Feminism's false triumph.

Hey kids, pop those champagne corks. The culture wars are over, and guess what? "The left has won," announces Janny Scott in a New York Times Week in Review article titled At Appomattox in the Culture Wars. (The very next day, another headline in the Times proclaimed Culture Wars Go On, but never mind.) Multiculturalism, feminism, gay rights--all are victorious throughout the land, especially, of course, in academia.

What does victory mean? "More porn videos," Scott informs us. A legacy we on the left fought for--and can be proud of--you bet. Drawing from a shrewd and complex analysis of the culture wars by Richard Goldstein of The Village Voice, and taking his quotes out of context, Scott singles out the left's proudest achievements--Gay Day at Disneyworld and "the cornucopia of abject degradation that is popular music."

And although the courts "have struck down race-based admissions, campus life has been transformed." Yes, and in California and Texas, it's about to be transformed even more, as preliminary data indicate that in the aftermath of the death of affirmative-action programs, admissions of African Americans and Latinos have plummeted. At UCLA's law school alone, the drop is approximately 80 percent. Let's boogie on down.

Dinesh D'Souza told the Times that "conservatives have the upper hand in the battle of ideas, and the liberals have the upper hand in the battle of institutions." Gee, that's a snappy soundbite--too bad it doesn't make a lick of sense. Since when do institutions like higher education, the media, Congress, and the courts, operate independent of ideas? And who, exactly, controls those institutions? Not Katha Pollitt, Bernie Sanders, or June Jordan.

I feel most festive about our victories in the culture wars when I read the reviews in the Sunday Times Book Review section. This publication seems to require that its reviewers write about feminism with the same venom that Cold Warriors used to write about the Red Menace and "subversives."

Here's Karen Lehrman reviewing Meredith Maran's memoir, Notes From an Incomplete Revolution: Feminism is about women being able to "spit, smoke, and sit with their legs apart"; "good feminism" invariably produces "bad mothering"; the women's movement has "a line" about how all women should feel and behave; and feminism is "outdated, repressive, and condescending." The review was titled Truth in Feminism.

In Carol Tavris's review of Elaine Showalter's Hystories in the same issue, we learn that Tavris is thrilled that Showalter is "braving the wrath" of feminist therapists, and that these same feminists are to blame for panics about satanic ritual abuse and multiple personality disorders.

Even in Laura Miller's critical review of Lehrman's own dopey book, The Lipstick Proviso, which argues that women should reject feminism because what feminism is really about is forbidding women to wear lipstick or pantyhose, we learn that while most women are sensible about feminism, "a handful of college professors" and women in "women's studies programs" probably do fit Lehrman's stereotype of feminists as a "battalion of scolding academics who condemn makeup." There we are again--doctrinaire, cudgel-wielding Ninjas in combat boots--and we want most women, as the title of this review suggests, to be "Oppressed by Liberation."

Newsweek can also make you want to break out the party favors. It demonized Lieutenant Kelly Flinn as a scheming narcissist who manipulated the public through a calculated P.R. blitz in which she "warmed to the role" of "victim" (that's what women do when they're in trouble--they perform and deceive).

And, in another pitch for feminism, the magazine ignores women whose families earn less than $50,000. In a major cover story about "The Myth of Quality Time," we learn what most of us already know--our jobs are so demanding of our time that we feel overwhelmed at home just trying to get dinner made, spend time with the kids, and drive them to soccer practice on time. But wait--did you say "soccer practice"? The series of articles here is illustrated with women and men in business suits holding briefcases, and throughout there is the assumption that parents have choices about how much time to work, and need to choose to scale back, given all the supposed "family-friendly policies" introduced by corporations throughout the land.

It is this ideology of autonomy that informs upper-middle-class life, even when real autonomy is just a myth. But for millions of working mothers, especially if they're single--a category, by the way, barely mentioned in the articles--there is no such autonomy. There is no flex-time and job sharing. There is no dashing off the assembly line, out of the restaurant, away from the office cubicle for impromptu class plays or ice-skating lessons. There is work, there is a time clock, and there is unemployment.

While Newsweek's headlines promise that the articles will show us What Parents Can do, the "solutions" article, Beating the Clock, lays out the usual suggestion--the mommy track. One woman's husband still gets home "too late for dinner," so she has scaled back her career. That way there's "more flexibility."

A final way to celebrate the triumph of feminists is by reading the op-ed pages of America's newspapers. As the Rocky Mountain Media Watch has recently documented, 83 percent of the op-eds at the Times are written by men--at The Washington Post it's 78 percent. Most guest editorials are written by former government officials; citizen advocacy groups get the least space. If it weren't for Bob Herbert at the Times, the paper's percentage of op-ed pieces by people of color would be barely measurable.

But the next time you find yourself in front of the TV cursing the omnipresence of William Kristol, George Will, Bill Bennett (still!), or Ariana Huffington, just relax, smile, and remember--we've won!