Buying In to the New Age of Skepticism : Information: One day butter is bad for you. But the next, it’s OK. Is it any wonder consumers are getting cynical?

Shari Thurer isn’t crazy about the title of her book “The Myths of Motherhood,” but an author’s gotta do what she’s gotta do.

Subtitled “How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother,” Thurer’s volume is a survey of societal expectations and maternal feelings of guilt and anxiety that may result.

Thurer examines attitudes about motherhood from the Stone Age to the present and makes reference to neolithic symbols, the Book of Genesis, Marx and Engels, Sigmund Freud, poet Anne Sexton and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Howard Stern’s memoirs, it ain’t. Still, Thurer, a psychologist at Boston University, wanted her baby to sell. Slipping myth into the title wasn’t going to hurt.

In the last five years, more than 650 “myth” books have been released--a trend that reflects savvy marketing strategy and a deepening sense of public skepticism.

Weary of sound bites and pop sociology, many readers take special pleasure in books that articulate their own dissenting views.

“The audience you start out with are those people who are saying to themselves, ‘I knew all along this was baloney,’ ” says Clay Harper, marketing director for Houghton Mifflin, which published “The Myths of Motherhood.”

At the heart of the matter, says Thurer, is a sense of “social relativism”--a philosophical position that recognizes that accepted “truths” are merely the consensus of society at a particular moment and, necessarily, subject to change.

“They are not writ in the stars, they are not in our genes, they are not written in stone. Ideas we thought were God-given change over time,” Thurer says.

Chad Quartuccio, a supervisor with New York Public Library on Staten Island, agrees that citizens are less willing these days to take someone’s spiel at face value.

“We live in a world where there is so much information available that we want to see every side of an issue, from every which way,” Quartuccio says. “We’ve become real skeptics. There is always somebody who contradicts what someone else says.”

Quartuccio, a specialist in children’s services, says even young readers are apt to demonstrate a dubious nature when choosing reading matter.

“There is a movement toward authors like Jon Scieszka, who wrote ‘The True Story of the Three Little Pigs,’ ” the librarian says. In this 1989 version of the tale, Quartuccio says, the wolf is a benign creature seeking sugar for his grandmother’s birthday cake when he sneezes and unintentionally blows down the house of the three little pigs.

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Revisionism is the rage.

The authoritative publishing trade resource “Books in Print” lists 1,799 volumes that feature myth on their covers. Although many have the unmistakable mark of academic enterprise (“Myth and the History of the Hispanic Southwest”), a significant portion reflects the contrarian spirit that apparently has seized the reading public (“Myth of America’s Eclipse,” “Myth of Black Progress, “Myth of Christian Uniqueness”).

“The Beauty Myth,” by Naomi Wolf, was a bestseller in 1991. And more scholarly works, such as Joseph Campbell’s “The Power of Myth,” based on the philosopher’s 1987 public television conversations with Bill Moyers, and the 1992 volume “Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype,” by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, reached the top 10 list.

Newsweek magazine recently ran a cover story dubbed “The Myth of Generation X: Seven Great Lies About 20somethings” and, to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation as President, the New York Times published an Op-Ed piece by Harper’s magazine that editor Lewis Lapham called “The Watergate Myth.”

Though the public seems in a feisty mood, Warren Farrell, the San Diego-based author of “The Myth of Male Power,” says there is an odd yin and yang to the dynamics of doubt. Cable television and the electronic superhighway supply consumers with vast amounts of data in such rapid fashion that the audience may suffer intellectual whiplash.

A political scientist and sex therapist who was a founder of the “men’s liberation” movement in the 1970s, Farrell says that although easier access to information helps vanquish false notions, trouble arises because renegade material circulates with remarkable speed thanks to modern technology and, once absorbed, can be difficult to excise.

In his book, Farrell argues, for example, that close examination of certain widely held assumptions regarding the status of men and women in the United States--that women are the victims of most violence, earn less for the same work and receive inferior health care--suggest the common wisdom is seriously flawed. His research indicates none of the above is true, Farrell says.

“We can both destruct and construct myths easier than we used to,” Farrell says. If anything, he says, readers should be more vigilant for false notions in these days of the Internet and cyberspace, and challenge all assumptions, even those that seem most credible.

“Skepticism is healthy because it prevents cynicism,” Farrell says. “A cynical person is usually an idealist who has been constantly disappointed.”

But myths wouldn’t be myths unless people accepted them--and, author Paul Dickson says, even in an age of skepticism, there are plenty of trusting folks in a mood to believe first, ask questions later.

In his 1993 book, “Myth-Informed: Legends, Credos and Wrongheaded ‘Facts’ We All Believe,” Dickson and co-author Joseph C. Goulden, shake apart the status quo.

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If you thought no two snowflakes are alike, or that whales spout water, or elephants have superior memories--Dickson and Goulden offer an opportunity for enlightenment: Dickson says there are a finite number of forms that crystalline structures can assume and that identical snowflakes are inevitable; that whales spout air, not surf, and elephants have about the same recall as many other animals.

Americans may be pushovers on the one hand, but, Dickson says, they are superb debunkers, too.

“A major theme in American literature and pop culture, in letters and in journalism is the undermining of conventional wisdom,” he says. “It’s something we do as Americans and we enjoy it.”

Dickson says there is nothing new about the spirit of skepticism that now seems so prevalent. In “Myth-Informed,” the authors refer to social critics H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan who, in 1920, published “American Credo,” which Dickson describes as “a poke in the eye at American wisdom.” Concludes Dickson: “It’s a constant, this debunking. It has nothing to do with the millennium.”

Maybe, maybe not.

Harper, of Houghton Mifflin, is convinced something is juggling the American mind-set as the 21st Century approaches. “Nobody has any authority anymore. One day butter is bad for you; six months later someone is saying, oops, butter is really good. Everything is greeted with cynicism.”

Young people who a few years ago claimed their elders were just a bunch of sellouts are buying into the Establishment themselves. “Now that everyone is over 30,” says Harper, “there is no one left to trust.”

Can’t trust anyone over 30? Watch for “The Myth of Middle Age” at bookstores soon.