It’s Show-and-Tell; Is It Seen or Heard? : Films and other fantasies centered on women’s secrets are stirring old confusions about power and propriety.

In politics, women and blacks are “special interests.” But in today’s popular culture, they are all the rage, stirring controversy with films and magazine photos that spill secrets and fantasies new to many American audiences.

Most films portray women’s lives through the distorted lens of male fantasies. “Thelma and Louise,” however, is a female fantasy that apparently offends many men. Described by the U.S. News & World Report columnist John Leo as “toxic feminism,” it is this generation’s road film, with a twist: Women are the adventurers and their enemy is male domination. Unwilling to die at the hands of lawmen closing in on their spree, Thelma and Louise choose their own tragic destiny. Like Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” or Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening,” “Thelma and Louise” dramatizes women’s hopeless dream of living life as a free spirit. Why are so many men taking offense? True, most of the film’s male characters are loathsome. But where is men’s hypersensitivity when male movie outlaws flee equally unattractive and stereotyped female characters and roam the open road, savoring life’s pleasures?

If the success of “Thelma and Louise” hints at women’s fantasies, Spike Lee’s brilliant “Jungle Fever” divulges some of black women’s closely guarded secrets. Gathered in a war council, friends of the betrayed wife offer consolation by recounting bitter stories of men’s philandering and irresponsibility. The actresses got so engrossed, Lee simply filmed their spontaneous indictments.

Henry Jaglom’s film, “Eating,” exposes yet another private dimension of women’s lives. As one of the characters confesses, it’s not sex secrets that modern women keep to themselves, it’s their obsession with food.

Plodding and plotless, “Eating” is nevertheless riveting as a documentary of bizarre female relationships with food. Some people have wondered if the film exaggerates. Certainly, but female audiences instantly recognize the characters’ obsessive diets and bulimic purges. (Katherine Gilday’s new documentary, “The Famine Within,” also about women’s collective obsession with body weight, should quell any lingering doubts.) Never before in popular culture have women so candidly revealed their emotional connections to eating. Food is dependable when men are not. Food sedates and subdues anger. It creates fullness and muffles feelings of emptiness. Layers of fat stave off men and sexual feelings but also deepen self-hatred. Some of the characters even say that their biggest dread of pregnancy is the prospect of unwanted bulk. It is as though women won the vote only to lose the right to guilt-free nourishment.

Perhaps that is one reason why many women have applauded Vanity Fair’s cover photograph of a nude and pregnant Demi Moore. Americans have confused and inconsistent attitudes about the propriety of showing women’s bodies. Nursing mothers who expose their breasts in public are censured, while trade magazines flash female bodies to sell everything from farm machinery to defense hardware. Fashion pushes the undeveloped adolescent female figure, while pornography peddles the engorged female fleshpot.

Moore’s big belly (even if airbrushed and glamorized) reminds us that most women’s bodies are neither adolescent nor strictly sexual. They are meant to be active, to give and take pleasure, to produce babies and not to be starved into anorexia. Viewers of “Eating” will not be surprised that M. G. Lord, a Newsday columnist who objected to the “fat, fecund photo” put the word “fat” first. Those who view the photo as pornographic have not only missed the point, but probably the last 30 years of American pornography as well.

Such a strange moment in American history. Suddenly, popular culture is probing the interior lives of women and blacks. It is refreshing to see slices of their worlds through their eyes. But, contrary to what censors think, visibility does not translate into political power. In Washington, women and blacks are still outsiders, every day losing a little more of their hard-won rights to the political agendas of the Supreme Court and Congress.