Today, the ideal male is the gay man and the ideal female is the worker female, the woman who can work in a coal mine just like all the other men.

Madonna has a far profounder vision of sex than do the feminists. She sees both the animality and the artifice. Changing her costume style and hair color virtually every month, Madonna embodies the eternal values of beauty and pleasure. Feminism says, 'No more masks.' Madonna says we are nothing but masks. Through her enormous impact on young women around the world, Madonna is the future of feminism.

Young feminists have been sold a bill of goods about American feminism. The enormous changes in women over the past 40 years are constantly and falsely attributed to the organized women's movement of the late 1960s and '70s.

Heterosexual love,. is in sync with cosmic forces. Not everyone has the stomach for daily war with nature.

Obama's folksy come-on is as bad as Madonna's faux British - and both are in need of fresh inspiration.

Madonna's great instinctive intelligence was evident to me from her earliest videos.

Women are being told "you are future leaders." Meanwhile, we are more than our jobs. One reason Sex and the City was such an enormous hit is that it expressed something that feminism won't admit: we don't know what we want. We don't know if we want children or not.