If you're sitting at a dinner party, and you look around and see that more than half the women have the same streaky blond hair, blame it on Homer. He was the one who first gave the epithet "golden" to Aphrodite and caused women to wish for hair of her color. Down through the ages, blondes have been prized for their rarity and erotic allure-even though most of them were not authentic.

This is the story Joanna Pitman tells in On Blondes . We get the historical litany of blondes from ancient Greek goddesses to Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana. We learn that "by the mid-nineties [Diana] was spending £600 a year dying her hair blonde." We learn about Queen Elizabeth I's transformation, as she aged, from auburn hair to blondeness, about the courtesans of Venice sitting on their altane bleaching their hair in the sun so that Vittore Carpaccio might immortalize them, of Hitler's equation of blondeness with Aryan purity, of Jean Harlow's platinum revolution (which made her hair fall out), of Marilyn Monroe's hair the color of a dirty pillow slip, and finally of Madonna's banal conviction that "blonde is definitely a different state of mind."

Dante Gabriel Rosetti was so obsessed with hair that he used to stalk women in the streets, drawn to their streaming manes. Hair was apparently a familial obsession, since in his sister Christina Rosetti's poem "Goblin Market," a golden lock is traded for forbidden sex with subhuman creatures. Hair and sex have been equated since the most ancient times. Alexander Pope hardly invented the theme in "The Rape of the Lock," though he gave it the perfect ironic expression. And the Victorians who traded hair lockets and rings were perhaps trading favors of another kind. Of these depths in her theme, Ms. Pitman seems aware, though she rarely permits herself to delve fully into them.

None of her material is new. Some of it is fleetingly striking. (Like a blonde.) It did fascinate me that the ancient Romans so prized blond hair that they sheared Germanic slaves to make blond wigs for their Mediterranean-looking noble ladies-emulating, of course, the very people who would eventually overrun the empire. The irony is appealing. But such moments of epiphany are rare in this book, though it's well written and exhaustively researched.

On Blondes struck me as the kind of book produced more and more often by contemporary publishing-a book that must have made for a great pitch meeting. You can summarize it in 30 seconds; even non-readers can imagine it. It seems to have a woman-friendly subject-and women, publishers hope, buy books. Ms. Pitman seems to me a talented writer searching for a book contract in a dumbed-down publishing universe. Her own inclination seems to have been to write a huge cultural history of hair, a kind of capillary Golden Bough in which all the myths and legends about hair through the ages would have been cataloged and compared. I wish she had done this, but perhaps she knew how hard it would be to get it published.

Ms. Pitman seems to have been inspired by a period of her own life spent in Africa, where her fair-haired looks made her particularly unusual. This is a fascinating beginning for a memoir. It also raises many interesting questions about fashions in beauty in a world where the races increasingly mix and intermarry. We have seen full lips replace rosebud lips as the standard of feminine beauty. Will other changes in the ideal come out of the mingling of races? Already, many of our goddesses of beauty are coffee-colored and yellow-haired. It is fascinating to speculate on the changes in store.

Probably the most interesting parts of Ms. Pitman's book deal with the transformations in fashion from the idealization of dark beauties to the idealization of the fair. Dark beauties had their day during the reign of Louis XIV and in the 17th century, when Van Dyck, Rembrandt and Vermeer apotheosized the dark. Ms. Pitman points out that blond hair lost favor in the 17th century because dyes had fallen in price, and thus had become too available to the bourgeoisie. The rich needed a new sign of status, which they found first in dark hair, later in wigs of enormous complexity and expense. By the mid-18th century, enormous wigs supported ships in full sail on waves of powdered hair. Through the centuries, hair alternated between sexual symbol and status symbol. Often, it fulfilled both these roles at once.

How did blond hair reassert itself after a period of fascination with dark curls or powdered wigs? Ms. Pitman credits the fascination with folk tales, which reached its height in the 19th century. By the time of the brothers Grimm, blond hair-if it was natural-had returned as a symbol of purity and virtue. Blondeness had totally changed its meaning. Associated with Aphrodite in ancient Greece, it now was associated with virginity and innocence.

The deeper theme in this book is the infinite mutability of human symbols. Blondness has stood for vice and for purity in different cultural contexts. This ought to alert us to the human tendency to manipulate symbols so that they become an outer expression of inner drives. How does this process occur? How do fashions change, and why? How is it possible that the same symbol that stands for vice and experience also may stand for purity and virginity? "Blondes are the best victims," said Alfred Hitchcock. "They're like virgin snow which shows up the bloody footprints." And yet, as Yeats wrote, "some woman's yellow hair has maddened every mother's son." More interesting than the hair color itself is the human tendency to mythologize certain physical objects and ascribe magic to them. Considering how common blond hair has become in an age of single-process streaks, why does it still have power-and can that power last? I think not.

Fashion is nothing if not malleable, and it responds rapidly to political and social change. In an apocalyptic world where most of the have-nots are dark-haired, blond hair could come to be a symbol of oppression, of political incorrectness, of colonialism. Probably, in some places, it already has. I wish this book had liberated itself to become the full-blown philosophical and political treatise that's always lurking in its margins. Hair and its historical meandering remains a subject full of promise. There are powerful forces in hair, as we know from the attempts of Muslim and Orthodox Jewish culture to cover it. There's much more to say about both the threat and the allure of hair. On Blondes makes a worthy beginning.

Erica Jong's new novel, Sappho's Leap (W.W. Norton), will be published in May.

Let me make a guilty confession: Natalie Angier's Woman: An Intimate Geography , is–after a great volume of poetry–my favorite sort of book. Science writing at its classiest and most readable refreshes me when I am weary of fiction and the ubiquitous memoir. And a book about women that looks like it could be a worthy successor to Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex ? All I could say when asked to review it was: Yes!

Was my enthusiasm justified? Again, yes. I learned a lot from reading Woman , although I didn't agree with Ms. Angier about everything, and once or twice I thought I caught her riding a hobbyhorse–with high style.

I learned that the vagina is really clean unless overcome by disease; that the clitoris has 8,000 nerve endings while the penis has only 4,000; that bonobos (a gibbon-ish relative of ours) are sexual Olympians who use rubbing and stroking to orgasm to lubricate the daily frictions of tribal living; that "males are more like females than females are like males"; that even in pair-bonded species "adultery" is more common than fidelity; that no apes or chimps, our closest kin in the animal kingdom, are pair-bonded, let alone monogamous; that female chimpanzees "search high and low and risk life and limb to find sex with partners other than the partners who have a way of finding them"; that half their offspring are not the offspring of the resident males of their group. (All those females sneaking out of the family tree, hellbent on genetic variety and pleasure!) I learned that testosterone is the hormone of desire rather than aggression in women; that vaginas are far more diverse morphologically than penises; that breasts are even more miraculous than we may have thought (they can make high-grade milk even without a nutritious maternal diet); and that "the more intelligent the animal the deeper [her] passion." (But perhaps I knew that already.)

Humans are complex emotionally because we are smart, long-lived, and have complicated brains. Those brains demanded and got complex reproductive strategies. Most anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists ("evo psychos," Ms. Angier dubs them) have actually underestimated just how complex.

Ms. Angier writes wonderfully well. Her mischievous sense of humor is even more evident here than in her science columns for The New York Times . But the position of Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter for that paper has certainly given her access to the full spectrum of scientific research and researchers, from the nuttiest to the most sane. None of their antics are lost on her. She sees through the evo psychos who use their trendy "science" to plump for self-serving masculinist myths. She casts a critical eye on their "hoggamus hogwash" (she disputes "Hoggamus, higgamus–men are polygamous," and implies that women are more likely to be polyandrous). She is the good-humored scourge; put her in a room with Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal , and she'll tickle and sing rather than club and claw him to death.

She writes: "Evo psychos pull us back and forth until we might want to sue for whiplash. On the one hand we are told that women have a lower sex drive than men do. On the other hand we are told that the madonna-whore dichotomy is a universal stereotype.… Women are said to have lower sex drives than men, yet they are universally punished if they display evidence to the contrary … all the laws, customs, punishments, shame, strictures, mystiques, and antimystiques are aimed with full hominid fury at that tepid, sleepy, hypoactive creature the female libido. How can we know what is 'natural' for us when we are treated as unnatural for wanting our lust, our freedom, the music of our bodies?"

Natalie Angier's prose, with its mixture of irony and metaphor-making, is surprising–like the research underlying her book. Just when you think she is indulging in the too-poetic, she undercuts it with a satirical jab.

She is my kind of feminist. Unlike, say, Catharine MacKinnon, she has a sense of humor about the war between the sexes. She understands that women and men need–and even occasionally love–one another, and she wholeheartedly supports a truce between the sexes, however shaky. She gives equal time to female and male researchers; you never get the feeling that she is about to announce that the male sex is obsolete and that we should all promote parthenogenesis for the future good of the species. Her writing suggests a happy acceptance of her own sexuality. Pleasure and pragmatism inform her take. She also has a healthy respect for menopause and for the extraordinary role grandmothers have played in human evolution.

Ms. Angier describes herself as "a utopian pessimist by nature." Her concluding chapter, "A Skeptic in Paradise" calls for a "permanent revolution" in which women never give up the struggle to improve society for the benefit of children and families. She recognizes that we have made some changes but we have hardly made all the changes future generations will need for full equality between the sexes.

This is no less true for being obvious, but it is scarcely obvious to everyone. Ms. Angier encourages us to see that "mothering strategies are as diverse as mating strategies, and no one strategy is the one, the twenty-four carat, the alpha and omega of maternity." She urges us to think about the extreme depth of human bonds, the complexity of human brains and of human culture, and to break free of the stereotypes that constrict both our imaginations and our problem-solving powers. She knows, for instance, that it is maladaptive for women to continue to blame other women for mothering differently from the way they themselves have chosen, for mating differently, or for choosing different life patterns and strategies. She sees the deep need for sororal unity in the midst of a diversity of choices unknown a century ago.

Woman raises interesting questions about the way science and scientific research reflect cultural biases. Ms. Angier takes the evo psychos to task for cloaking misogyny in pseudoscientific garb and calling it Nature.

She writes: "We don't have to argue that men and women are exactly the same or that humans are meta-evolutionary beings, removed from nature and slaves to culture, to reject the perpetually regurgitated model of the coy female and the ardent male.… The thesis of sexual dialectics is that females and males vie for control over the means of re production. Those means are the female body, for there is as yet no beast as the parthenogenetic man."

We never say it out loud, but all wise women and men know that these issues are the dark heart of sexual politics, the mating dance, and even feminist theorizing. We are hard-wired with the desire to pass along our genes to the next generation and to protect that generation so they can pass theirs (ours) along to the generation after that. How refreshing to find a book that sees through 30 years' worth of blather about sexual politics and calls a gene a gene, a reproductive strategy a reproductive strategy, and a survival mechanism a survival mechanism.

We should never forget how complicated we are. Nature relies on flexibility as its main strategy of survival. We bipedal hominids will survive and thrive despite mistakes and wrong-turnings because we are, above all, flexible. Anything that threatens flexibility–whether cultural or biological–is bad for our survival. We have covered the earth with our sisters and brothers not by being static in our behavior and belief systems but by being incredibly changeable. In diversity is our strength.

It is the open-mindedness of Woman that is so beguiling. Natalie Angier encourages us to celebrate the diversity of human nature and to realize that the process of cultural evolution is only just beginning.

A fictional sitcom heroine is compared to three historic women leaders and found wanting. This is news? We learn that Hollywood sitcoms-even those created by Michelle Pfeiffer's talented consort, David E. Kelley-demean women. This is given as proof that feminism is dead. The rest of the story is equally silly-featuring Spice Girl lyrics cheek by jowl with Camille Paglia-esque analyses of the "iconography" of Courtney Love, Bust magazine and the now-departed Spice, Ginger. Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem get short shrift. Neither Eleanor Roosevelt nor Hillary Rodham Clinton is even glimpsed. The Equal Rights Amendment debacle and the fortunes of contraception and abortion in America do not rate a mention. Nancy Friday-whom writers gleefully attacked in Time 's pages until her husband Norman Pearlstine became the boss-comes in for some unctuous felches. Now she is "a sex-positive feminist if ever there was one." (They used to call her a harpy). And Helen Fielding, Elizabeth Wurtzel and Deborah Garrison seem to be among the few young female writers Time has heard of.

I don't know about the guys who run Time Warner Inc. and CNN, but I thought the way to change the world was to follow in the footsteps of the suffragists, not Mary Richards. When will this kind of flimsy reasoning and intellectually vacuous reporting stop posing as cultural commentary? And when, oh when, will all the ink-stained wretches at Time (and elsewhere) let up on retrograde stories that accuse women of "self-obsession"? "Self-obsession" is code for women concentrating on women when we ought to, of course, be concentrating on men.

Time 's female journalist, Ginia Bellafante, probably doesn't even know that her employer has run scores of stories like this long before she was born. Or that she's been made part of an old shtick at Time : Find a woman to attack other women in the hopes of establishing her byline, and the status quo will remain untouched. The thing is: The trick usually works. Editors at Time and elsewhere in the media can always find benighted women journalists who are delighted for the chance to attack other women.

They just don't get it. The poor dears think they're furthering the cause of equality by trashing other women. From Clare Boothe Luce to Ms. Paglia, women writers have gotten famous for attacking other women, but it's still a cowardly and stupid thing to do. It's the way of the world. The old world. The patriarchal world. The Time -CNN world. Women are still tokens there, not chief executives. They can write, report, even edit, but the boardroom is still a men's room. The majority of people with the private jets have cocks. Let's hope they use them both for something fun.

Women think they have no choice but to trash other women in print. I myself always cringe when some sweet young journalist comes knocking at my door, telling me she loves my work and grew up reading me. I know then that I'm in for it.

Why Women Dish Women

I've thought long and hard about why so many women think they have something to gain by dishing other women. Envy only partly explains it. Susan Cheever said to me, "Women turn on women because they have nowhere else to turn. Women have all this intelligence and all this energy-but there are not enough rewards to go around. So they're like rats in a cage when there's overpopulation in the rat community. Women attacking women is a form of gender-based road rage. They're angry at men and children, but it's not safe to attack them, so they turn, out of frustration, on other women. Watch out who you lie down next to at an Upper East Side exercise class. You literally take your life in your hands at Lotte Berke."

In a world in which women are set up as tokens and rivals, our thoughtless impulse to attack each other is an evolutionary throwback we can ill afford. It merely perpetuates our second-class status, leaving us out of the club of power forever. Men don't like each other, but they know when to line up behind the alpha male and kiss his ass. They know how the world works.

Women are still in the dark ages, however, thrashing about and striking out at other women who dare to do what we wish we could do ourselves. I've been observing the kind of punitive responses automatically evoked by women writers who dare to tell their personal stories-as if a woman's story could ever be important. Watching the female firing squad-journalists from Entertainment Weekly , The Wall Street Journal , The Baltimore Sun , the San Francisco Chronicle , The Boston Globe , The New York Times Book Review , even Janet Malcolm on the Internet-line up in front of Kathryn Harrison (for The Kiss ), Lillian Ross (for Here but Not Here ) and Joyce Maynard (for a not-yet published memoir of a youth that included a sojourn with J.D. Salinger), it's impossible not to think that women are prohibited (by each other!) from telling their own stories. Ms. Maynard's memoir was attacked fully nine months before it was due to appear (which, according to the Picador USA catalogue copy, is this October). Nobody had seen it, yet already they hated it.

Critics are currently falling all over each other to trash Lillian Ross for having the audacity to present William Shawn as a lovable man. How could she expose this private person? they rage. He must be turning over in his grave . The fact that Miss Ross knew him and they didn't hardly keeps them from claiming superior knowledge. A similar cry has gone up about Ms. Maynard's memoir, At Home in the World . She knew Jerry Salinger, lived with him, in fact. Her critics never even glimpsed him. Does the story of a love affair belong as much to a woman as to the man she shared it with? Apparently not. These women have no rights to their own histories. Male memoirists spill their guts (Frank McCourt, Philip Roth, Frank Conroy) and women reviewers swoon. Why do we give so little leeway to our own gender?

Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times has had a very good year. Following her scandalous attacks on women writers, she won a Pulitzer. (The method still works). Lately, she has savaged Ann Beattie, Miss Ross and Joyce Carol Oates. What is this capo mentality? The Times finally has a woman reviewer who hates women even more than her male predecessors. This is an ancient tradition. Get a woman to do the dirty work. She'll never notice she's being used.

We Got Smart And Time Declared Us Dead

Ms. Bellafante, listed as a senior writer on Time 's masthead, dismisses 25 years of women's writing with backhanded slaps at Kate Millett, Ms. Greer and Ms. Steinem's Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem . Naomi Wolf is trashed for pointing out that sexuality for women is still not as acceptable as it is for men. Katie Roiphe-who critiqued the theory that all intercourse is rape in The Morning After -is herself raped by Ms. Bellafante for appearing in a Coach ad.

Time concludes that feminism has hit the skids and its entire literature is over, as if there had never been any books by Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, Marge Piercy, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mary Gordon, Susan Cheever, Anne Tyler, Amy Tan, Edwidge Danticat, Adrienne Rich, Carolyn Forche, Ann Beattie, Carolyn Heilbrun, Annie Dillard, Alice Hoffman, A.S. Byatt, Julia Alvarez, Nadine Gordimer, Christa Wolf, Kathryn Harrison, Fay Weldon, Doris Lessing, Gail Godwin, Hortense Calisher, Joyce Carol Oates, Isabel Allende, Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood-I could go on and still forget plenty.

Courtney Love's Versace shoot "proves" that Simone de Beauvoir's books have fallen on deaf ears. Current feminism is "self-involved" (a word always used about women who refuse to be victims) and petty darn tacky, too. It's also dead. The Spice Girls minus one now prove this, as Madonna plus one now proves it. Women are just in love with glitz and themselves. Where once they debated intellectual theory like Platonists, now they're "lipstick feminists" or "do-me feminists" or "material girls" or "Spice Girl feminists." All the very real changes of the last 25 years are ignored.

But the real crux of Time 's tirade seems to be that the Old Girl Network failed to trounce Bill Clinton for getting it on, or whatever he did, with Monica Lewinsky. What happened to us? Did we get so mellow our brains just fell out? Ms. Steinem defended the Big Creep in The Times , and I let him off the hook in The Observer . Soft in the head we are. We clung to the only guy with the guts to veto something misnamed "the partial-birth abortion bill" and to appoint Ruth Bader Ginsberg to the Supreme Court. This makes us sellouts.

For years, people wanted to know when women would get politically savvy. We got politically savvy and Time declared us dead. It doesn't take a George Eliot or an Emily Dickinson to point to a few superficial singers in sequins (and writers who strip for their book jackets) and hastily conclude that the women's movement has failed. But such reasoning is utterly specious. Every movement has its ugly excrescences and its commercial exploiters. This proves only that the world favors ugly excrescences and commercial exploitation. They always get more attention than truth and beauty. This is news?

Of course the word "feminism" has been devalued. Every word that describes something female gets devalued sooner or later. But feminism, though constantly morphing, is hardly moribund. Both its successes and its failures have changed it. We are in the midst of an unfinished revolution. The older troops are exhausted and their replacements (our daughters) are just getting the hang of it. They are about to reframe the debate and shape it to their own uses. They are about to turn the revolution around and make it new. This is good. It also takes time.

'Revenge Was Never the Purpose'

Young feminists not only have to decide what to call themselves, they have to get old enough to realize how deeply unequal our society is. "If a woman is bright, educated, able-bodied, attractive, childless and in the professions she can live very happily indeed," writes Fay Weldon, the British novelist. "And just as well, because this seems to be the kind of woman-like poor, nervy Ally McBeal; poor, all-over-the-place Bridget Jones-who these days has to do without a man." But bring a baby into the equation and suddenly equality is all over-except for those paragons of young masculinity who write endpaper essays for The New York Times Magazine . They love diapering babies and later even pat themselves on the back about it on TV. (Who's watching the baby while they do so?) Babies are still unequally cared for by moms, but many of our daughters are not moms yet. Rest assured, they will grow more radical with age (as Ms. Steinem predicted), and then we will see a feminist revolution that Time will actually have to acknowledge. Or is this merely wishful thinking? I hope not.

We won the right to speak of sexual desire (and sometimes even to indulge it-if we could find a willing partner). Naturally, the rockers and rappers appropriated this as rockers and rappers are wont to. (It wasn't the Spice Girls, but the African-American blueswomen of the first half of this century who first put female sexual power into music-Ida Cox and her contemporaries, Bessie Smith and hers.) My generation came along and won the right to enter law school in large numbers, medical school and the Supreme Court. We won the right to be mothers and also write books-something unthinkable in Virginia Woolf's day, not to mention Jane Austen's.

Of course, there are miles to go before we sleep, but it's not as if nothing happened. Above all, we've raised feisty daughters who won't take No for an answer and sons who are used to strong women-possibly even turned on by them. Those two factors may have the greatest impact of anything we've done. Time 's idiotic cover story on feminism is, in short, a symptom of what's wrong, not an analysis. Most women are not Ally McBeal and most women share Susan B. Anthony's passion for justice whether we apply the f-word to ourselves or not. Semantic slicing and dicing is the antithesis of reasoned argument.

I am actually quite sanguine about the future of feminism. What distresses me is that male bashing has become as ugly as female bashing was 25 years ago. Women now routinely mock men in public discourse and men submissively take it lying down-as if this were all that feminism meant. In order to make any progress here, we need a truce, not a war between the sexes. I find cheap attacks on men disguised as "grrl power" counterproductive (though I understand why adolescent girls may cheer). Still, this isn't what we fought for. Nor is censorship of sexuality. The spectacle of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon playing ring-around-the-rosy with right-wing opponents of free speech in the name of female purity is also not what we fought for. Claiming that all penetration is rape is certainly not what we fought for. We craved equality, not the right to treat men as badly as men once treated women. We fought to create new paradigms of power, not to turn the tables on the opposite sex until they ran screaming from the bedroom clutching their balls and their bottles of Viagra. As Fay Weldon also said, "Revenge was never the purpose of the woman's movement."

The only way to put a stop to this charade is to call it as we see it. Women attacking women is a way to maintain the status quo. Carolyn Heilbrun says that "power consists in deciding which stories shall be told." By continuing the calumnies of the Old Boy Network, we are only enforcing our own inferiority. When a woman attacks another woman, all she really proves is that she hates herself.

Erica Jong can be reached at www.ericajong.com

According to a venerable old Wall Streeter of my acquaintance, young Wall Streeters are predicting it will lower the divorce rate. That's a major concern in the age of equitable distribution. If you can still fuck your wife, maybe you don't have to give her (and her lawyer) half your ill-gotten gains.

To judge by the speed with which the new impotence drug is selling out, Bill Clinton may be the only man in this country who has the option of whipping out his dick. Walking through analyst-and-urologist-land on the Upper East Side, I spotted several "We have Viagra" or just "Viagra" signs on pharmacy windows.

Selling for a hardly accidental $10 a pill, this cure (nicknamed the Pfizer Riser) for what urologists and euphemists call "erectile dysfunction," is being marketed directly to the consumer–in this case, the aging baby boomer whose significant other is threatening to get a younger man unless he shapes up. Pfizer Inc.'s stock prices surged 21 percent between Feb. 1 and March 28, posting the highest price-earnings ratio of any pharmaceutical stock in recent memory. By April 24, the numbers had risen even higher, and a split was rumored.

What amazes me about Viagra is this: Impotence is apparently so widespread that there are 30 million sufferers out there, but until the advent of Viagra, the condition was not one much talked about at cocktail parties, in trading rooms or in doctor's offices. Internists report that they can tell an impotence-sufferer about five minutes into the interview because he is so tongue-tied and reticent. But all of a sudden, Viagra has smoked erectile dysfunction out of the closet and onto the information superhighway.

"Took just one before dinner Friday night at 7:30 and after dinner played with my wife, by 8:15 I had a raging hard-on easier than I'd experienced in the last 10 years," reported a happy Internet correspondent. But there is a downside to Viagra for at least one virile e-mailer with the nom de guerre of "Billy B": "I got sick to my stomach after each orgasm." Undaunted, Billy B persevered: "Within the next half-hour of more playing, I was hard again." Friday night was erection-packed, and Sunday morning was even better. After a weekend of trial and error, our guinea pig reported that the pill worked best on an empty stomach. "I did experience heartburn all Sunday night," he added, but it didn't seem to dampen his enthusiasm for the drug.

The pill has not been out a month, and already the Internet reports a rip-off called Viagro, which bills itself as the "herbal analog of the new impotence pill." This pill claims "no severe or moderate side effects." It goes on, however, to say that "the most commonly reported side effect was fatigue in the morning." Are they warning or boasting?

"Man, is it refreshing," raved a woman called Brenda, "to have an open discussion on such a vital yet sensitive issue."

Things were not ever thus. Back in 1973, when my heroine Isadora Wing said in Fear of Flying that the ultimate feminist existential dilemma was "a liberated woman face to face with a limp prick," critics were not always kind.

It was bad enough to encroach on forbidden male territory in writing of female sexuality (which Norman Mailer has appropriated with the upcoming novel The Time of Our Time ); to reveal the darkest male secret that even tough guys were not always hard was the ultimate literary faux pas. Men were in charge of literature then, and they also wanted to be seen as in charge of erections.

But erections were starting to get iffy as women were starting to demand sexual pleasure. The game had begun to change. Men were expected to please women as women had once been expected to please men. This made a lot of men very nervous–nervous enough to lose their erections. Frank O'Hara, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer had never had such problems–at least to hear them tell it. Apparently, all they ever had to do was fend off women raving over what indefatigable lovers they were.

The tricky thing about the penis, I am told by informed sources, is that it doesn't always listen to reason. A man may be madly in love and his penis may not know it. A man may be madly in lust but his penis may be on strike. A man may distrust a woman, and his penis may be otherwise informed (think of Samson and Delilah).

In the 70's, this was a big subject of discussion. I remember getting an urgent call from actress Bibi Andersson in Stockholm when I was vacationing in Capri one summer.

"There's a new Swedish book called Man Cannot Be Raped ," she said with great excitement, "and only you can write the screenplay. Only you understand." The idea was that men could boycott liberated women with the mutiny of their organs–and wasn't it just awful? I certainly thought so.

What was a liberated woman to do? Viagra promises to change all that. Or does it? After all, we've been promised pills to change the world before, and the world has had other ideas.

I certainly remember all the talk (back in the early days of Ovulen) that the birth control pill would utterly change sexual behavior. It was even posited by pundits that women would stop having babies. But pills do not really change the mating game–except temporarily. After everyone had fucked around for a while and contracted sexually transmitted diseases, free love stopped looking like a panacea.

Researchers insist that Viagra does not constitute a sexual revolution, but nobody seems to believe them. It will not create "sexual virtuosos," they warn. Or virtuosi. It "does not alter libido or desire." The same was said about powdered unicorn horn, but human optimism is hard to quash. Americans believe in pills more than we believe in God. There are even people who go on taking phen-fen, knowing it causes heart-valve damage.

"Welcome to the post-pill paradise," said a fictional adulteress in John Updike's sexual revolution novel of the 60's, Couples . There hasn't been a pill to cause such excitement since those palmy days when the whole sexual landscape seemed about to change–and then we got Richard Nixon, who mostly wanted to fuck the country.

I have often argued that the sexual revolution was mainly a media myth. Despite the fact that women's sexual standards have risen as male organs have wilted, it can still be demonstrated that young women like older men with money and that mating is as determined by economic imperatives as it ever was.

Twenty-five years ago, it didn't look as if that would still be true today, but certain eternal verities seem to have reasserted themselves. Money is money and it remains sexy. Not all women have turned into Constance Chatterley as a result of the birth control pill, and I don't expect that all men will turn into Mellors the gamekeeper as a result of Viagra. Even if rich old men can now dose themselves with Viagra, the drug may be a stronger force for sexual conservatism than for sexual liberation.

Indeed, rich old men may be the only ones who can afford it. No health maintenance organization except Oxford Health Plans will currently pay for Viagra. (They all claim to be studying the situation.) Apparently, America's puritanism still dictates our definitions of health. Is the implication that sex has nothing to do with good health? Maybe things will change when hordes of angry, impotent men storm their H.M.O.'s with placards reading "Help Keep America Hard."

You've probably heard by now that, like all great scientific discoveries, Viagra's discovery was serendipitous. The active ingredient, sildenafil citrate, was first developed as a drug to alleviate angina. Though cardiac patients participating in trials for the drug still got chest pains, they were happily distracted by their newfound erections. They kept demanding increased supplies of the experimental drug. Apparently, sildenafil citrate boosted production of nitric oxide in the nerve endings in the penis, which in turn brought blood to boost the penis itself.

Researchers had stumbled on an impotence treatment that did not require nasty implants or injection into the penis. Those last-resort treatments have already been decimated by the arrival of Viagra. Now the little elves at Pfizer are trying to figure out a way to market it to clitorally challenged women as well.

But the name seems wrong. I suggest Pfizer conduct a contest for renaming the drug to sound less like Miracle-Gro. Viriltas, Virilissimo, Virilita–something like that. Or perhaps we should name it after our President, who appears to be one of the few men who doesn't need it.

So the problem that once had no name now seems ubiquitous. Urologist Dr. Ridwan Shabsigh told a New York Times reporter: "The prevalence is stunning." Impotence has become a dinner party subject of conversation. Will bowls of Viagra pills become the status symbol that bowls of cocaine were in the 70's, or that bottles of Prozac were in the 80's? Have we gone from searching from serenity to searching for stiffness?

Perhaps the pill of the 90's will cause a revolution in fiction as well as one in the bedroom. Never, it seems, have young writers been so cynical about the delights of sex. But signs are everywhere that America is longing to cast off the sexual political correctness of the last decade. Surely it was responsible for endangering orgasms. The Viagra craze shows, if nothing else, that American men want their erections back. And so do American women.