With Women Like These...

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It's Still a Man's World. Men make war, run the government and maintain sole custody of the remote control. They also cause the most political trouble: the Keating Five, Abscam, Iran-contra. Martha Mitchell tried to insert herself into Watergate but got stuck with a hypodermic needle and put to bed before we could hear much from her.

There are women galore in the current scandal, but not one of them is a figure of power or authority. We are back with prefeminist vixens, villains and victims. Couldn't we at least get a Marcia Clark or a Leslie Abramson? The President's inner circle has mostly been an all-male preserve (just ask Dee Dee Myers). Ken Starr's deputies are swaggering cowboys, and the attorneys for the witnesses are all pinstripes and red meat. Marcia Lewis, Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky have become household names, but would you want your daughter to grow up to be any one of them? Even Hillary Clinton, fresh from her Heritage Tour, is more like Lady Bird Johnson than Eleanor Roosevelt.

Lewinsky, who reportedly told a friend she was bringing presidential kneepads to Washington, is a throwback to an era when the best way to power was through a prominent man. She is a product of indulgent, divorced Beverly Hills parents. As mothers go, I don't know any quite like Monica's, and have trouble finding a touchstone: Madonna (the current one)? A character out of Dynasty (Monica's favorite soap opera)? Monica and her mom aren't simply close, as most stories posit; instead, they're gal pals, dieting together since Monica was a chubby eight-year-old, moving in as roommates after the divorce, swapping clothes and dating strategies. Were my daughter to tell me she was having an affair with an older man, I would do everything I could to stop it (Do you know how many nurses think the heart surgeon is really in love with them? If you keep this up, I will lock you in your room! etc.). I might not succeed, but I do know I would not curl up on the sofa and chat about it. And I would not tuck away a soiled dress as if my daughter had caught the bridal bouquet, even under the guise of preserving it as potential evidence. But, then again, I would never have written a book like The Private Lives of the Three Tenors, hinting to the publisher that my knowledge of Placido Domingo was more than platonic.

Then there's Linda Tripp, whose voice we heard for the first time this week. Addressing an ungrateful nation from the courthouse beach, as the grand-jury stakeout is known, and shaking like a leaf, Tripp made a desperate effort to humanize herself as a truth-seeking patriot, a "suburban mom" protecting her kids. "Who am I?" she began. "I'm you," she answered, "an average American." I shouted back at the TV, "No, you're NOT! Take that back!"

Of all the characters, Tripp is the hardest to embrace, especially when she insists on painting herself as a victim. Anyone in her position, she contends, would have started taping after being asked to lie under oath, which is news to me. Most women I know, if confided in by a good friend about an affair, would keep it secret. And if the good friend asked me to lie under oath about it, I would say no and insist we drop the subject. I would not press a Record button for three months' worth of intimate confidences, all the while feigning friendship.