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Underlying and supporting this image is the assumption that while women possess a superabundance of qualities that would, if transplanted to men, bring peace and glory to the lesser sex, men do not possess a comparable set of gifts to bestow on their opposites. Evidently such standard male characteristics as aggressiveness, forthrightness, companionability are thought not to travel well, or not to be worth adopting. Yet, if women can seize male roles in works of art in order to improve them, turnabout ought to be fair play. Could we not have the story of Monsieur Bovary, with George Segal as the love-starved Eddie? Or Harry Karenina? Or Dick Eyre? Would one ever forget the haunting mystery-cum-melody Larry, with Richard Gere in the part made memorable by Gene Tierney? Or Coal Miner's Son-in-Law, starring Sylvester Stallone as the boy who starts out with nothing but a guitar and barbells and works his way up to become the heaviest singer in Philadelphia?
To be sure, there are a few female roles that in fact could just as easily have been played by men. Any of Joan Crawford's parts, for instance, if one could have found a man sufficiently frightening. Barbara Stanwyck, possibly. Ava Gardner, no. Conversely, it is highly unlikely that an actress could have succeeded in roles assigned to Peter Lorre or Sydney Greenstreet, but the imagination is not stretched beyond tolerance to envision women in several of Gary Grant's roles, or in Humphrey Bogart's ("Here's looking at you, mister"). An argument might even be made that certain dramatic works would have been better off had male and female parts been exchanged at the start. Hamlet, which has often starred women, might appropriately have been conceived as Hamlette, the tragedy of a princess who could not make up her mind. Such decisions are history, however, and ought to lie beyond reversal. The sole purpose of changing Hamlet at this point would be to make the social statement that our hero would have been a nicer person as a female, that he never would have stooped to seek revenge by the sword but instead would have cleansed Denmark wholly by his demure and delightful example.
As applied to the real world, this sort of wishful revisionism is nonsense, to say the least, as anyone who has suffered under women in power knows amply. One of the melancholy rediscoveries of the late 20th century is that the fair sex, given the opportunities of the unfair, behave no better. Last spring Anne Burford resigned from the Environmental Protection Agency amid charges of gross mismanagement, which has always been considered an all-male province. Similarly, Mrs. Gandhi has the habit of revoking civil liberties from time to time—man's work most definitely. Not for nothing has Margaret Thatcher been branded "Attila the Hen" by her enemies, suggesting that in public life, as in art, not even a Hun is safe from female encroachments. Beside the crudeness of such impositions, the question of equal rights enters here as well. Clearly the future belongs to women. Have men no rights to the past?