All hail! Will there ever be a female president?

I took the idealism and passion of the '60s for granted, simply assuming we were sailing toward perfect equality with men, a utopian world at home and at work. I didn't listen to my mom when she advised me to get a suitcase with wheels before my first trip to Europe. I didn't listen to her before my first cocktail party, when she told me that men prefer homemade dinner rolls stuffed with turkey and ham to expensive catered goose pâté and exotic cheese wheels. “Simplicity pays,” she said smugly, when all the guys swarmed around her sandwiches. And I didn't listen to her when she cautioned me about the chimera of equality.

On my thirty-first birthday, she sent me a bankbook with a modest nest egg she had saved for me. “I always felt that the girls in a family should get a little more than the boys even though all are equally loved,” she wrote in a letter. “They need a little cushion to fall back on. Women can stand on the Empire State Building and scream to the heavens that they are equal to men and liberated, but until they have the same anatomy, it's a lie. It's more of a man's world today than ever. Men can eat their cake in unlimited bakeries.”

I thought she was just being Old World, like my favorite jade, Dorothy Parker, when she wrote:

By the time you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying —
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

I thought the struggle for egalitarianism was a cinch, so I could leave it to my earnest sisters in black turtlenecks and Birkenstocks. I figured there was plenty of time for me to get serious later, that America would always be full of passionate and full-throated debate about the big stuff — social issues, sexual equality, civil rights — rather than tinny right-left food fights and shrieking conservative babes with blond hair, long legs and miniskirts going on TV to trash women and women's rights.

No Cassandra, I.

Little did I realize that the sexual revolution would have the unexpected consequence of intensifying the confusion between the sexes, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence as they entered the twenty-first century. The fewer the barriers, the more muddied the waters. It never occurred to me that the more women aped men, in everything from dress to orgasms, the more we would realize how inalienably different the sexes are.

Or, most curious of all, that women would move from playing with Barbie to denouncing Barbie to remaking themselves as Barbie.

Maybe we should have known that the story of women's progress would be more of a zigzag than a superhighway, that the triumph of feminism would last a nanosecond while the backlash lasted forty years. And that all the triumphant moments of feminism — from the selection of Geraldine Ferraro to the Anita Hill hearings to the co-presidency of buy-one-get-one-free First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton — would unleash negative reactions toward women.

Despite the best efforts of philosophers, politicians, historians, novelists, screenwriters, linguists, therapists, anthropologists and facilitators, men and women are still in a muddle in the boardroom, the Situation Room and the bedroom. At the risk of raising the question Am I necessary?, I admit I have no answers. But for decades now I've loved asking the questions. This book is not a systematic inquiry of any kind, or a handy little volume of sterling solutions to the American woman's problems. I possess no special wisdom about redemption in matters of sex and love. I am not peddling a theory or a slogan or a policy. I'm always as baffled as the next woman. As Dinah Brand, the hard-boiled, mercenary dame in Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest, complained, “I used to think I knew men, but, by God! I don't. They're lunatics, all of them.”

I certainly understand if some men prefer to think of themselves as individuals and opt to wriggle out of one broad's broad generalizations. This book offers only the diligent notes — on the job and off — of a fascinated observer of our gender perplexities.

And what a spectacle gender in America is! The entanglements between men and women come in three forms: tragedies, comedies and tragicomedies. Outrage regularly alternates with silliness. Illusions are often more interesting than realities. Causes and desires are regularly mixed up. Will there ever be peace? I doubt it. But there should always be laughter.

My mom, a soft touch who loved men, suggested that I change my title to Why Men Are Necessary. “Men are necessary for breeding and heavy lifting,” she said wryly.

But, difficult as it is, we must face up to the tough questions. As a species, it's possible that men are ever so last century. Are they any longer necessary for procreation? Have they proven themselves emotionally incapable of governing the country because they are really the ones subject to hissy fits and hormonal imbalances? Is their pillaging and plundering, warmongering, empire-building Y chromosome melting faster than the Wicked Witch of the West? Is it time to dispense with all those oxygen-depleting men batting out opinions in newspapers, TV and blogs, and those computer-generated-looking male anchor clones on network news? And what about women? Are we regressing? Or advancing along the winding scenic route in ways we hadn't predicted?

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