Gender Politics Needs a Name Before It Gets, Well, Boring

Good morning, and welcome to “Name That Phenomenon,” the column that offers you a unique opportunity to bestow a title on whatever the hell it is that’s going on between men and women these days.

Today, we look to the glossier side of the news business--three national magazines--for clues in this mess that used to be called the War Between the Sexes.

The Zeitgeist mongers are at it again, and it’s going to be a thrilling ride down the rails of gender politics as we (all together now) name that phenomenon!

You well-dressed gents--oh, and ladies, or rather womyn, or whatever --may already be familiar with the February GQ’s “The Way We Are” by Lucy Kaylin. Perhaps you have already slogged past the pages featuring moody dudes in wrinkled duds to get to this essay, in which the writer christens the current of antipathy coursing between men and women.

“These days, the mood between men and women is growing far less libidinous than litigious,” Kaylin writes, “what with the once-collegial workplace becoming a hotbed of abuses and almost as many categories of rape, suddenly, as Eskimo words for snow. . . .

“As more men stay home and women go to work, we’re finally learning how the other half lives and that no one has had it easy--that we’ve all been mired in quiet desperation. But the quiet part is finally over.”

And what do we call this noisy replacement?

“Call it the New Hostility.”

Think on it, readers.

Our second entry in Name That Phenomenon comes from Esquire’s February edition: “The 21st-Century Fox.” This issue is not devoted to a movie studio, if you catch our drift. In fact, we can’t really delve into a whole lot of what writer Tad Friend addresses, because our censors--make that taste mavens-- won’t allow it. Suffice to say the essay in question is titled “Yes.” As in, “That’s the message from a new generation of women thinkers, who are embracing sex (and men!)”

“For years, radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin have held sway, declaring sex bad and men worse, but now comes a generation of young women who have read the theory, thought about it--and rejected it. That purposeful hammering spreading across the land, bedroom by bedroom, is the sound of those young women beating their swords into bustiers.”

Picking examples from a not-so-broad, as it were, spectrum, Friend lumps together several young, pro-sex women, such as writers Naomi (“I love nubile young soccer players”) Wolf and Katie (“No such thing as date rape”) Roiphe, and proclaims a new political movement emphasizing “sexual liberation, sexual equality and the reclamation of men from the scrap heap of theory.”

And can you name that movement, Mr. Friend?

“Call it, ‘do me’ feminism.”

We’ll know soon enough.

Our third entry is the most recently published, and appears in this week’s issue of Time.

In an essay more remarkable for its amiable wit than logic (if you permit us the small indulgence of saying what we think), writer Lance Morrow whines and cajoles and explores “the proposition that . . . men . . . are swine.”

As if to preempt discussion, Time’s cover features a clearly Caucasian pig head (white head, pink nose--looks a little like the late Tip O’Neill, actually) sprouting from a human male body.

(Note to Time subscribers: The magazine assures us that the cover subject is no one’s ex-boyfriend, as it is a composite photograph.)

“Men should think more about their situation and their behavior,” Morrow writes. “Women should as well. Both men and women have been oppressed by the other sex, in different ways. And both have been getting away with murder.”

Thus Morrow wonders: “Are we really as awful as they say we are?”

His replacement for “The War Between the Sexes”?

“The War Against Men.”

*

So. What’ll it be, readers? Ready to name that phenomenon ?

Those partial to “The New Hostility,” please raise your hands.

“Do-Me Feminism?”

What about “The War Against Men?”

Hmmm, that’s odd. No one seems to be voting. This is absolutely unprecedented. Readers, please. Signify that you are ready to vote by raising your hands now !

Unbelievable.

No one is responding.

Perhaps a different question is in order.

A show of hands, please, from those too busy trying to keep marriage, children, relationships and/or career intact to care that A) relations between the sexes are just as muddled as ever; B) a few feminists are talking dirty and getting publicity for it, and C) some affluent white men are complaining that men are as oppressed as women.

We thought so.

It’s unanimous.