She's Baaaack!

Yeah, well, I've said this a thousand times in different ways. We know that penetration is not the index of female pleasure. That it's not the most efficient way to give a woman an orgasm. If the idea is the exchange of pleasure, then the '50s weren't bad, because we had a lot of foreplay.

Well, one of the things that I absolutely love, that you say in the book, is that women should express no more interest in men than they do in women, and just stop this, you know, constant effort to attract male attention when clearly they're not all that interested. I mean, if they were interested, we wouldn't have to be dieting and fussing with our hair all the time.

Stop buying Cosmopolitan.

Yeah, but if you go around saying that, you'll be called a "man hater" [laughs].

Well, of course I'm already being called a "man hater" [laughs]. And I wish I was. My life would be a lot easier, believe me, if I was.

Changing the subject, I want to push you a little further on one thing you state in your book. I love your critique of the medicalization of women's lives. In fact, you come close to saying something quite radical about breast cancer, which I've been thinking about, because it's such a cause in this country. And what you suggest, very subversively, is that both the prevention and the cures may be worse than the disease itself. Do you think we're going to get to the point where women will start rejecting the usual forms of prevention and treatment?

I think we're already there. Because there are women who are already saying, "I don't want to live my life as a cancer patient. I'd rather live the next five years as a not-cancer-patient, and then die, than put myself through this nightmare."

But whenever I say to an audience that you have to die of something -- and that one of the clever things that you should do as a human being in the 1990s is decide what it is you'd prefer to die of -- people get more and more uneasy. Doctors say to me, for example, that I should take hormone-replacement therapy, because it will protect me against heart disease . . . But I look at all these doctors and say, "What do you want to die of? Don't youwant to die of a massive infarct?" Rather than using up all your substance by wasting away in a nursing home. My mother is 80, has significant hypo-density of the brain, is a tremendous problem for her three children and for herself. I would rather drop dead in my tracks. So don't deny me my heart attack.

Right, okay -- brave words, I like that.

Well, I may weaken.

Not anytime soon, I hope.