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Text File | 1992-10-19 | 5KB | 94 lines

                                                                                MAN OF THE YEAR, Page 47

RELATIONSHIP OF THE YEAR

Man and Woman.


By Nancy Gibbs


    One of the most surprising things about the 1991 Battle of
the Sexes was that it was so full of surprises. After the
feminist revolution of the '70s, the postfeminist age unrolled
in the '80s amid musings about "mommy tracks" and the
installation of diaper-changing facilities in airport men's
rooms. By the '90s Americans were supposed to have moved on to
more subtle issues about enhancing everyone's quality of life,
letting women define themselves as individuals, letting men be
warriors or frogurt eaters, as they choose.

    The year's flash points, then, were all the more blinding.
Surely Patricia Bowman, the accuser in the Palm Beach rape case,
never expected that she would watch a forensics expert peer
through her black panty hose at more than 3 million viewers
nationwide. The producers of Thelma & Louise could not have
imagined that their cockeyed vision of two women on an ill-fated
spree would set off a national debate about misogyny, male
bashing and the power of feminine anger ungirdled. And certainly
neither Clarence Thomas nor Anita Hill could have guessed that
their private friction a decade ago would wind up sparking the
most ferocious weekend of rhetorical slashing and burning in
memory.

    Their confrontation has become the eternal analogy; any
story that pits her word against his, all the tales of power
struggles between the sexes, somewhere includes a reference to
the drama that played out before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
"They just don't get it" was the charge leveled first at the
Senators but later at all men who were unprepared for the
conversations they were soon having with wives and friends and
female colleagues. Judge Thomas has since gone on to the
black-robed dignity of the Supreme Court, leaving behind the
race-charged rhetoric that saved him that hot weekend in
October. Professor Hill has gone back to her law-school
classroom in Oklahoma, but continues to collect bouquets from
groups across the country that believe her story, admire her
courage under fire and decry the injustice of the whole episode.

    But in the ambiguous aftermath, both the Thomas vote and
the William Kennedy Smith verdict leave plenty of room for
argument. The female accusers gave credible testimony; they
seemed to have little to gain, and a great deal to lose, by
coming forward with their charges; they both took on men with
powerful allies and vast resources to counterattack; they both
passed lie-detector tests. Would the Palm Beach decision have
changed if the jury had been allowed to hear the testimony of
the three other women who have stories of sexual violence during
encounters with Smith? Would the Thomas vote have gone
differently if his story had been challenged as relentlessly as
hers was; if the Senators had pressed him on his penchant for
watching pornographic movies in law school, or his sudden claim
that he was a victim of a racist conspiracy that would have to
have been plotted 10 years earlier, when Anita Hill first spoke
of his behavior to her friends?

    Those who believed that the men in both cases were telling
the truth also came away with some new concerns. How are men to
know what the rules are when they appear to be ever changing? At
what point does misunderstanding become a crime? If the charges
prove false, how does a man retrieve his good name? Are women,
feeling victims of gender crimes, fighting back in a guerrilla
war with weapons that men cannot defend themselves against?

    All this is not an abstract parlor conversation about the
differences between the sexes. The events of 1991 may have been
unusual in their celebrated luridness, but they raised basic
issues that touch everyone's life. A few observers noticed that
in the wake of the Thomas-Hill confrontation, the analysis of
the Palm Beach trial was slightly more nuanced, more
sophisticated in its discussion of so charged an issue as
acquaintance rape. The politics may have been vicious, but the
Senate passed and the President signed a civil rights bill that
will finally allow victims to collect punitive damages in
harassment cases. Employers are making their rules more
explicit, their reporting procedures more reliable. If men and
women are temporarily more cautious and self-conscious about
what they may say and do, that may not be too high a price to
pay for a new understanding of what is appropriate behavior, and
what is not.