BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Scandal’s Influence Extends Beyond Navy : TAILSPIN: Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook <i> by Jean Zimmerman</i> ; Doubleday $24.95, 364 pages

I was sitting on the train reading “Tailspin: Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook” when my attention was drawn to a pair of young men who were guffawing at the book’s title and mimicking, with outstretched hands, the groping that sparked the Tailhook scandal.

Predictably enough, I frowned and turned away disgusted. Equally predictable was their laughter; as they exited the train a few stops later, one of them yelled out, “Long live the gantlet!”

Although Tailhook eventually brought down admirals and bulldozed the way for a more enlightened policy toward women in the armed forces, the gantlet--the third-floor hallway at the Las Vegas Hilton in which Navy aviators sexually assaulted dozens of military and civilian women during the Tailhook Assn.’s ribald 1991 convention--may be the most enduring image from the whole mess.

For the young guys on the train (clean cut, practically poster boys for the military, although they weren’t wearing uniforms), Tailhook still seems isolated, a joke the women just didn’t get, and a symbol for a kind of fun that they believe they are entitled to.

In “Tailspin,” Jean Zimmerman proposes that the guffaws of those young men on the train, while perhaps still in the air today, are the desperate cries of a species about to become extinct.

Sexism isn’t dead, of course--it couldn’t possibly die that easily--but Zimmerman details how the Tailhook scandal created a whole new set of rules for the military. And how those post-Tailhook policies may well pave the way for a broader societal appraisal of women in the workplace.

According to Zimmerman, a free-lancer who has written extensively about women and work-related issues, Tailhook was probably one of the primary reasons why Secretary of Defense Les Aspin lifted the combat exclusion rule against women in 1993. And by sweeping away that ban (although not completely), brand-new doors have been open for women in and, in the long run, out of the armed forces.

“Tailspin” is, however, a peculiar book. It reveals the military, particularly the Navy, to be a home for belly-scratching Neanderthals who, facts notwithstanding, stood firmly by their belief that there should never be a place for women among uniformed soldiers.

Yet Zimmerman asserts she got full cooperation for her research from the armed forces, particularly the Navy. According to “Tailspin,” she conducted more than 500 interviews and was given access to everything from reports to ready rooms, transcripts to transports. Some of Zimmerman’s reportage ran concurrent with the formal investigations.

Which begs the question: Why would the troglodytes, as she titled one section, mislead the investigators but talk to Zimmerman, an outsider, journalist and feminist?

Still, the book is chock-full of revealing quotes, some plucked from military documents, others obviously handed over to Zimmerman by the guilty parties without a smidgen of irony.

It’s not too surprising when she digs back to Dwight Eisenhower’s testimony before Congress and finds him supportive of women in the military. But it is both shocking and pathetic to discover that Frank Kelso, the highest ranking officer to go down because of Tailhook, had experienced a monumental change of heart about women just before the controversy, and had actually become an advocate for change.

In this case, Zimmerman reminds us of senators Bob Packwood and Ted Kennedy, both of whom, as legislators, are good friends to women, but just as often, it seems, make rather embarrassing faux pas in their not-so-private lives.

After Tailhook, she tells us, the old feminist adage of the personal as political had become painfully and awkwardly true.

Zimmerman, for all of her encyclopedic knowledge of the individuals, doesn’t point the finger at any one person. Tailhook happened, she concludes, because there was (is?) a culture of essential inequality between men and women in the military.

Only by bringing women up to speed, by giving them the same opportunities as men, by letting them compete with male soldiers at the same levels and with the same set of standards--only when men can learn to work with and fight alongside women as equals--will the mind-set that framed Tailhook be eliminated.

If this all sounds like pretty-par-for-the-course feminism, Zimmerman surprises again. Although clearly a feminist, she doesn’t let the feminist movement off the hook either.

In “Tailspin,” she acknowledges the movement’s uneasiness with the military and with women who want to be a part of what might otherwise be viewed as the ultimate patriarchal palace, the last bastion of old-time boy-dumb. (At the time of Tailhook, Ms. Magazine, for example, had never printed a single story on military women.)

Women soldiers, Zimmerman rightly points out, are living a feminist ideal, are subscribers of the purest kind to the idea that they should be allowed to do, and be, anything at all, without regard to their gender.

And if the feminist movement is at all true to its own values, it should not--it cannot--continue to ignore them.