The Body Politic : MY ENEMY, MY LOVE: Man-Hating and Ambivalence in Women’s Lives, <i> By Judith Levine (Doubleday: $22.50; 416 pp.)</i>

When I was in college, two friends and I, feeling similarly ill-used by the men in our lives, entered spontaneously and gleefully into a joint fantasy in which our boyfriends arrived to pick us up for some black-tie affair, resplendent in their tuxedos, to find us dressed in ratty chenille bathrobes, rollers in our hair, cigarettes dangling from our mouths, the ashes scattering onto the garbage piled upon the floor.

Somehow, just by flying in the face of their expectations--and those of our parents and our peers and (did we but know it) of the patriarchy itself--we understood ourselves to be wreaking an exhilarating revenge.

Twenty-five years later, the price of revenge inflated like everything else, women all across America watched “Thelma and Louise” and experienced the same exhilaration; but the mother lode of emotion into which the movie tapped would still be nameless. Hence, Judith Levine’s book, “My Enemy, My Love: Man-Hating and Ambivalence in Women’s Lives,” applies itself first to identifying that phenomenon which, widespread though she shows it to be, is denied in the way our society classically denies the manifestations of its deep-seated problems--by refusing to acknowledge them. Compared to “misogyny,” the hatred of women, which appears in all standard dictionaries, Levine found its linguistic counterpart, “misandry,” in only three; and of those three, one eschewed the word “hatred” in favor of “dislike” or “disesteem.”

Denied it may be, but the hate that dare not speak its name exists, and in a variety of guises. A collection of negative stereotypes, drawn from popular culture and from interviews with a broad variety of women, introduces us--if by some stroke of fortune we haven’t met them yet--to the Bumbler, capable of splitting the atom but stymied by the physics of a coffee-pot; the Brute, the ignoble savage to whom a Social Contract that admits women is void and therefore violable; the Abductor, who, not content with legislation that increasingly allows him to take his children from their mother, is looking to a medical technology which allows him “to steal motherhood itself.”

And if these labels are off-putting--as indeed, they were to me; the cutesiness of the capitalized first letter put me uncomfortably in mind of Cosmopolitan--read on. Behind this pop-psychology facade lies the firm, informed voice of a writer who’s thought profoundly about these stereotypes both in terms of the reality in which they are grounded and in terms of the way in which they serve to protect and perpetuate the status quo.

Contempt for the Bumbler-husband who can’t make a cup of coffee may be a wife’s accommodation to the certain knowledge that he won’t make a cup of coffee; but as long as her contempt allows her to feel superior, it is an adjustment whose true function is to make a life of servitude more tolerable. When women fear men as Brutes, they reverse the common identification of women with nature, and make man the uncivilized one who must be tamed or caged. This is to buy into the same ideology which supports the patriarchy: that gender is biology and biology is destiny; that we are slaves to those twin tyrants, Estrogen and Testosterone; that to hold out for an ideal of sexual egalitarianism is to wait, like Estragon and Vladimir in “Waiting for Godot,” in vain.

For Levine, as for a growing number of both men and women, gender is not biological fact but a cultural construct. It relies upon seeing the world as a series of opposites--male/female; white/black; mind/matter--in which the one must assert itself over the other. In such a world, ambivalence is seen as weak, a dithery postponement of the inevitable in which the one is declared the winner and the other must address itself to being a good loser.

The rest of the book is an examination of the way in which that icon of Republican ideology, the family, creates gender, and how the process simultaneously creates women’s rage; how this rage exploded into the women’s movement in which women declared themselves, at the very least, to be sore losers, not good ones; and how the tension between being good losers and sore losers dominates the coping strategies of the 12 women whose stories provide the concluding section.

Throughout, Levine steadily advances a persuasive argument: that ambivalence, though experienced by many women as a necessary evil--if it weren’t for men, we wouldn’t have to be ambivalent is their plaintive subtext--it is in fact a virtue. Indeed, one of the book’s greatest strengths is to show how those feminists who reject ambivalence, who deny difference, fall into the traps of racism, homophobia and all the other ills of either/or thinking.

Difficult though it may be to sustain--and I speak as one whose commitment to and/and falls apart at the Newsweek description of a rising German politician as a “former Waffen SS leader and television host”--ambivalence suggests our only way out of a lose/lose struggle in which women must either submit to the patriarchal oppression or, in attempting to prevail, adopt its values. Embracing ambivalence, or even multivalence, makes it possible to envision a world beyond gender, beyond racism, beyond the One and the Other. Paradoxically, Levine argues, ambivalence is necessary to the realization of such a vision: At the same time we are vaulting ourselves into a future free of gender, we must stare into the face of it in order that we might fight it.

I have focused on what I perceived to be the central argument because I found it so compelling. To do so meant omitting mention of a multitude of other virtues: its ability to surprise both with information and with insight, the clarity of its voice, the courage of its conviction, and, most of all, the respect it paid to the reality with which it was dealing, that the “social facts and personal feelings are arrayed around man-hating and ambivalence not in dot-to-dot lines of causality, but in a cluster of concurrences and contradictions. They form a constellation like the Pleiades, the floating sisters, not like Orion, with his arrow aimed straight for its target.”

It is to Levine’s credit, above and beyond anything else, that she found a style that communicated its content. By turn journalistic and theoretical, critical and compassionate, analytic and lyrical, relying for its content on both objective data and personal history, she expresses the multivalent vision she espouses and becomes that which we discovered women to be at the start of the women’s movement--a great friend.