By Joan Swirsky

these were written in 2003

For the last several years I have watched countless television news shows without once seeing a woman anchor or reporter. While many professional broadcasters looked and dressed and sounded like women, all of them were referred to by clearly male colleagues as “You guys”! Strangely, even on all-female shows like “The View,” hostesses (or were they hosts?) referred to their colleagues as “you guys.”

It is significant that one of the most impassioned issues of the feminist movement – one that required right-thinking gender neutralists to embrace the term “Ms.” in order to free women from what they perceived of as the tyranny of being stereotyped by their marital or non-marital status and one that Über-feminist Gloria Steinem chose for the title of her magazine – has come to this: All females, both younger and older, are now referred to as “you guys.”

Imagine if CNN’s Wolf Blitzer hosted a televised seminar about media bias and asked his guests – that included NBC’s Tom Brokaw, NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, Slate editor Michael Kinsley, MSNBC’s Lester Holt, CBS’s Lesley Stahl and ABC’s Peter Jennings – “What do you gals think?” You can bet that their answers would not be about media bias but about the preposterousness of Blitzer addressing six men and one woman as “you gals.”

Yet thunderous silence has been the response to this issue not only by Gloria Steinem, but also by the mother of feminism, Betty Friedan, the presidents of NOW and NARAL and other feminists who screech if one girl is denied a place on her local soccer team. So uniform is their failure to protest this travesty that one must ask if the ultimate goal of their advocacy was to have females of all ages perceived, indeed treated, as “guys.”

Recently, a Los Angeles “bias and sensitivity” panel took pains to remove any reference to women who “stitch and sew” for fear that it might encourage them to marry. To them – however misguided their intentions – language mattered.

But not one word from any feminists about “you guys”! As if language didn’t matter, as if Ms., in fact, was equal to Mrs. or Miss or Babe or whatever. As if calling girls and women guys was perfectly okay.

“You guys” is only one example that feminism is in its death throes, particularly American political feminism with its emphasis on the unchallengeable importance of “making it” in the workplace and, by association, the sanctity of abortion.

In contrast, European social feminism, while embracing and also actualizing the importance of “working mothers,” has always placed the primacy of childbirth and motherhood on its front burner. (However, the strange notion that is shared by both American and European women is that “working” mothers make money while women who merely raise children have not earned the adjective “working.”)

Consequently, an entire generation of our country’s women – upwardly mobile and squarely in control of their reproductive cycles – have deferred marriage and babies into their mid- or late 30s or even 40s.

The result has been many millions of women who have had a hard time getting pregnant, who often spend many thousands of dollars on infertility treatments and frequently opt for single parenthood – but only sometimes get pregnant.

Yet when these “guys” do get pregnant and are subjected to weekly sonograms, they hang these visuals on their refrigerators, carry them in their pocketbooks, e-mail them to friends and family, and cherish these embryonic representations as the most precious things in their lives.

And when they have amniocenteses to determine if their fetuses are “normal,” even diehard, so-called “pro-choice” feminists often choose to continue their pregnancies instead of opting for abortion, relegating career advancement and material goodies to the back burner of their value systems when they realize that holding and caring for an “imperfect” child is better than jetting off to the Cayman Islands or buying a new Jaguar.

While I can’t imagine why any female, of any age, would tolerate being called a “guy,” I have sympathy with those who have come to their anti-abortion stance later rather than earlier in their lives.

After having my children young (at 18, 20 and 23), I had an abortion – to my everlasting remorse. But in my early 30s, I became a delivery room nurse and what I studied and later witnessed was that even six-week-old fetuses were exquisitely formed, with perfectly shaped skulls and inside them brains that might one day have found the cure for AIDS and cancer and now SARS, budding fingers that might one day have designed another Sistine Chapel or played Beethoven sonatas, legs that might one day have challenged Mia Hamm’s, the capacity to produce urine and the presence of regular heartbeats and intact digestive and neurological systems.

All that each one of these aborted fetuses needed (including my own) was a little more time to gain weight. But all of them were sacrificed on both the spurious values and sham altar of American feminism.

Is there anything redeeming about our country’s bleak state of feminism? Yes. Every woman in the media (to use but one example of influential females) can start by interrupting anyone who calls her “guy” by simply saying, “I’m not a guy… but you were saying?”

And every woman who contemplates abortion can simply not “go there” by reminding herself that no matter what her goals are, what she hopes to accomplish, what she believes in and what she wants her legacy to be should not be predicated upon denying the child she carries any less chance of fulfilling his or her aspirations.

It’s bad enough, as I mentioned recently in “The Death of Feminism,” that both girls and women now accept being called “guys” and that women who have tried for years to get pregnant – and when they do, acknowledge that sonograms of their 3-week-old fetuses represent their most cherished hopes for motherhood – still think that the “right” to abortion is sacrosanct (i.e., that it’s okay for other women to kill their 3-week-old fetuses).

Yet another example that feminism is dead is the popularity of “Sex and the City,” the HBO show that features 30- and 40-something woman sending out the unmistakable messages to females both younger and older that careers, money, looks and, ostensibly, intelligence are nothing compared to doing anything to get a man, including endlessly obsessing about the subject, engaging in loveless or even likeless sexual encounters and also agonizing endlessly over “intimacy” (which they have no trouble engaging in routinely with their shoes and outfits).

In general, the show’s message to viewers like me is clear: The career path women have chosen over the past several decades has failed. Yes, they make money, but has there ever been an episode in which any of them have spent that money on charity? Yes, they’re “successful,” but have any of them shared the so-called secrets of their successes with, for instance, underprivileged girls who yearn for guidance? Yes, they’re pretty, but have they ever done volunteer work for The National Foundation for Facial Reconstruction? No, no and no again.

Call me a prude or call me retro. But from the first episode I watched of “Sex and the City” – and I’ve watched only a few since then – I reviled the show. I didn’t want to revile it, especially because I thought it would depict the very real and very difficult “singles scene” in which earnest women quite desperately tried to find what was missing in their lives: a genuine, committed, loving relationship.

What do the show’s viewers get instead? Carrie, the sex columnist, sees her old boyfriend carrying a baby. “I had a baby,” he beams proudly, to which she responds in all of her narcissistic cluelessness: “I had a date.” So there it was – a successful (and, we assume, literate) magazine columnist well into her mid-30s revealing that life has taught her nothing about graciousness, joy in other people’s happiness, grace under pressure, class.

Then there is Charlotte, the show’s prim-and-proper art dealer and, at first glance, a throwback to a more conservative era, whose marriage has failed and who is now in a relationship with a Jewish guy (yes, a man is a guy) who ostensibly loves her but doesn’t want to marry her for religious reasons. And what is her strategy to break him down? Sex, of course. Great message to Catholics and Protestants and Jews and Muslims everywhere: If your man has convictions, oral sex might break them down.

Samantha, the PR executive, still thinks that indiscriminate oral sex is the way to go. What a wonderful lesson for the young women in her audience. Sashaying more like a drag-queen version of a femme fatale than a real one, she gives both desire and sex a bad name.

Enter Miranda, a de rigueur out-of-wedlock mother who clearly hates the new role she has to juggle with being a lawyer. Another wonderful message: Hanging out with sex-obsessed friends is much better than having baby doodoo smeared on your forehead, which is clearly a symbol to her of everything that Miranda thinks is wrong about motherhood – forget about nurturing, loving, sacrificing, evolving. Better to talk about your own and your friends’ failed relationships.

A lot of people I know “love” the show but when I ask them why, they say, “It’s fun,” “It’s probably true,” “This is the world we live in.” If this is the world we live in, that world can certainly stand significant change.

But just as intriguing to me is why the women on this show have, in any way, captured the imagination of the public. They are not humorous or interesting or original or provocative or deep or even fun.

The other day I bumped into a 60-something friend on the street and asked her what was new. She told me she was raising funds to restore the desecrated cemeteries of Eastern Europe. A 50-something widow friend told me she was going on Sierra Club walks and “cleaning up the environment.” A 40-something friend told me she was involved in trying to raise awareness about the Innocence Project, which uses DNA to free “lifers” who were imprisoned based on faulty evidence. And a 20-something master’s degree candidate friend told me that she was bringing “the power of clowns” to inner-city children to “make kids laugh.”

Character still prevails. But you would never know it from watching “Sex and the City,” a smarmy show that would like everyone to believe that indiscriminate sex, inane conversation and Manolo Blahnik shoes were all that counted. I’d still like to think that most of the country thinks they don’t!