Male Call: BEYOND POWER

Life in the prehistoric era, as Marilyn French tells it, was apparently much like that in a modern Scout camp. Early humans fished and frolicked, lived off the land and sat around communal fires at night talking, singing and indulging in sexual banter. Life was generally not hard, she says, and peace reigned between the sexes and between humans and nature. This idyllic era, a source of some nostalgia for the author, fell victim to the most decisive and perfidious event in history: the rise of patriarchy.

Perhaps gathering in cultic groups "rather like women meeting in consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s," men groped their way toward an ideology of dominance and manipulation. Patriarchy took over the world and has distorted human culture for more than 5,000 years with its obsession with power. Male self-identity depends on the ability to control women and nature. No dominance, no manhood. Parodying Vince Lombardi on football, French writes: "In a patriarchal world, power is not just the highest but the only value." Elsewhere she seems to say that slaughter is required for male identity: "Killing became the mark of the truest man, of manhood itself."

Beyond Power is part ideological tract, part history of the world according to feminism. In a brisk romp through the ages, readers learn that an 18th century woman playwright, Olympe de Gouges, came down firmly on both sides of the French Revolution, and that Crystal Eastman founded the American Civil Liberties Union but got no credit for it. No male abuse of females goes unchronicled, and to give the author her due, the long litany, from foot binding to burning for witchcraft, has a sobering effect. French, an academic who has taught English at Harvard, Hofstra and Holy Cross, seems incapable of nuance. The history of fatherhood, she believes, is the history of tyranny, and dialogue is impossible in corporations and other hierarchical institutions. One of the primary aims of military training is to teach young men how to hate.

Every mean-spirited or mistaken action by a male is chalked up as yet another manifestation of patriarchy in action: Stalin's murder of Polish army officers, the deterioration of language, textbooks that fail to discuss the debate over clitoral vs. vaginal orgasms.

Along the way, French dispenses reams of disinformation. Middle-class women of the 18th century, she writes, got pregnant easily because they were inactive. Regarbling an already muddled item from Ms. magazine, she says that President Carter wanted to send female soldiers into Afghanistan, and that the Afghan rebellion occurred partly because of the Soviet demand that women be allowed to read, write and attend village meetings. China and the Soviet Union are listed as the world leaders in allowing women to fulfill themselves.