4) “So rather than try to compare people and talk about who’s got power and who doesn’t, I think we should all sort of just put our arms around each other’s shoulders and drink a beer and say it’s a hell of a life, you know?”

A) Advertising executive, B) university systems administrator, C) Air Force general, D) Kinko’s worker.

Correct answers? 1: D, 2: B, 3: A, 4: C.

“Gig” is full of surprises like these — stories of successful professionals filled with rage and regret and of workers in aggressive, demeaning or dangerous professions who are gentle, thoughtful or playful. The men and women interviewed in “Gig” range from preteen lemonade sellers to septuagenarians; they include a prostitute, a supermodel, an adhesives saleswoman, a taxidermist and a slaughterhouse human resources director. Perhaps because almost 40 interviewers participated, the individual voices remain distinct, with their personal, regional and class inflections intact.

“We were very moved by the wholehearted diligence that people bring to their work,” co-editor and Word founder Marisa Bowe writes in the introduction. “Very few of those we talked to hate their jobs, and even among the ones who do, almost none said ‘not working’ was their ultimate goal.”

“Gig” grew out of a weekly column in Word, called “Work,” that was modeled on the interviews that formed Studs Terkel’s 1974 “Working.” Bowe tells us that some interview subjects were referred by readers of Word who thought they had friends or acquaintances with interesting jobs. I suspect that people who perform their jobs on autopilot don’t often talk about them or don’t make them sound interesting, so there is some sampling bias in the method. Still, the editors of “Gig” are on to something: The national mood does seem to be turning back toward a validation of work.

At the time Terkel’s “Working” was published, trendy young intellectuals cast a cold eye on work. Gainful employment (except, say, at an anarchist vegetarian food collective or leftist bookstore) involved supporting the status quo, suppressing natural impulses in favor of delayed gratification, being competitive rather than loving, egoistic rather than communally minded. The hip and thoughtful tended toward socialism, believed in liberation through the ending of repression and indulged freely in sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Searching on “Working” on Amazon.com, I was taken back to those times. “Great book,” one fellow wrote from Hawaii. “I read this book thirty years ago. It has probably kept me unemployed for most of that time. Warning: if you read this book you may quit your job.”

Most readers of “Gig,” however, aren’t going to be dropping out of the “system” anytime soon. Today, trendy young intellectuals tend to want to buckle down and get to work. Part of this change in cultural mood stems from the liberalization of American society over the past 30 years. Kids who grew up smoking pot and having sex in high school may be less likely to treat their 20s as a prolonged bacchanal. Kids who grew up with parents who had nontraditional jobs may not blanch at the word “work.”

On a less optimistic note, our newfound respect for work is also linked to the increased role of materialism and the decreased role of other values in our society over the past 30 years. With 50 percent of marriages ending in divorce, a retreat from the turmoil of private life into the relatively simple world of work is more appealing than it was in 1971 (as sociologist Arlie Hochschild argued in her last book, “The Time Bind”). We perceive fewer nonmonetary rewards in life, so the “cash nexus of capitalism” looks better and better.

Yet one of the inspiring aspects of “Gig” is how little most people talk about money as a component of their jobs. They leave jobs that don’t pay enough and appreciate those that are rewarding, but overall, people seem more engaged by the tasks they undertake and the human contact they have — even suspecting that they might be doing a little bit of good in the world. They are heartened by the feeling of competence they obtain from their work, even if, and sometimes because, it’s not very challenging. If there’s any advice for employers to be found here, it’s to make sure the people who work for you feel that they are succeeding at their tasks.

And if there’s any advice to be found in “Gig” for those choosing a career, it’s to follow your intuition, not the conventional idea of what’s prestigious or meaningful. The interviews suggest both the incredible breadth of experiences life offers and the surprising happiness most people find in the everyday. You can nearly hear them giggling nervously (the editors’ most frequent note is “[laughs]“) as they confess, almost guiltily, that they love what they do:

“I work six days a week, about twelve hours a day. And I’m doing great. I’ve never been happier in my life.” (Michelle, “clutter consultant”)

“They’re in their job and where they really want to be is on the lawn and right now, I’m on the lawn.” (Brian, lawn maintenance man)

“Even when I work seven days a week, which I do a lot, I don’t mind. I’m just so happy.” (Lisa, dog trainer)

“You probably haven’t never seen anybody that loves their job more than I do mine.” (James, produce-stand owner)

People in less prestigious occupations seem, if anything, happier and more convinced than other workers that their work is worthwhile. Perhaps it’s because they have smaller egos to begin with, or because opting out of status competition makes for a more satisfying life, or — scary thought for 2000′s Ivy League grads — because doing what you truly love doesn’t typically mean becoming a lawyer, investment banker or physician.

The problem is that women’s magazines depend on the notion that the major signifier of identity is gender, and this is less and less true. Gender roles just aren’t as important in daily life anymore, and the work world is readier to ignore sex than most of us are. Mirabella’s demise may be a leading indicator of this new, de-girlified reality of women’s lives.

The magazine had its own internal problems — it was bought and sold and went through several editors in its decade-and-a-half lifespan — but the fact that its educated and affluent women readers were abandoned may herald further changes down the demographic ladder.

Then there is the psychological impact of the recent changes in our increasingly sex-neutral material world. The predominance of media that produce less tangible artifacts — from CDs to digital cameras to VCRs to the Web — also reduces the attention we pay to our necessarily gendered bodies. As more of our lives are conducted using digital rather than analog technologies, the role of touch diminishes, and the sensuality of life with it. This would seem to be both a good thing and a bad thing, and the consequences are still difficult to see.

Gender as the primary identifier was true for only a pretty brief period in human history, maybe 1860 to 1960. Before that, class and religion were equally basic to the way people thought about themselves; in developing countries they still are. In our Bible Belt, obviously, religion never went away as a principal component of identity. I’ll bet you that Christian, Muslim or Jew have a greater resonance for many people in this country than male or female do. And while the paraphernalia of upper-class life are available to anyone with the money to buy it, those born into old money still see their class status as a fundamental aspect of their identity.

After the 1960s, age became another major way of identifying yourself, though oddly that’s fading now that everyone wants to be, and to some extent thinks of herself as, young. As my 73-year-old mother says, “80, that’s old.”

What we’re left with now is, well, interests. Narrow-casting. You’re a 26-year-old female gay Chinese-American webmistress in San Francisco and you mountain-bike to work and collect vintage handbags and rock-climb on weekends. You’re a 47-year-old white male lawyer in Manhattan, divorced with twin boys, and you play club tennis and serve on the board of a small theater company and collect Italian mid-century furniture.

Maybe both of these people would enjoy reading some of the same articles and you could probably sell them some of the same products, but is their gender really the key to reaching them?

The recent fate of several men’s magazines — Details, Bikini, Icon Thoughtstyle, POV have all folded — suggests that it isn’t. Young men, it seems, would rather be addressed through their particular interests — music or extreme sports or business or pictures of naked women or literature — than as “young men.”

In fact, the American men’s magazines that have targeted the “laddie” sensibility most strenuously have gone out of business the fastest, while those like GQ and Esquire that address a broader range of interests and pride themselves on the quality of their writing have flourished.

My hunch is that Mirabella’s demise foreshadows the end of service-oriented women’s magazines. Part of this has to do with big social trends like the rise of women in the workplace, and part of it has to do with the increased use of the Internet.

What Web browsing suggests is that narrow-casting is the best way to reach most people. Tap into the niches out of which they forge a self. Advertisers are starting to get it. But as a quick glance at the current crop of women’s mags shows, they don’t yet see that gender isn’t the best basis for narrow-casting. For one thing, it ain’t that narrow. For another, it’s not related to enough economic activity. Only a small percentage of purchase decisions are directly gender-linked, mainly clothing and personal-care products. And how many of these can you buy?

I have always felt vaguely insulted by how little women’s magazines deemed to sell me. Women’s mags assume I never buy furniture or wine or tennis rackets or cars or in fact anything other than clothes and makeup. I guess the premise is that I will page through Tennis magazine if I am in the market for a racket and Gourmet if I want cooking equipment and Wallpaper for lamps. But the Web should have taught them, and us, that reality doesn’t line up that way.

One of the corollaries of the fact that we now have everything available to us all of the time is that we are ourselves available to everyone all of the time. You can reach me reading a trade publication online and convince me to look at some sporting equipment that’s on sale, or catch me on eBay trolling for art pottery and suggest a new book.

What you are less and less able to do is convince me or, especially, people under 30, to sit still for 400 pages of one thing, whether it’s fashion or politics.

Then there’s the issue of timeliness. When any of us can assemble a more or less ideal “magazine” from material available for free on the Web, why should we be expected to pay for a less well-selected, out-of-date version? After all, the monthly women’s magazines’ notion of what’s new is selected, necessarily, with a three-month lead time. Even from the standpoint of beauty-product information, they are out of date compared with material easily available on the Web. Tear up that Allure, and make up your own damn magazine as you scroll.

The other problem with the gender-casting that drives women’s magazines is a social ill: the reduction of gender identity to its lowest common denominator, personal appearance. This happened because somewhere along the line, some marketing genius figured out that all women wear some women’s clothes and most of them wear some makeup.

All of us, male and female, are ill served by this trivialization of femininity, this equation of womanhood with the application of cosmetics and personal care.

It was not always thus. Even in the most repressive Victorian circumstances, women were granted the dignity of being esteemed for their character, and the tasks they were supposed to be good at, while no matter of choice, were not all ridiculous.

Is it more prestigious to be renowned for your bread-making or for your mascara application? For your church attendance or your knowledge of where to get a great facial? Yes, femininity is always going to be a social construct, but the version the women’s mags market is a particularly mediocre one.

Moving back further in time, think about how rarely Jane Austen speaks of the appearances of her heroines, or for that matter of their clothes. Certainly these ladies lived in relatively oppressive circumstances. We would not trade places.

But they had the dignity, charm and allure of human beings whose identities were based on their character rather than their superficies. They spent their leisure hours riding or walking in the country rather than shopping for nail polish or conditioner. They danced at balls, not in classes at gyms.

Today’s women’s magazines are 19th century in their insistence on the indoors as woman’s sphere. The world of the women’s magazines is an indoor world, one of trying on clothes, of shopping for makeup and applying it. Even the exercise recommended is of the indoor variety — aerobics, exercise classes, yoga. The emphasis in fitness is on “toning” rather than strength, on avoiding risk rather than finding pleasure in it. For every one article on some very mild adventure travel there are 10 on spas.

I know these magazines are supposed to be fun, to allow women the playfulness of experimenting with self-image and ornamentation. Of course those can be good things, in their place. But most of the women’s magazines offer their readers the merest shadow of real, spine-tingling, breath-catching fun.

Most of the magazines offer a scaredy-cat hedonism of puerile pleasures like baths and massages, with a childishly erotic undercurrent. Maybe this diffuse eroticism is meant to appeal to women who want to avoid genital sexuality. And despite the celebrated emphasis of Cosmopolitan and its imitators on sex, their typical sex technique piece has all the erotic charge of an aerobics manual.

Young readers don’t realize that the content is driven not by some definitive vision of what a woman is, but only by outdated visions of what women will buy. The magazines themselves have become institutions, part of our culture’s definition of femininity, but we forget that their version of womanhood is but a blip in the great screen of time.

Capitalism may have created this monster, but even more capitalism is bringing it to an end. That is what is wonderful about the time we live in, and why I love capitalism: Greater efficiency and lower search costs in the exchange of information and goods do lead to greater freedom in the ways we invent ourselves.

We owe a lot of this freedom to the commercial exploitation of the Internet, and to the libertarian culture it brews. I am sympathetic to some of the observations and arguments of writers like Paulina Borsook about the shallowness of e-commerce culture. But I am overwhelmingly grateful to everyone who made it possible. Never have so many holes been dented so quickly in what looked like a monolithic culture.

At 41, I remember well what it was like to grow up in the ’60s, when intelligence and interest in the sciences marked you as a weirdo in school, when half of one’s questions were answered, “That’s just the way it is,” when women and blacks and Jews all knew their places. How good it is that we are no longer there.

I am always amazed to read that women aren’t supposed to be quite comfortable online, or that we need special (third rate) Web sites of our own. Hello? The Web has given women (and people of color) a splendid new chance to defy those who would stereotype us. The only question is whether we have the courage to seize these opportunities, or whether we will continue to be the prisoners of gender — this time in cells we build for ourselves.

“Blonde Like Me” is almost purely descriptive, dividing blonds into types — Innocent, Moon and Sun are Ilyin’s major divisions — and offering glimpses of the author’s past through the lens of the blonds she has known and been. There is nothing wrong with organizing things this way, but the book is disappointingly bland as narrative and disappointingly shallow as analysis.

Is a woman’s “deepest desire for herself” really revealed by her choice of hair color? Ilyin’s assumptions about women and the world are both narrow and conventional:

The Innocent Blonde inside every woman wants to kick over the traces every now and again. There are moments when we all get the urge to abandon the four-by-four by the side of the road, dump the kids off at the sitter’s for fifteen years, pay off the mortgage with a flick of the pen, and make tracks for Aruba. But we can’t, so we buy a box of hair color.

Oh yeah? There’s an “innocent” blond inside all of us, including Asians, Africans and we brunets who have never had the slightest interest in being blond? And many of us never pick up the “traces,” or we do kick them over, and not with a box of hair color. Who is teaching father culture here?

On the last page of her book, Ilyin writes that women choose to be blonds because “they want to live heroic lives,” which may be so. A book examining the distance between actually heroic lives and lives centered on hair color choices would be a useful thing. But a book that assumes that there is something heroic about having a particular hair color is another matter. Don’t women, at least, know that questions of appearance have their place, but scarcely represent the deepest truths of our lives?

But what moves the book from the realm of the flawed to that of the truly annoying is the cloying tone Ilyin uses to tell her life story. Throughout “Blonde Like Me,” her dumbed-down stance, the effort to pretend that she’s really a regular gal, not an intellectual, grates. Why should a highly intelligent university professor feel obliged to coo on the first page of her book, “Tired of working, I decided to go to a very ritzy grad school to learn about signs and symbols and what they meant”? Or, later, mock her own work in progress on advertising imagery? Why does she feel the need to convince us that she’s insecure about her looks and weight, just like the presumed chummy (female) reader? (And what does the male reader make of all that?) It’s sad indeed if she thinks “we” won’t like her if she’s smart, and it’s foolish of her, as a writer, to cut her coat accordingly. Does she want her obit to mention that she was blond or that she was a semiotician?

Ilyin is a polished and graceful stylist, and she provides enough historical anecdotes and pop-culture tidbits to show that she could undoubtedly have written a good and enduring book on the symbolic status of the blond. But she hasn’t. There is no more in the way of argument or interpretation than you might find in Vogue. Only stray aphorisms and asides suggest the blonds book we might have had: “Real people are not whole” … “The words of the goddess that want to come out of your mouth often get tangled in your hair.”

Inside “Blonde Like Me” are at least two more interesting books struggling to emerge. One is about being a very tall female: Ilyin claims that the male attention she gets comes from her being blond, but it’s likely that being a 6-foot-2 woman attracts even more notice than her hair color does. The other is about growing up in a diplomatic household with a White Russian father. The scenes of her family life are quietly delightful, although they are drawn with little depth. Family members get their one- or two-line descriptions, and you have to wonder about someone who would dismiss her sister thus: “Nadia works at a computer company, sees friends, has beaus, and kicks over the traces every once in a while by having pizza at her favorite dive. Add to this a lovely Victorian apartment and convenient storage unit, and you pretty much have Nadia.”

Several chapters of “Blonde Like Me” are memoir material only tangentially related to the book’s premise (“The Semi-Dior Pivot” about how her mother sent her to modeling school to give her confidence once she hit 6-2 at 13, and “I, Defiler,” in which she describes a bizarre incident at an Orthodox church service). They suggest the contours of one of the hidden books in this one, but add nothing to its content as a book about blonds. It’s as though Ilyin wanted to write a memoir, but got a contract for a book on blonds, and tried to make the best of it.

The tone of “Blonde Like Me” is women’s-magazine cozy and bland. Ilyin seems to be trying to be Helen Gurley Brown, but why not go for the real thing? There is more reality, guts and vigor in two pages of 78-year-old Brown’s recent autobiography, “I’m Wild Again,” than in Ilyin’s whole book — and you can bet that if Brown had a graduate degree she wouldn’t go around ashamed of it. I’d never read any of the magazine publishing doyen’s seven previous books and even as an adolescent found Cosmopolitan too embarrassing to pick up. I couldn’t imagine wanting to wear the horrible clothes on the cover girl, and then there was the big hair. (It was, I knew even then, a class thing: Cosmo was for secretaries, not professionals.) I assumed Brown was one of those sickly sweet, girly writers who teach father culture — that is, who teach females how to be women — powerless, decorative, boring.

I was wrong. “I’m Wild Again” is a loosely threaded web of memoir, advice and observation, but it feels like a cohesive whole because of the strong personality of its author. Brown — Arkansas born, no college degree, 17 secretarial jobs before she wrote “Sex and the Single Girl” — is fascinating even pushing 80. To give you an idea of her energy level, she still exercises twice a day, and after a bout with breast cancer, she has begun working on her posture. Self-confident enough to reveal both her flaws and her strengths — to be, in short, a real person — she is a far better role model than the tacky covers of Cosmo under her editorship suggested.

For one thing, Brown is as forthright as, well, a man in her comfort with her power and success. (New Yorkers: Read her description of her four-story Central Park West pad, once Mike Nichols’, and weep.) For another, she gets straight to the point on all subjects, and like Freud, she thinks love and work are the important ones. The meaty, smart sections of career counsel to young women have the authority of someone who has wielded real power, which is by no means the usual case for women writing advice for women. Brown puts her finger on what I suspect is the real reason for the persistence of the male-female earnings gap, and the relatively small number of women in top positions in the business world, with one of her precepts: “As you climb, don’t be afraid success will defeminize you.” Advice Ilyin should take for her next book, which might then reflect the abilities she blunts in “Blonde Like Me.”

After “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?” I was also offended for my gender. But after years of life experience, I was equally offended by its members. I knew the evil patriarchy hadn’t forced the female contestants to enter this humiliating contest, or forced millions of women to watch. (The show actually got higher ratings among women than men.) If women were willing to sell themselves on national television, and other women were entertained by it, we hadn’t come very far from the gender primitivism of my childhood, when both my parents took it for granted that sex was a good that men would, or should, pay for, and one that women could either “give away” or, well, not exactly sell, but obtain full value for bestowing.

After 40 years of feminism, many women still expect men to show their intentions, and devotion, by paying for dates and presents, and still evaluate them as future providers for a family. Men still complain of “wasting money” taking women out to dinner who don’t want to have sex with them. They still mutter, “When push comes to shove, we pay all the time, whether it’s prostitution or dating.” Girls still grow up thinking of work as an option, while boys know it as a necessity.

Conventional wisdom would have it that women have to think hard about their future spouses’ earnings because of the earnings gap. In 1998 the median income for all females in the labor force was 73 percent of male income ($25,862 to $35,345). For college graduates 25 and older, the gap is wider, with women earning only 71 percent of what men make ($35,408 to $49,982).

But what if, rather than being hapless victims of the earnings gap, women allow it to continue, in part in order to choose their bed partners based on their incomes? What if (most) women enjoy earning less than men, because we have eroticized being on the short end of the stick? What if women, like men, effectively pay for sex — with lower earnings?

My theory is that men have by and large eroticized freedom, while women have eroticized its absence. It’s not that lower female earnings lead women to evaluate men based on their earning power — it’s that women want to maintain male financial dominance, so they make sure they earn less then men. And it’s not that men are willing to support women (and their children) because they are committed to them — it’s because men believe they are buying the freedom to leave that they will (for a while at least) foot the bills. This applies to prostitution, where men pay for the freedom of closing the door on the selves they show, and to family life, where all too many men are able to walk away from supporting their children.

We rarely examine the values implied by the kinds of remarks we let slip constantly — “She married badly,” “He’s a meal ticket,” “She’s too high-maintenance.” Very few women would react well if a man asked their price, but many will casually boast of their boyfriend’s expensive presents or recent promotion, or imply that a lover’s income offsets other less stellar qualities. Not many men are proud of going to prostitutes, but even those who have never bought sex are apt to mutter that one way or another, men still pay for it.

Some people will howl in outrage at these ideas. Some will say it’s harmful to the feminist cause to air these issues. I raise them here with the hope that discussion leads to more open lives, and better ones, with choices being made with open eyes. Some women may consciously choose a less responsible, less stressful or less remunerative job — and that’s fine, as long as it is a choice, not the result of sexism or its internalized equivalents. But just as we have learned to look at cultural factors when equal opportunity doesn’t result in equal results racially, so we should inquire why so few women opt for the top of their professions, and why so many of the best and brightest women sideline themselves in their 20s, long before the tradeoff between childbearing and work becomes acute.

Instead of endlessly rehashing the staple women’s-magazine issues, we should be exploring why women set their work and money goals relatively low, why women still represent only 13 percent of corporate officers of Fortune 500 companies, why so few of the dot-coms are founded by women, why of a recent list of 167 newly minted Goldman Sachs partners not even 15 percent are female. I do not think institutionalized sexism is a major part of the answer.

The tricky part of the sex-for-money trade is that there’s a slippery slope. On one end is a man sending flowers to a woman after a first date, and on the other is the prostitute and her client. In a typical dating scenario, it isn’t sex for money, exactly, but it may be sex because of money — sex because a man’s behavior gives signals that he has money and is willing to spend it. It’s sexy, we women often think, when a man insists on taking us out to dinner or sends flowers, when he gives jewelry, when he promises a big diamond if things work out. But we also feel it’s sexy when he earns more, when he has more heft and impact in the world. “More” is always relative, and since we can’t be sure of having a relationship with a tycoon — indeed, most women can be sure they won’t — women increase their chances of having a relationship with a man who is more successful by being fairly unsuccessful themselves.

You choose one of those fields that are respectable and interesting and offer an absurdly low ratio of income to effort, like public-school teaching or social work; or you have a series of dead-end and nonlucrative jobs rather than a career; or you do embark on a career, say in law or banking or advertising, but you take it less seriously, and ensure that you will never make partner or the equivalent. You make it clear that your career will not come first in your life. You can even make it clear that you are going to need to be taken care of. And surprisingly enough, men respond protectively.

I say “surprisingly” because hardly any woman wants to marry a man who says he will have to be supported. And in our cash-conscious society, we have few qualms about lacking a safety net for poor children, the ill or the disabled. Yet many a man who is not rich and doesn’t expect to be rich will take on the financial responsibility for a young, able-bodied, well-educated woman who is not yet, and may not ever be, the mother of his children. Of course, there are limits. Men say, “She’s too high-maintenance” about a woman they feel will bankrupt them. Women who overtly demand financial tribute are a turnoff to most men. But men almost never say (as women do), “What a great person — but we can’t get married because she’s a nursery school teacher and hasn’t got a dime.” Women who need to be supported, with humble expectations for themselves, are a turn-on.

In middle- to upper-class life, it’s almost a rule: The lower paid the occupation, the more obvious it is that the woman in it expects to attract a man to support her. Publishing? Auction houses? Private-school teaching? Classic post-deb, waiting-to-be-wed jobs. (Office receptionist, restaurant host, public-school teaching used to be the lower- to middle-class equivalents, except that now almost all married women in these economic groups have to work.) It’s not that women need to get married because they hold these jobs — in many cases, they hold these jobs because they want to get married. They’re signals: “Rescue me” is the message.

Look at the equally controversial black-white earnings gap. While substantial numbers of blacks have moved into the middle class, the statistics also reflect the “underclass” who have not. In many inner-city neighborhoods, children emulate gangster culture and profess scorn for those who succeed in school. They’re behaving in a self-defeating manner, dooming themselves to poverty, but it’s understandable. They not only have few role models of conventional success, but they have little chance of achieving it. So a new culture of low expectations grows, with its own aesthetic, set up in opposition to the mainstream or elite.

Aren’t there analogies to the case of women? We fail to see them because our eyes have not been nearly as opened to the effects of patriarchy as they have been to the effects of racism. When adult women spend substantial amounts of leisure time shopping for clothes they neither need nor can afford, or undergoing time-consuming “beauty” treatments, both men and women tend to read that as appropriate behavior. In both cases, women and African-American inner-city dwellers, there are what biologists call “feedback effects”: The defeatist attitude leads to certain perceptions by the power structure of the group in question, and these perceptions are internalized, increasing the defeatist attitude. Multiply that by 5,000 years of patriarchal society, and you have some deeply ingrained behaviors. So deep, they tend to be called natural, by both sexes.

Nietzsche called this process of scorning what you can’t have ressentiment. It’s a status order internalized in the form of rules, like “Don’t do your homework — that’s not cool,” or “Majoring in computer engineering will scare attractive men away,” or the perennial “If you work out too much, you’ll bulk up.” Women’s eroticization of traditional power relationships makes evaluating a boyfriend for his earning power seem acceptable, rather than mercenary, to most men and women. And it’s one small step from assessing a man’s spending power to assessing your own salability. How far is that from selling yourself on national television?

The money shot once had a very specific purpose. Viewers of porn films
supposedly want to see that actors are “really” having sex. Because the female orgasm on-screen can be faked, male privacy is more open to cinematic violation than female. Thus the depiction of the male orgasm became the litmus test for pornographic authenticity. Such verisimilitude isn’t required of actors in other genres; our enjoyment of a western does not depend on the actors being shot by real bullets. But the pleasure of porn is about voyeurism, not imagination. “Happiness” and “There’s Something About Mary,” though, are not porn. They suggest rather than depict sexual acts, and solitary male masturbation (even in the world of gay porn) rarely ranks high on the voyeuristic menu. Lonely and mechanical, it’s too close to pathos.

The grunts and sighs we hear in these film masturbation scenes, the strenuous
arm motions, and the little gob of goo that follows them, make masculine sexuality seem silly. As a current Diesel ad puts it: “Men. Who needs ‘em?” Above the caption, three comely young women pose in Diesel products at a sperm bank. One is selecting a test tube containing white fluid — probably the first appearance of semen in a magazine ad — from a rack held by an elderly nurse. The clothes the young women wear are sporty, not sexy, but then, who needs sex?

With cloning, we won’t need sperm to make a baby. Eventually, we may not need a human womb either. While no one was looking, technology has made sexual reproduction obsolete. It’s not clear that genetic diversity must come from
the mixing of X and Y chromosomes. What the money shot reminds us of is the impending biological irrelevance of the male. It may never happen on the level of social fact, given that raising a child is still best accomplished by two partners, but the biological family is no longer necessary.

While the fact of this irrelevance is new, its myth is ancient. Not so long
before the days of the Bible, people did not realize that a man was needed to
make a woman pregnant. The reverence attached to seed in the Bible is an
overcompensation, a reinforcement of a new discovery necessary to justify
patriarchy. (Enough of the old matriarchal culture survived, at least on the
level of suspicion, that designation as a Jew is matrilineal.) Most of us
dimly recall a biblical injunction to the effect that casting your seed upon
the ground is prohibited. Yet this vignette from Genesis, despite being taken as a parable about the evils of masturbation, is far from unambiguous on this matter. When Onan’s brother Judah died, God asked him to impregnate his brother’s widow — the story implies that he pulls out at the last moment, thus engaging in non-productive coitus. Semen, according to the authors of the Bible, is supposed to make babies. Spilling seed is wrong.

When I was a little girl and complained to my mother of some sexist element of society, she, a feminist before her time, would reply: “Well, just remember that men can’t have babies.” I never thought much of that answer until Dolly the sheep. Science has made it clearer how the whole elaborate structure of patriarchy represses this fact, overlaying the basic uncertainty regarding the male contribution to a pregnancy with a system of patrilineal descent. Even our sexual aesthetics reinforce the importance of the male. Just think about the way menstruating women and menstrual blood are abhorred while semen is revered. If Monica Lewinsky’s blue Gap dress had been stained with menstrual blood, or vomit, she would surely have taken it to the cleaners, whether or not she was “too fat” to wear it. Those fluids are accounted disgusting in our culture; semen has been a symbol of power. Lewinsky may, if these two movies foretell the future, be among the last generation to share this awe for the male seed.

The uneasy truce between the sexes that has made our romantic lives “so sugarless” (to steal a line from Hole’s song “Celebrity Skin”) will have to absorb the new developments in biology. Those little gobs of goo are, to different eyes, disgusting, sacrilegious or delightful. They are also, reproductively speaking, on their way to being useless. At the end of “Happiness,” a family gathers around a festive table. Aside from the aged paterfamilias, there are only women, four of them. In runs pubescent grandson Billy, who announces, expecting praise upon his first masturbatory emission, “I came.” The family isn’t so much shocked, disgusted or amused as it might have been 30 or 40 years ago. It’s indifferent, as though he had paraded the acquisition of an archaic skill.

The coming of the end of sex may be behind the embarrassing literalism of these films and so many other recent cultural phenomena. Romance used to be based on metaphor. Every now and then as a child I’d open a thick book from our bookshelves and encounter some dried flowers nearly at the point of disintegration, a memento from one of my mom’s long-ago dates. The bouquet was supposed to remind her of the sweetness of those moments: It was a substitution of a physical object for a feeling. This is analogous to what we do when we make art.

Lewinsky’s saving of the ensemened dress was a contemporary version of that gentler act. As President Clinton deposited the evidence of his orgasm on her dress, she presumably felt happiness, which she must have wanted to preserve. The happiness, however, was not the same thing as the semen. But true to our literal time, when the suggestion of the thing has been obliterated by the thing itself, and artists use actual blood and vomit, piss and excrement, rather than referring to them obliquely, Lewinsky saved the thing itself. Just as the adolescent son of “Happiness” might have, in another time, simply told his family, “I’m a man now,” he referred to the organic act, not its metaphorical meaning.

Such literalisms are condemned by curmudgeons as violations of good taste. They surely are, but that’s a dangerous ground for attacking them: Joyce and Picasso, Stravinsky and the blues all were accused of similar offenses. What’s depressing about this plethora of white goo on screen — the comedy “American Pie,” due this summer, continues the genre — is the desperate need to insist on its importance. As semen becomes less and less essential to reproduction, we brandish it even more defiantly.