All hail! Will there ever be a female president?

I'm continually astonished, provoked and flummoxed by the odd and stunning trajectory men and women have traveled from the big bang of the Sexual Revolution to the big busts of the Plastic Revolution. The free-love idea that sex could be casual and safe and unfraught was, in retrospect, chuckleheaded. As my friend Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor for The New Republic, observes:

“Sex is a spiritual obligation. It makes up for the poverty of bourgeois experience. We're too late for the Spanish Civil War. We missed the landing at Omaha Beach. But still we need to know what we're capable of. So it is in the realm of private life that we have to risk ourselves, to disclose ourselves, to vindicate ourselves; and the more private, the more illuminating. Our theater of self-discovery is smaller. And in this lucky but shrunken theater, the bedroom looms very large. It is the front line, the foxhole.”

“The bedroom is where people who live otherwise safe lives can learn how cowardly or courageous they are, what their deepest and most dangerous desires are, whether they can follow the unreason within them to what it, too, can teach. Tolstoy said that modern tragedy should be set in the bedroom.”

If Gloria Steinem had had a crystal ball and flashed forward to a 2005 filled with catfights and women scheming to trap men, snag the coveted honorific “Mrs.,” get cosmetic procedures to look like Playmate bombshells and dress, as Dave Chappelle says, like “whores,” would the sister have even bothered to lead that bonfire of the bras?

I think not.

Whether or not American feminism will be defeated by American conservatism, it is incontrovertibly true that American feminism was trumped by American narcissism. This is a season when the female beau ideal is not Gloria Steinem, a serious bunny, but Jessica Simpson, a simple bunny, and when Hollywood's remake of The Stepford Wives stumbled because it was no longer satire but documentary.

I had to live through disco, pointy polyester shirt collars, greed is good, me decade, yuppie consumerism and cigar bars — coming full circle from platform shoes and Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses to platform shoes and Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses — before I was hit with a pang of nostalgia for the opportunity I'd missed in college. We would never again be so consumed with changing the world. The more time passed, the more Americans simply focused on changing themselves. We've become a nation of Frankensteins, and our monster is us. With everyone working so hard at altering their facades, we no longer have natural selection. We have unnatural selection.

Emma Woodhouse learned the hard way about the dangers of makeovers. She tried to turn her simple friend, Harriet Smith, into a girl with airs and aspirations. Too late, Jane Austen's heroine realized that she had altered Harriet for the worse, from humble to vain. Literature is rife with cautionary tales about experiments in identity — from Dorian Gray to Jay Gatsby to Tom Ripley, whose murderous motto was: “Better a fake somebody than a real nobody.”

But our contemporary carnival of makeovers does not concern itself with virtue, only vanity. We have grown superficial even about surfaces. The whole country seems to have embraced Oscar Wilde's teaching that “It is only the shallow who do not judge by appearance.” The national obsession with appearance is a chronicle of social psychosis straight out of Philip K. Dick.

We had the Belle Epoque. Now we have the Botox Epoch, permeated by plastic emotions from antidepressants and plastic veneers from collagen, silicone, cosmetic surgery and Botox. This, freedom?

I came of age in interlocking male institutions: My dad was a police detective, I was in the Catholic Church and I had three brothers. The nation's capital we lived in was peppered with statues honoring men. When I first got into journalism, I covered sports, then politics, at a time when they were even more male-dominated arenas.

Along the way, I got into the habit of tweaking the oppressors. I imagined that women were forever destined to a life of dissidence.

Though the science is mainly of metaphorical interest to me — a fascinating biological parable — the new research into sex chromosomes suggests that all that antler crashing over the centuries has tuckered out the Y. Men are now the weaker sex, geneticists say, and could soon disappear altogether — taking March Madness and cold pizza in the morning with them.

Only another hundred thousand years — or ten million, if you believe the Y optimists — and the male chromosome could go the way of the dial-up connection.

So, dear readers of the soon-to-be-extinct male persuasion, you're on notice.

In the year 102,005, or 10,002,005 at the latest, we'll finally have our fair share of female network anchors, female priests, female columnists, female Supreme Court justices, corrupt female CEOs and philandering female presidents.

And we'll run the world. In a manly way, of course.

Excerpted from “Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide,” by Maureen Dowd. Copyright © 2005 by Maureen Dowd. Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, a Member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher.

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