

Hillary Clinton recently lashed out at those who have detected a " feminization" of American society. "What an unfortunate term," she said. " After all, don't fathers worry about how long their wives and babies can stay in the hospital when they need care? Don't men want to be able to take time off when a family member is gravely ill? Don't they want to ensure that their elderly parents have health-care coverage in the later stages of life?" In place of "feminization," Mrs. Clinton suggested "the maturing of politics" or the " humanization of society."

You can understand her frustration: "Feminization" is a term people throw around without ever being specific about its meaning. But there really is no other word for the multilayered phenomenon that has come to characterize our politics, our marketplace, and our media. Women's clout is no longer latent, even if the leading apostles of feminism still claim it is. As society is currently constituted, women are the sex primus inter pares, first among equals, in politics, business, and the media. This year especially, from NBC's coverage of the Summer Olympics to the political conventions, the effort to appeal to American women as a group has been a driving force in the culture.

The "feminization of America" is a paradox. It is a triumph of the feminist movement -- and a sign of anti-feminist backlash. It represents a new level of respect for women's strength and independence -- and a patronizing calculation about female gullibility and weakness. It suggests that culrural politics has infected the free market -- and that the free market is controlling both politics and culture more than ever.

At the core of these contradictions is an idea new to our culture and our time: Women are now thought to have more in common with other women than they do with men of similar ethnicity, religion, or income level, their interests coinciding more with those of other women than with those of their own fathers and brothers and husbands and sons. Women now constitute a class -- a dominant class.



II

In this election year, it is political feminization that has received the most attention. Here, the vaunted gender gap is always explained in such a way that the vote of a woman seems worth more than the vote of a man. A candidate is doing well, pundits think, if he's getting 45 percent of the men's vote and 55 percent of the women's vote, and poorly if he's drawing 55 percent of men and 45 percent of women. This unequal treatment makes the gender gap, at first glance, one of the more baleful and bias-ridden concepts of modern punditry. After all, why was 1994's overwhelming masculine tide for GOP candidates dismissed as the collective tantrum of "angry white males," while Bill Clinton's overwhelming success with women in 1996 is celebrated and deemed worthy of careful study?

Because if you think about women as a class, their votes are worth more. Fifty-two percent of voters are women, and they tend to cast about 52 percent of the votes, as they did in last November's election. (In 1992, they cast 54 percent.) But their importance is even greater than that.

Women have a weaker allegiance to political parties than men do. Their votes are less predictable, and they make up their minds later. That is why political advertisements and party conventions are aimed at them -- the female vote remains in play after the male vote is locked up. And it is an axiom among political consultants that it's easier to appeal to women without losing men's votes than it is to appeal to men without losing women's votes. In November, men were far less bothered by the "women's" appeal to extend the Family and Medical Leave Act than women were by the "men's" appeal to overturn the Brady gun control bill.

So the gender gap is meaningful. And it is more serious when a candidate is short of women. If a candidate is short of men's votes, they may not have been votes he could get in the first place. But if he's short of women's votes, he's running a lousy campaign. The importance of "soccer moms" in the last campaign -and the desperate quest of both parties to corral them -- is an indication that both parties understand the women's vote this way. By defining the "soccer moms" as a suburban woman with children, the parties excluded two groups -- childless women and black women -- whose votes go reliably to the Democratic party. In the era of Texaco-style witch hunts, " soccer moms" is a polite way of saying "white women." Indeed, the fickle soccer moms went for Clinton 49-42 percent and for congressional Republicans 55-45 percent.

Why do women voters behave this way? "Do you want the politically correct answer?" says a pollster who works on women's issues. "They're busy juggling both career and home. They're pressed for time. The non-politically correct answer is that they decide late because they're only marginally interested in politics." National Review Washington editor Kate O'Beirne concurs: Women are "inattentive and uninformed," she says. Only 34 percent of college- educated women under 30 regularly read a newspaper, as against 53 percent of men in the same bracket.

So we are left with a conundrum: Women are less interested in politics and don't know what they think about political issues, yet as a class they are likelier to turn out at the polls than men. This has changed the calculus of politics.

It turns out that this was what many suffragists were seeking when the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920, giving women the vote. Female suffrage was in part a reaction against the dizzying pace of technological change and social dislocation, and proto-feminist thinkers sought to combat scientific, hedonistic modernism with a dose of what women were deemed best qualified to supply: homespun wisdom. (Or, if you like, provincial ignorance.) That is, they would bring private morality into the public world. But when women's suffrage did nothing to stop the relentless march of progress, everyone forgot that that had been one of early feminism's original goals. Today's "feminization" is only its long-delayed attainment.



IlI

A similar feminization -- driven by similar marketing considerations -- is underway in the private sector. Advertising, a $ 24 billion industry, is concerned primarily with getting consumers to switch brands -- to choose Tide over Fab, or buy a Saturn instead of a Neon. And, it appears, women are just as fickle in the marketplace as they are in the voting booth. While men tend to settle relatively early on the brands they like, and stick to them, women shop around.

Women must be worth more as customers than men; just look at the pull- out-all-the-stops efforts to sell them cars. It's not as if women are being sought as an untapped market: Nationwide, they already buy 53 percent of new cars. But because women are so susceptible to brand-switching appeals, car dealers look at female customers as fresh conquests, while men seem like customers they would have had anyway. When General Motors started running a special women's marketing campaign earlier this year, CNW Marketing/Research did many of the demographic studies. Here's what they found. "Women were neutral about the GM brand. Men ran either hot or cold," CNW vice president Art Spinella told Advertising Age last summer. "There was a lot of potential for GM if it concentrated on the women's market." (Ironic, if men are losing their grip on society not because they're too chauvinistic, but because they're puppy-doggishly loyal.)

So given that it's more productive, or at least more cost-effective, to appeal to women, how do you make those appeals? Advertisers emphasize supposedly "womanly" characteristics that seem shockingly retrogressive. One of GM's key promotions was commissioning the Fashion Designers Council of New York to design vehicle interiors. They then auctioned off the cars to benefit the Concept: Cure breast cancer program. Shades of the Dodge La Femme in the '50s, which Dodge marketed to women by offering outfits that matched the car's interior.

Many car companies appeal to women's much-discussed obsession with safety and security -- a few years ago we were shown how the brakes on a Volvo with a woman driver save the life of a child in the back seat. Michelin commercials convert the company's tires into a baby's cradle. This, too, is eerily reminiscent of this year's politics, particularly the Democratic party's relentless promotion of the idea that American tap water is poisoned and the government simply has to do something about it. Indeed, Mrs. Clinton has urged us to pay more heed to women on the grounds that they are "experts on the hazards and vicissitudes of life."

It turns out that this approach is based not on outmoded sexist stereotypes, but on newfangled feminist stereotypes. According to Risk in Perspective, the newsletter of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, women fear almost every hazardous thing more then men: "Gender is a remarkably strong predictor of confidence in health hazards. [One] study tasked respondents to rate twenty-five public health risks, where women rated all the items as more risky than men." The Harvard letter uses this difference to argue for bringing more women into risk analysis, not to argue that women are paranoid and unrealistically demanding of everyday life -- even though one could make that case from the very same data.

One phrase that crops up again and again in the mouths of those trying to sell products and shows and candidates to women is "soft focus," which implies gauzy emotional appeals over hard, rational argument. The ultimate in soft focus was this year's major advertising event, the Summer Olympics on NBC. The Olympics are, of course, a sporting event, and sporting events traditionally earn an audience that is something like 75 percent male. Horst Stipp, the network's director of social and developmental research, says, " Our research suggested that men would keep watching, but women could be added. " By placing the 19-day event in soft focus, NBC garnered huge ratings -- they were up 21 percent from 1992 -- and NBC grossed $ 700 million in advertising.

Marketing experts tend to use euphemisms to describe soft focus. NBC senior vice president Nicholas Schiavone calls it "real life and real emotion presented credibly." What it really means is turning the Olympics into a big sob story about cancer and dying fathers.

"Very obviously, that's a male perspective," says Horst Stipp. "It's a man saying, 'This is a little wishywashy.'" But burrow under what feminists say and you'll find a vision of what women want that's very wishy-washy. Anita Perez Ferguson, president of the National Women's Political Caucus, has long been a defender of assertive womanhood. She claims Clinton won because he " talked constantly about the needs of individual families." Then Perez Ferguson expanded on the point: "Personalizing the message tended to resonate more with female voters than a numeric description of public policy." In other words, women aren't too good at math. Regina Brady of CompuServe tells Ad Age: "Women on-line are probably in higher positions and incomes than men on-line -- you're getting influencers." But then she adds that a new marketing campaign from CompuServe will have "a much more emotional pitch . . . that may strike core values particularly present in women." In other words, women are sentimental.

So which is it? Are women power-wielding "influencers" or flowzy, blowzy creatures of emotion? Is this the ultimate triumph of feminism or its savage reversal?



IV

It has been an axiom on the right that feminism has failed in many ways because its insistence on treating men and women as though they were androgynous equals was a profound denial of a natural truth. This "equality feminism" gave anti-feminist activists in the 1970s and 1980s an enormous amount of ammunition. Phyllis Schlafiy helped defeat the Equal Rights Amendment in part by warning that it would lead to the abolition of separate- sex bathrooms, as indeed it has on certain college campuses and in certain grungy restaurants.

But the story has changed in the 1990s. In this decade, Carol Gilligan's feminist theories about how women speak "in a different voice" (to use the title of her 1982 book) have turned us all into "difference feminists," whether we know it or not.

Gilligan, who teaches at Harvard, was the first "difference feminist." According to her, females approach social life differently from males, working together and building consensus rather than fighting it out for dominance. Indeed, Gilligan said, little girls are perfectly confident and competent at all this. But then comes what Gilligan's mentor Erik Erikson called an "identity crisis"; around the age of eleven, a maledominated culture takes advantage of their early adolescent confusion to rob girls of their self-esteem.

Rather than seeking to eradicate the differences between the sexes, as her mainstream feminist sisters did, Gilligan emphasized them. And with that, feminism found its way into the heart of American culture as it never could have otherwise. The hugely infiuential work of Deborah Tannen, whose 1990 bestseller You Just Don't Understand argued the common-sense truth that men and women behave differently in conversation, reminded a country driven slightly insane by mainstream feminist thinking that sex differences have to be respected. The popularization continued with John Gray's Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, by most reckonings the most successful book of the decade, which expanded on Tannen to instruct ordinary Americans in the age-old wisdom that men and women act differently as well.

Thus, there has been a rapprochement between the vast body of American womanhood and the feminist movement that has claimed to speak for them. And that may be the most subversive trick of all, for Gilligan's theories are as radical in their implications as any other feminist doctrine. The differences between men and women, in Gilligan's view, extend to their ideas of justice -- and she implicitly favors dropping "male" rights-based justice in favor of " female" relationships-based conflict resolution. Which seems an abandonment of justice altogether, or at least a recipe for a banquet-sized heaping of O. J. Simpson cases. She sees in feminism the possibility of a new society in which girls avoid their identity crisis and stay as they are, better in school than their male peers, better behaved, and more constructive. And, of course, dominant, once society has turned into a gender-based Utopia predicated not on the masculine fist-over-fist but on the feminine hand-in- hand.

Whether women are praised as "caring" and "instinctive" and "human" or derided as "mushy" and "uninformed," cultural ideas about female priorities are coming to a remarkable convergence. Those who would further "feminize" society make the same arguments as those who would de-feminize it -- that women and men are different and that those differences need to be respected. Just as "difference feminism" has infected the body politic with Utopian dreams, the body politic has polluted "difference feminism" by using it as an excuse to revive traditional roles in feminist clothing.

I think of a friend, a woman I'll call Joni. She is a beatnik de nos jours whose favorite politician is Maxine Waters and who would be flattered to be called a radical feminist. Joni fell in love a lot in college and had little interest in getting a job when she got out. What she wanted to do was cook, go to rock clubs and dance, and shop.

At a show one night, she met a drummer -- call him Van -- who worked as a cameraman to make ends meet. They've been living together for 13 years. Van never made it as a drummer, but he kept his cameraman job, at which he still works 9 to 5. They just bought a house ("On a lark!"). Her parents just moved in with them ("They're so cute!"). Joni is constantly having her hair done (in elaborate '70s buns, so it can't really be meant for beauty), and whenever Van comes home she has a hot meal waiting for him ("I cook more for my own relaxation than for Van"). Joni, of course, is a housewife: She pursues that life in earnest, even if she robes it in camp. It's like Ozzie and Harriet minus the children, or The Honeymooners minus the self- knowledge. But Joni also gets a constantly selfreinforcing message from marketers and politicians that she's (a) beleaguered, (b) some kind of brave renegade, and (c) infinitely superior to a "housewife." If I called her one to her face, she would probably never speak to me again.

So the new feminized vision is often the traditional sexist stereotype, with a shrill, man-hating ideology overlaid. Look at the ads for Saturn, in which, after being condescended to by a bunch of male chauvinist car salesmen, a woman winds up at a Saturn dealership, where she not only buys a car but winds up taking a job. She now likes "showing the guys the vanity mirror," the narrative runs.

Barbara Lippert, an advertising critic at Adweek, says, "The curious thing going on in terms of ads appealing to women is the imagery: Men and women have essentially reversed roles. For 30 years, if somebody was stupid and bought a product and got smart, it was a woman. Today it's a man. If someone is cooking, it's a man. We're ogling male nipples and breasts and pecs." The most famous of such ads is the one for Diet Coke in which women working in an office scramble to catch a glimpse of a disrobing construction worker. There's a curious con job that's being practiced in the name of feminism here. Women are being peddled the delusion that they're liberated enough to view men as sex objects, in order to get them to buy a product to keep themselves thin.



V

If the feminization of America doesn't change the core roles of the sexes, can there be anything wrong with it? Well, yes. What you wind up with is a society built around pretense, official mythology, and stultifying taboos. Oh, come on, doubters will say: After all, such things have always existed between the sexes, following such folk cliches as, "A man chases a woman until she catches him." But there's a difference between folklore and political and economic power. If what we're witnessing is a kind of collectivization of womanly wiles, then society may increasingly appear to men as a cynical rip-off. That may have already begun; the movie Swingers and the TV show Men Behaving Badly, Newsweek's Rick Marin tells us, are part of a "Retro Guy" backlash. How else to explain the incredibly robust sales of pickup trucks -- absolutely useless for most of their owners except as a statement -- unless we look at them as declarations of manliness, ratified by the fact that women buy only 26 percent of them? There might be a parallel here to the genteel 18th century, which saw, in America as in England, a proliferation of whorehouses, grog houses, and other refuges from a society that had become too prissy.

Yet if America is growing less and less congenial to men, they're going to be much worse off in the future than they were in the Age of Hogarth. For the modern world may be one in which men quite naturally underperform women in the first place.

Females have always outdone males on the verbal part of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. You may not know this, since the education establishment has spent two decades worrying about how the SAT is racially biased, or about how females do worse than males on the math portion of the test. But in a world where communication is itself increasingly a job skill, and where the elite jobs center on what Robert Reich calls "symbolic analysis," women may now have an edge. Diana Furchtgott-Roth's Women's Figures, a study just released by the Independent Women's Forum, shows that women now receive 59 percent of associate degrees, 55 percent of bachelor's degrees, 53 percent of master's degrees, and almost 40 percent of doctorates. It raises an interesting question: Might women be better suited to the information-age economy?

"Look: The ability to lift heavy objects and bash other people's heads in with rocks is not at a premium in the information economy," says Jim Chapin, a New Democrat theoretician. Chapin thinks that, to the extent women are voting with Democrats, the party has a lock on a coming class. Kevin Phillips notes that Newt Gingrich has his strongest base of support among white male high-school dropouts in the Rocky Mountain states. Demographically, this population hardly constitutes a rising star you'd want to hitch your wagon to.

It gets worse for men. It turns out that, according to IQ expert Richard Lynn, "the consensus of opinion in the entire history of intelligence testing" is that females have IQs as high as, if not higher than, those of males. (Lynn himself disagrees with this consensus.) But there's a hitch. Consensus also holds that the distribution of male intelligence is wider: There are more male geniuses and male dopes. What's more, the very top leadership posts in any society are distributed more on the basis of aggression than of brainpower, according to Steven Goldberg, chairman of the sociology department at the City College of New York and one of the most prolific writers on the subject of male/female roles. That means that in the visible power structure, women will always be dramatically underrepresented. Goldberg adds that those women who do rise to the very top of the workplace end up leading "male" lives in a male world -- for there, areas in which women have always enjoyed an advantage (like nurturing) are undervalued, while those where men enjoy an advantage (like enterprise and risk-taking) are overvalued.

This, in turn, creates an ever-rejuvenating sense of grievance among woman opinion-makers. "The strength of the Democratic party, and the most powerful group within it," says Chapin, "are the 2,500 female corporate vice presidents who believe they'd be president if not for men."

Yet it's not clear what is the true political calling of women as a class. Historically, it has made little sense to talk about women's being liberal or conservative in the modern context. True, women chose Clinton over Dole, but they were more inclined than men to vote for Nixon in 1968 and for Ford in 1976. And in a more feminine society -- that is, in a risk-averse, anti- entrepreneurial, "finished" society such as postwar Europe -- women have been a conservative force these past decades. They were a bulwark of the Italian Christian Democrats throughout the Cold War, and in Britain, it was women who kept Conservatives in power in 1970 -- despite Labour's winning a large majority among men.

But American conservatism means something different from European conservatism. American conservatism has made itself the defender and proponent of reckless male abandon -- and thus may find itself bereft of women in the new, "feminized" electorate.



VI

Whether we use the word "feminized" to mean "more feminist" or "more feminine," we have reached the point where any and all feminization is a radical force. At the very least, it implies a remaking of society and a rejection of ideas as old as the Bible. As Simone de Beauvoir and Marilyn French and numerous sexist males before them have noted, mankind traditionally thought of itself as non-animal, as largely outside of nature. In fact, human was merely another way of saying non-animal, as in the locution -- familiar to generations but never, ever heard today -- "What separates men from the beasts is . . ." In that light, women were the recidivist sex: As childbearers they were tied to nature in a way that men were not. To provide is human; to nurture, animal.

Feminists always saw that idea as the source of sexual inequality, and feminism could succeed only by altering it. Women had to be allowed to take up roles outside of "nature," to be independent of nature as men are (this helps explain why ideological feminists are so passionately devoted to the idea of an unlimited right to abortion). Similarly, men have been put under pressure to "get in touch" with their "natural" side by sharing responsibility for the running of the household and the care and feeding of babies.

And by urging us to describe these profound changes in American society not as "feminization" but as "humanization," Hillary Clinton may have at last won her stripes as a feminist icon. For wittingly or not, she has put the last pieces of the puzzle together. To quote what she said a second time: "Don't fathers worry about how long their wives and babies can stay in the hospital when they need care? Don't men want to be able to take time off when a family member is gravely ill? Don't they want to ensure that their elderly parents have health-care coverage in the later stages of life?"

Of course men in every society have always wanted these things, and they've done their part by earning a good living and protecting the home. Taking care of the ill, the aged, and the newborn has historically been a collaborative effort of male providing and female nurturing. Hillary's subtle trick was to exalt nurturing as the higher of these two virtues. Henceforth, the female virtues would be the "human" ones, while the male virtues were merely backward remnants of the not yet "humanized." To put it more simply, Hillary is welcoming men to their new role as the second sex.



By Christopher Caldwell