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The cold war is over. The war between the sexes has some potential to take its place, to fill the need for portentous conflict with seemingly enormous issues and irreconcilable differences, as between cobra and mongoose, earthling and alien. Men and women at one another's throats, or waving knives at one another's private parts, admirably fuse the dimensions of the intimate and the world-historical. Journalists and essayists have to make a living; men and women leading peaceful, productive lives with one another have to be dragged somehow into the combat. Accordingly: "You hear what she said about you? . . . You hear what he just did? Ain't he awful? Damn, she's awful! Let's you and her fight!"
Thus one interpretation of current gender sliming is that it is the work of the usual American overstimulation and culture-by-spin-and-tablo id -- the commercialization of the id. Life on the ground continues, more or less as usual, while the sky is lit up with bright video games of rhetoric.
Maybe what we see is also just a swing of the pendulum -- the man's turn to be "it." Or maybe the theme of garbage that has become American society's cultural motif has finally caught up with men and engulfed what they used to think of as their dignity. In a country where childhood and children go into Dumpsters, where women's bodies (and men's and children's too) are treated like garbage in the $8 billion-a-year pornography industry, and where popular culture itself, sluicing through the ever efficient, stainless-steel First Amendment, is a Mississippi's inundation of septic personal garbage and out- of-control behavior (somehow most of the themes come together in the case of Michael Jackson and his family), perhaps it is simply men's turn to be treated like garbage as well.
The war has now escalated to a new stage of attack and counterattack at higher and higher frequencies. Men feel insulted. Women detect fresh assaults. The men-are-awful period has been going on for a while. There are signs now that the oh-yeah-well-women-are-pretty-disgusting- too stage is upon us. For men and women, this is mostly a lose-lose combat. But it is entertaining for the crowds in the Colosseum.
Woman-dissing: We now see some retaliatory rounds targeted at female ruthlessness at the office -- in the movie Mrs. Doubtfire (ruthless careerist mom keeps admirable father from his children); in Michael Crichton's novel Disclosure (ruthless careerist executive sexually harasses male subordinate and tries to destroy his career); in Ron Howard's new movie, The Paper (ruthless big-city tabloid editor played by Glenn Close).
But let us stick to exploring the proposition that it is the men who are swine. As Samuel Butler advised in the 19th century, "Wise men never say what they think of women."
Any honest male admits, in the privacy of his heart, that he considers men to be pretty awful sometimes. He has known guys who were so rotten that . . . Well, women don't know the half of it. If he were a woman, he knows, he would be disgusted by men's preoccupation with sex, which makes them alternately clumsy and dangerous; by their selfishness and egotism, by their % bullying and insecurity, above all by their potential for violence. On the issue of rape, the man-trying-to-think-like-a-woman would go ballistic.