Male Call: BEYOND POWER

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French will have no truck with biological explanations for male-female differences in attitude and behavior. Even the larger size and greater musculature of males, an obvious factor in discussing male domination of women, is dismissed. Size cannot be important, she reasons, since young males do not usually beat up their smaller fathers. By discounting all other factors that might explain why males think and act similarly around the world, French is left with the patriarchal theory. This long-running conspiracy, insists Beyond Power, is responsible for the abuse of the environment, the invention of the state and the idea of heaven. Transcendence is the name of the male game: under patriarchy, men have come to hate the corporeal world, including their own bodies.

French is sure that feminism is the first opponent of patriarchy that cannot be co-opted or assimilated. "Feminism," she writes, "is in a state I call blessed: its ends and its means are identical." How feminism will overthrow patriarchy goes unexplained, though she believes it requires the replacement of power with pleasure. This is not the narrow, selfish pleasure of patriarchy, but "a gratified response to quality" that will somehow blossom into compassion and community.

The notion that an unacknowledged male ideology exists is not a frivolous one. Science and politics might be very different if women were more involved in the fields. Male thinking runs easily to the linear and abstract, and men's search for control does need examination. Beyond Power poses as such a work; instead, its 640 pages promise a rigorous analysis and deliver a series of cartoons. --By John Leo