What evil lurks in the hearts of men?

For a moment there, between the "Tragedy of the Fallen Hero" phase and the "Race Is the Real Issue" phase of the O.J. Simpson affair, the media took a moment to do a few belated mea culpas about their historic and egregious neglect--no, let's be honest, their distortion and glamorization--of violence against women. For those few intense days right after Simpson's arrest, when news of the football hero's history of wife-beating ignited the long-suppressed rage of women everywhere, there seemed to be some real understanding and concern about how the courts, the police, the media, and the society at large collude to keep women unsafe and in constant fear, even in their own homes.

Not that this reaction was immediate. Not at all. It took the emotional equivalent of a nuclear explosion from the female population to get the attention of the major media, and then the world. Not since the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas confrontation have I seen such a dramatic division along gender lines in the way a news event was perceived and talked about.

Right from the start--on that amazing night when ninety-five million of us sat transfixed by the movements of a white Bronco being followed by a fleet of police cars along a deserted freeway lined with apparently crazed spectators cheering their "hero" on--the lines were being drawn. Although the mostly male news teams certainly didn't get it for a while.

Cindy Garvey, the ex-wife of an abusive baseball star, knew of Nicole Simpson's battery and had even tried to counsel her. Garvey seemed every bit the "hysterical female" to her co-panelists on CNN as she expressed her rage at the sympathy and adulation most of the press and the world was then giving O.J.

"The love that so many people have for him ... the fact that so many are cheering him on," gushed the fawning male anchors, as they tried to fill the empty hours of airtime. And, as Garvey alone seemed to understand, it was enough to set the collective teeth of the female population on edge. During the next few days, the gender wars were on. So intense was the female response that, as in the case of Anita Hill, all the major media finally had to take time out from business as usual to do cover stories and front-page features on the subject of domestic violence.

And then, as quickly as it had appeared on center stage, it was gone, rerouted to the back pages of daytime soap opera and talk shows, women's magazines, and church-basement support groups. Well, what else is new? Feminists have been tirelessly laboring in the courts and legislatures and health-care institutions for more than twenty years now to change the nation's perceptions and priorities where gender violence is concerned.

While much has changed for the better, there is probably no single issue in which the problem of the "male gaze" in media--the tendency of film and news media to present things from the male point of view--is more serious or dangerous. Hollywood movies, TV news reporting and drama, and hard rock and rap music have a long and inglorious history of glamorizing male violence and distorting its social and emotional realities. Quite simply, we have not seen images of male violence that accurately target its sources and hold its perpetrators accountable.

The movies are the primary culprit. It is on the big screen that we see the most constant, most compelling, and most distorted images of male violence. What the movies show us are male villains who are really not like you and me. They are larger than life, in charm or viciousness--often both--and are, therefore, somehow separate from the "normal" males we actually know, or are. Remember the sexily deranged Robert DeNiro in Cape Fear, the seductively irresistible Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, the demonically lovable Jack Nicholson in just about anything lately? What woman could equate such cinematic concoctions or their deeds with anything their own boyfriends or fathers may have done? Or feel like doing later that night?

Summer is the season for sexy, "heroic" violence in movies, and this past one--the summer of O.J.--was no different. Never mind the usual mayhem for morons. Even the few intelligent films of the season were hard to take.

My own worst movie moment took place in the one film of the season which actually had some claim to being intelligent, sophisticated, and socially critical. I went to see Mike Nichols's Wolf right in the middle of the O.J. hoopla and was thoroughly enjoying its sly, sophisticated sendup of the New York publishing industry, even identifying with the wimpy-but-principled editor-turned-wolf played by Jack Nicholson, when--to my horror--someone bounds out in the moonlight, breaks into his estranged, adulterous wife's home, and (gasp!) nearly decapitates her with his bare teeth. Much as Nicole Simpson was nearly decapitated by someone's sharp knife.

The problem is we have few counterimages to that fantasy, few images of male violence which present it in its actual psychological, social, and political context, that explain to us why it happens and tell us it is neither glamorous nor acceptable. We have few cop shows, no summer blockbusters, and almost no news reports or documentaries in which we can see, with clear eyes, what male violence looks like, who it looks like (the mailman, the guy next door, the office supervisor, the Supreme Court Justice, the Senator from Oregon) and how and why it goes on so readily and with so few consequences.

It isn't widely acknowledged, of course, but there is a place in media where violence against women is represented and judged by its proper standards: daytime television. On soap operas and talk shows, these issues have been featured ever since the women's movement put them on the agenda in the late 1960s.

Even as the O.J. story gobbled up all of daytime and prime time for weeks on end, The Young and the Restless, the most popular soap on television, was in the midst of a long-running, front-burner story line about a battered wife on trial for killing her husband because he had threatened to attack her daughter. Indeed, as the story unfolded to the fascination of millions of women everywhere--and, I'm happy to say, growing numbers of men--the producers saw fit to present what can only be called "political education" on domestic violence. They had the victim/defendant attend a support group for battered women along with women of all races and classes, in which facts and figures on the crisis of gender violence were regularly presented. And then, at the trial itself, the entire support group demonstrated outside the courthouse wearing T-shirts reading FREE APRIL LYNCH and STOP VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN.

I relate this in detail because it must come as a surprise to many that womanoriented television can be so dramatically different in its treatment of gender politics than the male-dominated news and movie industries. But it is so, especially on talk shows, where gender violence is a staple topic. In 1993, there were no fewer than sixty-three talk-show segments in which some form of gender violence was the topic, according to the Journal Graphics index of transcripts it offers. And that's just the programs this one company transcribes.

This is what has recently gotten so many media honchos' knickers in knots. Commentaries in Time, Newsweek, and elsewhere worry that Oprah and Sally present a real threat to the criminal-justice system and its ability to find "objective" jurors. The "abuse excuse," it seems, is responsible for letting too many "criminals" go free. Never mind that these "criminals" who lash out after years of inhuman treatment would not even be in the criminal-justice system if any of the other systems in this society were doing their jobs in protecting women and children, or at least offering them alternative escape routes.

Given these differences in daytime and prime-time programming, it's no wonder there is a growing "gender gap" in attitudes toward gender relations. A recent New York Times/CBS poll of teenagers shows that girls and boys have increasingly different attitudes and expectations about gender roles, marriage, and family life.

One interesting difference: Boys tend to think boys are better than girls, while girls see themselves as being as good as boys. And girls intend to be equals in marriage, while boys--still--think they will be the bosses. And one good omen: Girls, unlike boys, see themselves as "being happy without getting married," which, given the epidemic of domestic violence, may be a lifesaver for many.

At least one factor in these troubling indicators may well be the different media girls and boys watch. Boys are likely to be watching sports programs where male "heroism," like O.J.'s, is measured in brute force and physical strength, while girls will more likely be watching Oprah, where stories of nonheroic male violence are often told and judged harshly.

But the focus on victimization, on the pathos of the woman victim, helpless against her brutish attacker, leaves something to be desired from a political standpoint--even when she is ultimately empowered to strike back and reclaim her life. For the answer to domestic violence is not--heaven help us--for women to wait around until things get unbearable and then strike back and go to trial, or to the talk-show circuit.

There is a middle ground missing from the gender-polarized media views of male violence. Somewhere between the hero/demons of the big screen and the heroine/victims of the daytime small screen, there ought to be a space for the true depiction of male violence--as it really occurs, by the kinds of men who really, every single day, every sixteen seconds--do it.

There used to be a small space on prime time that offered a glimpse of the truth. The often-vilified TV docudrama used to present occasional narratives in which violent men were portrayed in realistic psychological, social, and economic depth and detail. Movies like A Case of Rape and Cry Rape, dating back to the mid-1970s, portrayed rapists as the all-too-ordinary, woman-hating guys they really are.

The often-excellent miniseries about multiple murderers like Ted Bundy, while generally dismissed as sensational and overly violent by critics, were exemplary in their portrayal of the family and social values and environments which, from childhood on, work to create and often condone such horrifying behavior. And movies like The Burning Bed and Something About Amelia, concerning domestic violence and incest, have often been a source of education and pressure upon the state to provide more aid to victims of sexual abuse and even a few programs to treat abusers. (The kind of programs, if you recall, that O.J. Simpson's judge permitted him to skip because it would be too "humiliating" for so prominent a figure to attend.)

But these docudramas are, I'm sorry to say, a dying breed. In the last year or two--no doubt because of media reaction to, and terror of, the dramatic gender polarization which such cases as the Bobbitts, Thomas/Hill, and now O.J. Simpson have highlighted--docudrama producers and their sponsors have done a turnaround. They have been giving us one show after another in which high-profile cases involving sexual abuse of young people and violence within families are presented not from the victim's point of view but from the abuser's.

We have seen no fewer than three TV movies about Amy Fisher, two miniseries about the Menendez family, and about a dozen lesser-noted features about less-publicized cases i which women and children who have probably suffered abuse by adult males are blamed, condemned, and demonized in ways which have audiences screaming for blood. In the case of the Menendez brothers, who still face the death penalty in their pending trials, the irresponsibility of the media in presenting so slanted and judgmental a version of events as yet unresolved by the courts is particularly alarming.

I have no doubt surprised you by apparently defending, or at least giving the benefit of the doubt to, Fisher and the Menendez brothers. After all, isn't it obvious--to everyone from Dominick Dunne in Vanity Fair to Margaret Carlson in Time to John Leonard in New York magazine, and perhaps to most of your friends and acquaintances--that these "bad seed" demons did terrible things for which they deserve to be punished?

Perhaps. But anyone who followed the Menendez trial on Court TV (or read the fine print about Amy Fisher, which was harder to find) knows there was another side to these stories. Two juries, after all, were sufficiently confused about the Menendez case to give up their efforts to come to judgment. To about half of them--suffering, no doubt, from "the Oprah effect"--the sins of the adult male in the case, like those of the husband and father in The Burning Bed and Something about Amelia, were at least as important in moral and legal terms as the crimes of the defendants themselves.

And it's not all Oprah's fault. The fact is that issues of gender and family violence are--thanks to feminists--now contested matters about which there are serious questions and challenges to dominant assumptions, and rightly so. Even Amy Fisher, from a feminist standpoint, deserved more generous coverage than she got. She was, after all, a child--one who, like way too many young girls who end up in the juvenile- or criminal-justice systems, was very probably the victim of incest and was most certainly the exploited sexual victim of a thirty-six-year-old married father.

The TV movie versions of these cases, however--all five of them--never even mentioned the issue of sexual and physical violence against these defendants. They presented the entire scenarios, in both cases, from the point of view of the adult males in a way which, in the 1970s and 1980s, did not usually happen. Even Joey Buttafuoco was whitewashed on TV. And Jose Menendez, the rags-to-riches Cuban immigrant, was treated as the perhapsoverbearing, but essentially caring, father the prosecution hoped the juries would believe in.

They didn't persuade most of the jurors, as it happened, but they surely did persuade the producers of the two docudramas, both of which offered one-sided versions in which the two brothers were seen as evil sociopaths, plain and simple. Whatever one thinks about the actual Fisher and Menendez cases, I think it's a troubling sign of the times.

So much for movies, prime time, and the news media. The accurate depiction of male violence against women and children is not likely to come from them--even in the marginal way it did, on occasion, in the past. The great need for a true picture will have to come from elsewhere: Who are the perpetrators? Why do they continue to commit these crimes? And why are those in power so quick to distort, deny, and brush under the rug all traces?

Luckily, the publishing industry--not yet wholly taken over by the wolves--is still printing books that provide that picture. Indeed, in the midst of the Simpson mess, Harcourt Brace published Mariah Burton Nelson's wonderfully titled The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football, in which the former pro basketball player reveals some shocking facts and statistics on the brutally sexist culture of male professional sports and encourages women to get physically strong themselves. This is must-read stuff for all young girls and, perhaps more importantly, young boys.

But I am happy to say that my best literary escape during those dark days and weeks of summer came from a male author. Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart, the harrowing story of his own family--from which executed murderer Gary Gilmore came--presents the most moving and meaningful account I've read of just what it is like for a male to grow up within the culture of male violence and to be socialized to reproduce it.

Gilmore's picture is truly horrifying: a family in which male abuses of power, and female helplessness in the face of it, reached epic proportions. And yet the people involved--Gilmore's vicious father and murderous brothers--seem all too human and believable, from the point of view of a younger brother in whom love, pity, and hatred combine in moving ways.

Gilmore's book makes clear that most male violence is neither heroic, glamorous, nor--most interestingly--even demonic. Rather, as Hannah Arendt understood so well in considering the atrocities of such Nazi functionaries as Adolph Eichmann, male violence--institutionalized or individual--is more banal than satanic when you get up close.

That is why it is so common and so hard to eradicate. It is, indeed, the work of average guys--fathers, boyfriends, husbands, neighbors, bosses, judges, football players, Senators, and service workers. It is the work of men who were raised, like the rest of us, to accept the male violence around them--at home, at the movies, on the streets, in schoolyards and playing fields--as normal, as simply what men do. To accept it and to imitate it, just as they were raised to accept, blindly and unthinkingly, the system of gender injustice that supports and condones it.

That Mikal Gilmore not only broke the cycle of male violence in his family but also had the courage, compassion, and insight to tell the terrible secrets of his life is admirable.

It is what one version of true male heroism, in a sane and humane world, would look like.