Wolves and Sheep, along with its foreign editions, followed by scores of radio and TV and print interviews, appearances on afternoon talk shows.
Shows with titles like FIGHT BACK! Dogging the Predator, The New Slaves, The Testosterone Conspiracy.
The final section was Departmental and Campus Activities and it brought things back to dusty academia.
As an assistant professor she’d sat on four committees. Scheduling and Room Allocation, Graduate Student Orientation, Animal-Subject Safety—the kind of drudgery I knew well—then, six months before her death, she’d chaired something called Interpersonal Conduct that I’d never heard of.
Something to do with sexual harassment? Exploitation of students by faculty? That was something with hostility potential. I placed a check next to the notation and moved on to Wolves and Sheep.
The book jacket was matte red with embossed gold letters and a small black graphic between author and title: silhouettes of the eponymous animals.
The wolf’s mouth was crammed with fangs and its claws reached out for the undersized sheep. On the back was Hope Devane’s color photo. She had an oval face and sweet features, wore a beige cashmere suit and pearls and sat very straight in a brown suede chair backed by shelves of books in soft focus. MontBlanc pen in hand, sterling inkwell within reach. Long fingers, pink-polished nails. Honey-blond hair swept back from fine bones, the cheeks accentuated by blush. Light brown eyes clear and wide and direct, soft without being weak. A confident, possibly ironic smile on nacreous lips.
The pages were dog-eared and Milo’s yellow underlining and pen scrawl were all over the margins. I read the book, drove two miles down Beverly Glen and over to the University, where I played with the Biomed library computers for a while.
Interesting results. I returned home, watched the talk-show tapes.
Four shows, four sets of noisy, giddy audiences, a quartet of smarmy, pseudosensitive, and altogether interchangeable hosts.
The Yolanda Michaels Show: What Makes a Real Woman?
Hope Devane tolerating the metal-grind rhetoric of an antifeminist woman who preached the virtues of Bible study, cosmetics, and greeting one’s husband at the door in a see-through raincoat over nothing else.
Sid, Live!: Prisoners of Sex?
Hope Devane engaged in debate with a male anthropologist/ant specialist who believed all sex differences were inborn and unchangeable and that men and women should simply learn to live with one another. Hope trying to be reasonable, but the end result falling just short of shallow.
The Gina Sydney Jerome Show:
Hope Devane in a roundtable discussion with three other authors: a woman linguist who pooh-poohed psychology and recommended that men and women learn to interpret language correctly, a New York-based syndicated columnist on women’s issues who had nothing to say but said it polysyllabically, and a depressed-looking man who claimed to have been a battered husband and had stretched the account of his torment to three hundred pages.
Same old noise . . .
Live with Morry Mayhew: Who’s Really the Weaker Sex?
Hope Devane debating the self-styled head of a men’s-rights organization I’d never heard of who went after her with misogynistic lust.
This one different—the hostility level ratcheted up several notches. I rewound and watched it again.
The misogynist was named Karl Neese. Thirty or so, lean and outwardly hip in all black and a stylish haircut but Neanderthal in his point of view, hogging the airtime and layering insults relentlessly—psychodrama parmigiana.
His target never fought back, never interrupted, never raised her voice even when Neese’s comments drew applause from louts in the audience.
MAYHEW: Okay, Mr. Neese, now let’s ask the doctor—
NEESE: Doctor? I don’t see any stethoscope.
MAYHEW: She happens to be a Ph.D.—
NEESE: Am I supposed to be impressed by that? What does Ph.D. mean, anyway? “Piled higher and deeper”? “Papa has dough”?
MAYHEW [Suppressing smile]: Okay, Dr. Devane, now if you could please tell us—
NEESE: Tell us why feminists keep harping on about their problems—nag, nag, nag. But it’s okay to abort on demand because babies are inconvenient—
MAYHEW:—your theory of why women fall prey so often to unscrupulous—
NEESE: Because they want unscrupulous. Bad guys. Danger. Excitement. And they keep coming back for more. They say they want nice, but just try to pick up a woman using nice. Nice means weak and weak means geek. And geek gets no peek!