Male and Female

Nearly every week brings subtle shifts, or at least portents of change, in the balance of forces between the sexes. Last week was no exception:

> The other customers laughed when Mary Anna Anderson tried to rent a Rototiller so she could plow her rock-filled yard and plant grass around her house in Van Nuys, Calif. Only men can rent power equipment, a salesman for Northridge Equipment Rentals told her curtly and without explanation. Anderson, 28, who had just graduated from Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco but had not yet been admitted to the bar, said that as soon as she was a full-fledged lawyer she would sue. Two months ago she was and she did. Filing her complaint in Van Nuys Superior Court, she asked $15 for travel expenses, $250 for alleged violation of California's antidiscrimination statute--and $10,000 for the humiliation of being publicly ridiculed. Last week she was preparing her arguments for a court confrontation sometime in the next few months.

> For more than a decade, the Bank of America in San Francisco has been spending $170,000 a year on free taxi rides home for 325 female employees who work after 8 p.m. Recently, male workers have complained that they are being discriminated against. Bowing to the pressure, BOA has decided to abolish the free rides; instead, it will provide free shuttle service to brightly lighted parking areas. But, as Key Punch Operator June Apedaile points out, "most women either don't have a car or don't want to drive." Having won their point, BOA'S male employees are now worried about their female coworkers. Says Computer Operator Joseph Wonder: "It's a pretty rough neighborhood for women; at night they don't stand a chance."

> Writing in Playboy, radical feminist Germaine Greer suggests that rape means not just taking by force but taking by fame, charisma, insincere tenderness, or hints of favors to come or largesse to be withdrawn. It is even rape when a lonely woman goes to bed with a man not because she wants sex but because she "would like to develop some sort of relationship with him." Writes Greer: "The man who has it in his power to hire and fire women from an interesting or lucrative position may extort sexual favors. A man who is famous or charismatic might humiliate women in ways that they would otherwise angrily resist. 'An End to Rape' does not so much refer to rapes on the streets as to the daily brutalization of contact between doctor and patient, employer and employee, dater and datee..."

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