Strife be unto him who in enlightened times is fool enough to suggest that women are getting too big for their britches, but evidence abounds. There has now appeared on television The Sins of Dorian Gray, a modernized perversion of Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the famous senescent canvas became a filmed screen test, and Dorian was played by a woman. A remake of the 1946 movie It's a Wonderful Life cast Mario Thomas in the role established by Jimmy Stewart and Cloris Leachman as the once male angel. Mary Tyler Moore made her Broadway debut in 1980 with Whose Life Is It Anyway? in a part originally written for a man. Joan Rivers and Nancy Walker pressed Neil Simon to permit them to play the leads in a female rendering of The Odd Couple.
The mind heaves with possibilities: The Sisters Karamazov? Twelve Angry Ladies'? Young Girl with a Cornet? Mrs. Roberts? How long before the world is treated to a revival of Moby Dick, starring Victoria Principal as Captain Alice and ubiquitous Meryl Streep as the passionate yet complex crew? Or Steven Spielberg's E.T.T.E.? Or Richard Attenborough's epic film biography of the Indian pacifist Blandhi?
Naturally, one is told not to worry about these things. Such transformations do but signify the newly liberated consciousness wherein the contemporary male and female are learning to exchange and fuse their too long separate and restrictive identities. Thus in the past year alone have audiences been instructed and entertained by movies like Victor/Victoria, in which a woman impersonates a man in order to impersonate a woman; and The World According to Garp, featuring John Lithgow as the transsexual ex-pro-football player with a heart of gold; and Tootsie, in which Dustin Hoffman, decked out as the soap-opera heroine Dorothy Michaels, both receives and delivers his revelation: "I was a better man as a woman with a woman than I've ever been as a man with a woman." That, of course, is the essential message in these bottles: when a man assumes the role of a woman, or when a woman assumes a role formerly occupied by a man, it is the man who gains immeasurably from the virtues thus acquired.
The cultural goal of these exchanges would seem to be the creation of an androgynous ideal, a male hero with certain indispensable facets of his masculinity intact but displaying in great and blatant measure the desirable female attributes of gentleness forbearance and sensitivity. This is not at all the menacing androgyny of a Mick Jagger, whose odd dual nature appears to find its roots in the bowels of Greek mythology. Rather, it is represented by a fellow like Alan Alda, a man's man but wearing pastel sweaters. In fact, this heroic vision was realized long ago (minus the pastel sweaters) in such figures as Henry Fonda and the recently usurped Jimmy Stewart. What seems to be sought nowadays is a Californiated version of the former types, men who have achieved their "softness" specifically because of their therapeutic and ennobling association with women.