inevitable.....and soon.

The author deserves great credit for emphasiz- ing the weakness of Freudian theory, and the import- ance of the more modern concepts of femininity in men and vice versa. (His deflation of the Playboy image of masculinity is also a joy to behold, and should be reproduced on every Bunny's costume!) His thesis is that, in a reasonable society, no one need be dominated nor dominating on a full-time basis. The ideal family is pictured as an ever-shifting balance of authority, with each person willing and able to take the lead in his or her areas of compet- ence. This flexibility reminds me of what I see in the happier TV households, where the wife not only tolerates her husband's periodic spells of femininity, but takes them in a matter-of-fact way. The situation he describes corresponds in depth with my advice to "Make friends with your wife--if possible. This, says the author, is the way to true manliness of a kind that does not require all the propping-up rit- uals needed to sustain the fragile concept of pat- riarchal masculinity.

I am tempted to read too much into page 213, where he says, "only when each individual of either sex learns, in a sense, to act out the other's roles, can the two sexes really and essentially communicate with each other." Could he be advocating cross- dressing as a sort of family psychotherapy? I fear not; he mentions transvestites only once, and then in no very flattering way. Still, I cannot help but feel that our way of life is basically in accord with his philosophy and that the "hard man in a hard hat" will be all the better husband for being a "lady to the fingertips" a few hours a week. So take that $5 you saved on "The Disappearing Sexes" and invest it here; you need this book far more than you do that new purse!

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