PERSPECTIVES ON TESTIMONY : Is There No Believable Woman? : We rejected Anita Hill for her composure, then saw the Palm Beach accuser battered for showing emotion.

Any woman who has cause to accuse a man of sexual misconduct--and is wondering how to comport herself if she does so--will get cold comfort from two major public dramas that have played out on our television screens of late.

There, unfolding in our living rooms, were two compelling stories in which women charged powerful men with sexual offenses. Law professor Anita Hill claimed that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her when she worked for him years earlier in Washington. A woman in Palm Beach charged that William Kennedy Smith, nephew of Ted Kennedy, raped her at the Kennedy estate. The background, demeanor and behavior of the two women involved was markedly different. But both were roundly condemned. They seemed to be viewed, by the media and the general public alike, not so much as individuals but as differing female archetypes--both very dangerous.

Anita Hill was seen as composed, coolly professional, answering probing questions about such subjects as pubic hairs in Coke and Long Dong Silver with crisp aplomb. The result? She was seen by the public and the men of the Senate alike as Medusa--the mythological lady with a stare so cold it turns men to stone.

Republican senators suggested that this young woman from a strict Baptist family was so vindictive and canny that she pored through old law cases to uncover pornographic references and read Gothic novels to find smut. Even after she passed a lie detector test, people accepted the notion that this cool, competent professional was, underneath, the vengeful woman of “Fatal Attraction.”

The alleged rape victim in Palm Beach was quite different. She wept as she testified that she had been tackled, held down and violated at a place where she thought she’d be safe from harm. She freely displayed her pain and outrage. And how was she portrayed?

As a sniveling mass of raging hormones, mentally unstable, who had neurotic reasons for crying rape and who couldn’t even remember what happened to her. Callers to talk shows branded her an actress, a crazy, a woman who “asked for it.” And she lost.

In one case, a woman is seen as strong, cool, vengeful. In another she’s perceived as emotional, weak, unable to control her fantasies. Weak or strong, weeping or keeping a stiff upper lip, a graduate of Yale Law school or a young single mother, when you accuse a high-status male of sexual misbehavior, you become a walking catalogue of age-old myths about women.

The fact is, we do not believe women who seem to have no apparent motive for lying and not much to gain, either. But we do believe powerful men even though they have a lot to gain from not telling the truth.

Is it more logical to think Anita Hill invented the stuff about porno talk because she is a nutty scorned woman, or that Clarence Thomas--who was known to be a viewer of such films--in fact borrowed some language from flicks he watched?

Somewhere, from the depths of mythology about women, the suspicion always arises that women are just not reliable. Even when they are talking about what happened to them. And listen, do you really want to wreck some guy’s career for some ditsy broad?

Women have to be prepared for this kind of thing when they step forward, no matter who they are, but step forward they must. Fantasies about women breed in the shadows, and it’s only when they are exposed that they can be seen as the bizarre, twisted creatures that they are.