By now everybody knows about the pretty cadets at West Point—and Annapolis and Colorado Springs. Well, from the men's point of view, if Mars is going to fall into the lap of Venus sooner or later, why not put her next to him right away? Anecdotal and comic possibilities aside, however, what is really striking is the point of view of the women. They appear to be far less interested in opposing war than they are in making it—or at least in dressing it up. And what is happening at the academies seems to be happening everywhere else these days. There are women bullfighters now, too. It's a signal fact—the spectacle of women succeeding not in the reduction or suppression of a violent and inhumane activity but in merely getting into the action.

The point is that most women activists are not interested in a transformation of prevailing values, which would be a real liberation, but only in claiming their share of the system. They are not against war but for opening up West Point. They are not against the work ethos or competition or successism but simply for more jobs and positions for themselves. In a large sense, they do not wish to be women and get their rights but to be men and get their rights. All of which is not to say that they should be denied the more important of those rights either, like nondiscrimination and equal pay for equal work; these are simple human rights. But, by and large, the sheer militancy of the movement has obscured a basic fact these years—that an enlargement or expansion is not a true change of values. Women have not become, by the happy accident of special pleading and justice, revolutionaries seeking to transform the general terms of existence, but conservatives and even reactionaries interested in maintaining the whole way of life because, at this particular juncture, they can claim its prerogatives. Therefore, in all sorts of ways, they are showing themselves more royalist than the king, more men nowadays than the men are.