bloom). The lengthy article came dressed in all the right tones of feminist rue, well-worded self-reflection and moral indictment. All the familiar features earmarked the story: crippling loss of self-confidence, a "tailspin," an academic paralysis, an overwhelming sense of guilt, fear and confusion, and at the center of it all, that amorphous, complex crime-lecherousness-that has held the feminist orthodoxy in orbit since the late 80s.

What's interesting is what happened next.

I keep a close watch on my cultural windmills, and I can tell you categorically that a few years ago, this story would have had them spinning furiously, unanimously, in favor of Wolf. Bloom would have gotten about as much sympathy as Chiang Kai-Shek alone in a dark alley with an angry mob of Red Guards. The imperative would have been simple: Kill.

A "heavy, boneless hand" on her inner thigh?

Show no mercy.

These were the years when college professors were liquidated in quiet rooms across the nation without a stitch of due process or a feather of protection. As in any revolution, people were deranged with fear.

The finest and most ironic feature of the inquisition was that the accusers were not even expected to face the accused, lest their trauma be further exacerbated. An excellent book on this miserable subject is Australian feminist Helen Garner's masterpiece The First Stone, about a professor at Ormond College who is swiftly destroyed after he is accused of falling on bended knee to declare his infatuation (verbally) to a young student at a campus party.

And who, Garner rightly asked, has the "power" in a scene such as that? An elderly man on bended knee in front of a strapping beauty in her prime.

Let's leave it to future historians to unfurl those impossible threads about sex and power and return to our windmills. It's now 2004, and Naomi Wolf throws a lit match into a cultural sphere she believed to be filled with the right kind of moral gas. And what happens?

Nothing.

I spent the whole week reading essays, reports and blogs. Stories about the story. Be they left or right, pro-feminist or contrarian-they all had a tone of sober repudiation, a shrug, a sense of, Oh for Christ's sake, leave the man alone, this was 20 years ago. As my father put it, "That's not even history; that's archeology."

The outrage is directed back at Wolf-not at Bloom. Even party-line periodicals like the New York Observer, Slate, Salon, with their Alessandras and Alexandras and Larissas. Nobody bought. Anne Applebaum, writing in the Washington Post, soberly and dryly called for an end to "exaggerated victimhood"-as embodied by Wolf.

The jig is up. And Camille Paglia wasn't even called to the frontlines. Women chimed in from all corners, and Camille's voice almost drowned in the din.

It is galling, is it not, when paradigms shift? Nobody yells, "Strap yourselves in, we are changing our minds, we're lurching suddenly and inexplicably to the other side of the scale." They just change positions and then pretend to have never even heard of the previous belief system. Victim feminism has fallen out of fashion-and nobody warned Naomi Wolf about the tanking stocks.

In Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds (1841), he invokes the term "moral pandemics" and charts the phenomenon of mass fevers that have swept nations through history, burning down reason, and in some cases destroying whole societies. One chapter deals with the tulip frenzy that seized the upper classes of Europe in the 17th century, driving the entire economy until one day, interest waned, the fever passed and noblemen who'd sunk their fortunes into a few rare tulip bulbs became suicidal.

So it is with hot political ideas. They have electric currency for years, and then suddenly, they lose value, because in fact, they never were real; their value lay only in what we were willing to imbue them with and project onto them. Fevers break, thank God, and it is when they break that humanity returns to its senses, and sees, for the first time, how the fever itself distorted everything-made shadows look like monsters.

Wolf appears now like a helpless vendor trying to peddle a Semper Augustus tulip bulb in Rotterdam circa 1769. I almost feel sorry for her, but not as sorry as I feel for the countless victims of the sexual inquisition that is now apparently over. I wonder what kind of recourse, if any, they will get.

I don't take "sexual harassment" lightly, and I refuse to be bullied by the charge that I'm leading lambs to slaughter by diminishing the "very real" anguish that "these women feel." I think lechery is very distressing and should be discouraged at every turn.

Raise your hand if you are pro-lechery.

My point has always been that what feminism did was to take seeds of "very real anguish" and create a climate of fear so total that the entire nation was plunged into "very real anguish." An inferno of anguish. The worst thing about it was, it gave women a ghastly power we don't want: the power of the victim, which flared, along frayed cables of sexual politics leftover from the 1960s, into something akin to social terrorism.

Once again, women were thrown back into their shackles as sexual beings first and foremost-by their would-be liberators, the feminist establishment. It was feminism's fatal wrong turn to take the victim road, because down that road, all accomplishments, all dreams, all voices, all identities are vanquished, in order to feed the victim fire. Even someone as successful as Naomi Wolf had to perform a final, ritualistic harikari and throw herself on the pyre in order to assuage the raging gods of the victim cult. It's like watching a bunch of prisoners standing before a prison door flung open. You know how it always ends-they prefer the prison. It's safer there.

I don't take glee in seeing Naomi Wolf pilloried. Though she's not my cup of tea, it would be extreme snobbery not to concede that she has meant a great deal to millions of young women. Somebody should, however, tell Harold Bloom to come out of hiding, come out onto the porch. Times have changed. He's undoubtedly a bit of a lech, but he also has contributed something great to society. Maybe this is the Lord's mysterious work:

We have been spared very little this past century. One thing we were spared, as a result of that "heavy, boneless hand" coming down where it did that fateful night 20 years ago, was Naomi Wolf the great feminist poet.