Abstract

Subject to Debate

It's hard to believe that only three years ago Susan Faludi was alerting women to the mass media's premature burial of feminism beneath an avalanche of happy-homemaker propaganda. These days, feminism's back, and acrimonious gender politics are a hot media topic. The gender wars, actually, are the New Backlash. Sex plays the role formerly assigned to marriage: instead of domesticity, a hot date; instead of babies, babes. In the old backlash, feminism was bad; now feminism is good, it's just the women's movement that's bad. This maneuver lets men-even Lance Morrow feel progressive and broadminded, and it lets women feel that the most militant thing they can do is forget about all those hot-date mood spoilers like job discrimination and the Hyde Amendment and no day care.