Self, a mass-circulation women's health and beauty magazine, believed that a Republican win in the recent presidential election would have meant a crucial victory for "the angry white male." According to Self, "almost everything women care about" was at stake on Nov. 5.
        The attitude is typical of many mainstream women's magazines, which, along with beauty tips, recipes and lifestyle advice, put out a subtly biased political message that portrays women as perpetual victims, Republicans as their enemies and big government as their friend.
         The women's magazines - Redbook, Working Woman, Mademoiselle and Parenting, reaching tens of millions of readers - are key purveyors of a powerful, and wrong premise. For the past decade feminist scholars and researchers have been barraging the American public with statistics purporting to show that "our sexist culture" is inimical to women.
        "Battery increases 40 percent on Super Bowl Sunday," "Girls suffer a tragic loss of self-esteem at adolescence," "One in four women are victims of rape or attempted rape," "40 percent of women are severely depressed." Although none of these alleged facts is true, the women's media credits them. So do many women. 
        In Glamour, an angry-looking young woman asks, "Excuse me, are women equal yet?" Glamour editors then offer 18 reasons why women are not equal and explains why they should be incensed.
        Parenting devoted 22 pages to alerting mothers to a reported self-esteem crisis among our nation's teenage girls. "The problem is pervasive - and urgent," warned the editor. In truth, the "problem" of shortchanged girls demoralized by gender bias in the classroom is a fanciful product of feminist advocacy research that has been discredited by, among other sources, U.S.
Department of Education data and three recent university studies.
        Cosmopolitan informs women, A March of Dimes study names battering during pregnancy as the leading cause of birth defects and infant mortality." But March of Dimes officials say they did no such study.
        The editors of these popular magazines are not feminist ideologues, but they have bought into the victim culture.
        And, it's not only the magazines. Last year, Oprah Winfrey hosted two feminist journalists who had written a book "documenting" massive gender bias against women in medical research and practice. Before each commercial Winfrey asked audience members - mostly women - "Are you angry yet?" And the audience roared back its anger.
        In the August 1994 Atlantic Monthly, Andrew Kadar, a UCLA Medical School professor, reviewed the standard charges that medicine is gender biased and concluded that "the truth appears to be exactly the opposite."
        The drumbeat of provocative Ms.-information gives the Democrats a clear advantage. The more women are rendered insecure, the greater their felt need for programs that Democrats favor. 
        Two prominent media watch-dogs, Consumer Alert and the Media Research Center, released a joint report after the election analyzing the political content of 13 popular women's magazines over a 12-month period. They found that publications such as Working Woman, Glamour and Redbook routinely "scare women to death" by overstating risks, and they push hard
for protective government programs. The report calls women's magazines "a liberal pipeline to Soccer Moms."
        Republicans strategists were clueless about the extent and significance of the ongoing crusade to scare women and persuade them they are victims. Democrats, on the other hand, understood that the message the women's magazines were giving women was political dynamite.
        The Democrats thrive on all this victimology. And they contribute to it. Susan J. Blumenthal, the deputy assistant secretary for women's health, has made the department a clearing house for feminist advocacy statistics. One of Blumenthal's "fact sheets" attributes several serious women's health problems to "long-standing biases against women." Another states, "An estimated 30
percent of emergency room visits by women each year are the result of injuries from domestic violence." Blumenthal also promotes her versions of the facts in a regular health column for Elle and as a contributor to McCall's and Ladies' Home Journal.
        When I called the Office of Women's Health for the source of the 30 percent figure, senior analyst Frances Page told me, "I have no idea where the statistics are from. The person responsible has left. You might try the AMA." But according to a June 1995 article in the Journal of American Medical Association, of 648 women surveyed in emergency rooms in Denver, Colo.,
only 11 (fewer than 2 percent) "presented for care because of trauma" related to domestic violence.
        President Clinton has fallen for feminist numbers, too. In a March 21, 1995, speech he said that according to the FBI, a woman is battered every 12 seconds. The president's speechwriters seem to have confused the FBI with Mirabella magazine, which announced the baseless statistic in its November 1993 issue.
        Independents, conservatives, libertarians and honest liberals who want all women to vote freely, intelligently and without fear will have to undertake the long and arduous task of setting the record straight.
        That won't be easy. It means challenging the false claims of all the agents provocateur. It means gathering and supporting groups of objective scholars. It means using truth and reason to content for the minds of America's women.

Christina Hoff Sommers, a philosophy professor at Clark University, wrote Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women.