Ruby slippers  

Here's Laura Kipnis exhorting women not to take it so seriously when men make unwanted advances - laugh it off, she says. Reasonable enough, except that when the actors are the greatest American literary critic and an undergrad in an English class, the explicit power imbalance makes it a little harder to sustain. Kipnis breaks it down like this:

The photos running alongside Wolf's article tell an interesting counternarrative: Wolf at 20, rather gorgeous; Bloom - at least in this undated photo - one of the less attractive men on the planet. Wolf may begrudge Bloom for trying to use her for validation (or sex, or both - yes, shockingly, sex is sometimes used for such purposes). If so, what she's resenting, ironically enough, is the fact that she has power over him. For her looks and youth instead of her poems? Maybe - and he has power over her because of his fame and literary prowess, not his visage or physique. (And not just because he collected a paycheck from Yale.) What isn't clear is that one fantasy is any more objectifying than the other.