Fast-Track Feminism : Terminatrix : THE MORNING AFTER: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus, <i> By Katie Roiphe (Little Brown: $19.95; 180 pp.)</i> : SEXUAL VIOLENCE: Our War Against Rape, <i> By Linda A. Fairstein (William Morrow: $23; 324 pp.)</i>

In politics, a good 30-second attack ad is worth a dozen position papers. In a complicated world, it’s hard to provide honest answers in 30 seconds, which is the beauty of the medium for many politicians. Most 30-second attack ads aren’t very honest, but in terms of winning elections, so long as they push the right hot buttons with voters, that doesn’t matter at all.

So why should the publishing world be different? Welcome to the brave new world of neo-know-nothingism, where a 30-second attack ad between hard covers can become the most talked about nonfiction of the season.

Katie Roiphe’s “The Morning After” was excerpted as the cover story of the usually discerning New York Times Magazine; featured on network magazine shows; reviewed and written about everywhere. It has become its own cottage industry.

Her thesis is provocative: Feminism, by its focus on rape and sexual harassment, has turned women into whining victims. It’s a perfect thesis for our interactive era: not only because sex is always hot, and because, as Susan Faludi has elegantly established, feminists are always fair game, but because everyone can have an opinion. Bosnia is complicated. No one knows what “managed competition” really means. But sex in the office? Drunken grappling? He said, she said? Anyone over 15 has a story to tell.

What’s striking is how little Roiphe has to say about the issues we must address as society expands its understanding of rape and sexual harassment. For example: Where should we draw the lines? How can we prevent rape, without treating every sexual encounter like a police interrogation, complete with Miranda warnings? What are the obligations of universities to their students? How do you protect the privacy of victims, while also protecting a man’s right to defend himself? Should sensitive women be allowed to sue where stronger ones might simply have told the man off? What standard governs?

If you’re looking for answers, or even insights, or even analysis of any of these questions, don’t look in “The Morning After.” There is no there there. It is a paragraph of opinion shamelessly padded to 174 pages. Roiphe’s book is sloppy and shallow. Quotes are used ludicrously out of context, cases misstated. Only one legal case is discussed in the book, and Roiphe gets the facts and handling wrong. Then there’s everything she’s left out. Serious debates among feminist legal thinkers on the subject of rape have occured in recent years, and dozens of rape studies have been done, but Roiphe ignores almost all of them. In a recent review in the New Yorker, writer and poet Katha Pollitt eats her for lunch, nicely, just on the facts. Roiphe is not a serious student of her subject, not a careful researcher, not a gifted thinker--and it doesn’t matter at all. She’s a bomb-thrower. Her book is hot, and so is she.

Linda Fairstein is everything Roiphe isn’t. She’s been prosecuting rape cases for over a decade. She established the Sex Crimes Unit in the New York District Attorneys office, one of the first in the country devoted to rape and a model for all the others started since. She knows her history, she knows the law, she knows the context and it comes through clearly in “Sexual Violation: Our War Against Rape.” Fairstein uses her cases to educate her readers about what law reform really means in practice and how real world victims and defendants fare. She has written a smart, serious, interesting book, that’s probably gotten a little more attention just because Roiphe’s is out there, but still can’t compete with the hype surrounding “The Morning After.”

And that says something troubling not only about the media, but about us. The reason politicians run attack ads is because they work. People say they hate negative campaigning, and in theory they do, but if you show them a half-dozen ads, the one they’ll remember, the one that may change their vote, will usually be the tough jab. So, too, for “The Morning After.” We decry the sensationalism of the media, the preoccupation with the lurid over the lofty, with the hot quote over the thoughtful analysis and then we tune in for it. If negative ads didn’t work, politicians wouldn’t run them. If Roiphe’s simplistic thesis didn’t sell magazines, it wouldn’t be on the cover.

Which is too bad, not only because Fairstein has written the better book, and deserves the magazine covers, but also because, as in politics, the triumph of attack ads can have real consequences.

Regrets the next morning do not make sex rape; force and bad intent do. Sometimes, Roiphe’s classmates probably do use the term rape more liberally than Fairstein would. But the fact that conduct isn’t prohibited by the criminal law, or can’t be proven with sufficient certainty in a courtroom, doesn’t mean that women should silently put up with it, or that men should be encouraged to engage in it.

Forced sex leaves scars on people, whatever you call it. For decades, universities pretended that it wasn’t their problem. Now that they’re finally starting to address it, Roiphe makes fun of them, belittling the women who need help, mocking the counseling programs, caricaturing the brochures, dismissing the problem like yesterday’s hangover. In my more generous moments, I’m struck by how successful feminism has been in creating a person like a Katie Roiphe--someone so fiercely independent, so determinedly not a victim, that even date rape is an event hardly to be remembered. In my less generous moments, when I think about the countless young women who have sat in my office over the years, hurt, in pain, with nowhere to turn, I just hope no one takes her too seriously.