Melrose Place.

If one wants to understand the appeal of Jane Austen and the Brontes at the cineplex, one need only check out what is perhaps the most popular of all current dramatic series on TV with young women these days: Melrose Place. This show brings throngs of young women together, at bars, in dorm lounges, in living rooms, all over America, to share pizza and an hour of very un-Austenian pleasure each Wednesday evening. It may be the only show on television in which perfect gender equality, personal and professional, has actually been achieved.

And the picture it presents of this much-demanded state of affairs--as played out in the context of our current, dominant cultural norms and values--is anything but attractive. It's so terrifying that any woman in her right mind would gladly flee to Jane Austen country to escape its manic, madhouse miseries.

Melrose Place started out as a very warm-hearted, even progressive-minded series about a bunch of young singles negotiating the job and relationship world,

They were straight and gay, black and white. They worked McJobs and worried over unwanted pregnancies and the perils of single parenting. They volunteered at soup kitchens and literacy programs. They cared about each other and helped each other out. It was sweet but low-key, and the ratings didn't rise high or quickly enough for Aaron Spelling.

His solution? Bring in Heather Locklear, a veteran from Spelling's 1980s hit series Dynasty, to play the part of a scheming, conniving, amoral advertising

executive who chewed up competitors and sexual partners as voraciously as she chewed her power bars. Ratings soared and the show and its characters and situations have metamorphosed into a near-mythic cultural phenomenon. The world of Melrose Place today is one in which sexual and financial negotiations and relationships are fast-paced, brutal, permanently unstable and shifting and--here is where the Jane Austen contrast is most vivid--completely devoid of any sense of rules, limits, or boundaries.

For those who decry the limits of essentialist assumptions about gender traits, here is a world in which no such assumptions hold, in any way, shape, or form. Women and men share similarly rapacious, individualist, conniving genes--temporarily anyway--and then they morph, male and female alike, into the opposites, suddenly becoming caring, loving, vulnerable, sensitive, and altruistic. For even in the realm of psychology and personality, there are no rules or limits on what one may become.

Money and success and sexual pleasure are at stake here. Empires rise and crumble, week after week, as characters shift alliances and arenas at whim, and then switch back again. Losers become winners and then losers again in a matter of days. Characters who risk all for the obsessive love of another, by the following week will have come to loathe the object of their affections sometimes to the point of plotting to murder them, especially when conflicts of financial interest are involved. And gender, even sexual orientation, has nothing at all to do with one's chances of winning or losing in any arena, emotional or economic. Isn't that what we asked for, girls?

To be sure, the series is done in a high-camp, tongue-in-cheek style at which viewers are meant to giggle knowingly. The preposterousness of plot and characterization, the excessively glammed-up costumes and settings, the sheer audacity in defying all rules of reason and logic, are not to be taken seriously. Still, the giggles are inevitably laced with a bit of nervousness, for while the show is quite clearly a send-up, what it is sending up are the cultural and social values that undergird the wildly free marketplace which young people today are being socialized to compete in, or die trying.

"I did everything so that this child could have freedom of choice, and have what America stands for," said the mother of Jessica Dubroff, as she sent her seven-year-old daughter off on a quest to break a nonexistent, nonsensical "world record" wearing a cap inscribed with the slogan WOMEN FLY.

And women do indeed fly, on Melrose Place, in upscale women's magazines and pulp fiction, in the writings of young "post-feminist" writers like Naomi Wolf and Katie Roiphe, who snag six-figure book contracts to tell us how easy it is.

Women fly, too, in the new post-feminist ads for athletic shoes and exercise equipment, and in the writings of the new rightwing "feminist" organizations like No Left Turn and Independent Women's Forum, which preach that gender equity has been achieved and all that's left to do is just to "Go For It," "Knock Yourself Out," "Fly High."

But fly to where? And for what?

With only the marketplace--with its hollow, individualistic, always uncertain and anxiety-provoking ups and downs to guide our ambitions and our destinies--all the success, all the gender equity in the world can do little to calm our nerves or fulfill our deepest needs and desires.

No wonder the women who watch, excited but a bit horrified at this vision, feel the need to escape, occasionally, to the more stable, comforting world of Elinor and Marianne, where limits and rules and values and consequences were predictable. Of course the rules were cruel and unfair to women. But in a world driven only by marketplace values and dynamics, leveling the playing field for women and girls is hardly going to make the struggle for equality worth the trouble.

The left might be offering an alternative idea of gender equity, in the context of a larger vision of social and spiritual wholeness and stability, but it is in total media eclipse these days. So the Melrose Place vision is all the MTV generation has to compare with the reactionary Victorian fantasies. Hang on to your seats, kids. It's going to be a bumpy ride.