I worry about the next generation of young women.

A few years ago I was telling a story about growing up and listening to such high-self-esteem songs on the radio as “Love Has No Pride” or “I Will Follow Him.” At one point, a young woman in the back of the room raised her hand and pointed out that “two full generations have passed since you were growing up.” (I thanked her for sharing and then told her, gently, that she failed the class.) But I decided to go and listen to some new music.

That week it so happened that on the cover of Time magazine there was a singer-songwriter named Jewel. Her hit song was called “You Were Meant for Me.” I don’t know whether it’s actually been identified as the theme song for clinical depression, but I think it should be. It goes something like, “I get up in the morning and you’re not here, even though you were meant for me. I make one egg but I don’t clean the pan. I go to the movies but I leave early because you were meant for me. I go home, I cook the other egg in the dirty pan because you were meant for me,” etc. This is what’s happened after 40 years of the women’s movement.

At least with “I Will Follow Him,” we got off our asses. Not that I’m bitter.

Yet these are women who pay their own bills, write their own papers, and fight their own ideological battles. They bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan, etc., just as the song has it. They are busy revising the rules, not bending to them.

Speaking of the rules: In 1996, I appeared on Oprah debating with two “girls” who had written a book titled The Rules (I call them “girls” because that’s what they called themselves. They are exactly my age. We all graduated from high school in 1975 and even if women are still, at least according to the ex-president of Harvard, deficient in math skills, every woman can still figure out how old another woman is. We can also figure out each other’s weight as if we were running a booth at a state fair.)

On Oprah’s stage I faced a blonde and a brunette; the brunette did not speak. And I don’t want to sound nasty, but the blonde was as blond as I am. We argued on television like a bunch of women from the Bronx yelling at each other through tenement windows and over clotheslines. They wanted to know, as the blond put it, “why you have such a problem with our book, Dr. Barreca.” (She made the word “doctor” sound like “vampire.”) I replied, “I have a problem with your book because it assumes that men are morons and that women are capable of infinite manipulation; you tell women that the only way to get a man to marry them is to withhold sex as long as possible. You say, and I quote, ‘Never laugh out loud in front of a man. Save the laughter for your girlfriends.’ And ‘No matter how hot the sex gets, you must remain cool.’ What I want to know is, if you can’t laugh out loud, and you can’t have hot sex, why on earth would you want a husband?”

Why, in other words, should any of us do battle with these stereotypes? The victory is insignificant, we wouldn’t have to get our hands dirty, and we’d never be late for work. Oh, right, we probably wouldn’t be going out to work, either.

Hmmm….

Oh, right: because when you cave, you are buying, however subtly, into the idea that it is easier to please the master than to learn mastery — that you are getting what you need by the privilege of your sex rather than by the right of your humanity. You have to be nice to the guy who pumps your gas, checks your oil, or buys you a house and pays your bills. You literally can’t afford not to be. He’s “providing” for you because he’s happy with your company. If he becomes unhappy with you, he has every right to kick you out of his house and refuse to pay your bills. You are there, not by right, but by privilege.

Not that feminism has everything neatly sorted, as the Brits would say; there’s still a lot of work to be done.

The Onion had maybe the best response to the crisis of feminism: A 2003 headline blared “Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does.” “Acts of empowerment include gossiping about the sexual proclivities of male acquaintances, lunching with other women in small groups, taking calcium-rich antacid tablets, and reading The Nanny Diaries.” The Onion purports to quote a women’s-studies professor as saying, “From midnight cheesecake noshers to Moms who don’t fool around with pain, feminist achievement covers a broad spectrum. … It is great to be a female athlete, senator, or physician. But we must not overlook the homemaker who uses a mop equipped with convenient, throwaway towellettes, the college co-ed who chooses to abstain from sex, and the college co-ed who chooses to have a lot of sex. Only by lauding every single thing a woman does, no matter how ordinary, can you truly go, girls.”

Okay, I’ll stop now. I know I’m ranting. Any thoughts on the subjects raised, my dears?