Relationship of the Year Man and Woman.

By NANCY GIBBS

ONE OF THE MOST SURPRISING THINGS ABOUT THE 1991 Battle of the Sexes was that it was so full of surprises. After the feminist revolution of the '70s, the postfeminist age unrolled in the '80s amid musings about "mommy tracks" and the installation of diaper-changing facilities in airport men's rooms. By the '90s Americans were supposed to have moved on to more subtle issues about enhancing everyone's quality of life, letting women define themselves as individuals, letting men be warriors or frogurt eaters, as they choose.

The year's flash points, then, were all the more blinding. Surely Patricia Bowman, the accuser in the Palm Beach rape case, never expected that she would watch a forensics expert peer through her black panty hose at more than 3 million viewers nationwide. The producers of Thelma & Louise could not have imagined that their cockeyed vision of two women on an ill-fated spree would set off a national debate about misogyny, male bashing and the power of feminine anger ungirdled. And certainly neither Clarence Thomas nor Anita Hill could have guessed that their private friction a decade ago would wind up sparking the most ferocious weekend of rhetorical slashing and burning in memory.

Their confrontation has become the eternal analogy; any story that pits her word against his, all the tales of power struggles between the sexes, somewhere includes a reference to the drama that played out before the Senate Judiciary Committee. "They just don't get it" was the charge leveled first at the Senators but later at all men who were unprepared for the conversations they were soon having with wives and friends and female colleagues. Judge Thomas has since gone on to the black-robed dignity of the Supreme Court, leaving behind the race-charged rhetoric that saved him that hot weekend in October. Professor Hill has gone back to her law-school classroom in Oklahoma, but continues to collect bouquets from groups across the country that believe ! her story, admire her courage under fire and decry the injustice of the whole episode.

But in the ambiguous aftermath, both the Thomas vote and the William Kennedy Smith verdict leave plenty of room for argument. The female accusers gave credible testimony; they seemed to have little to gain, and a great deal to lose, by coming forward with their charges; they both took on men with powerful allies and vast resources to counterattack; they both passed lie- detector tests. Would the Palm Beach decision have changed if the jury had been allowed to hear the testimony of the three other women who have stories of sexual violence during encounters with Smith? Would the Thomas vote have gone differently if his story had been challenged as relentlessly as hers was; if the Senators had pressed him on his penchant for watching pornographic movies in law school, or his sudden claim that he was a victim of a racist conspiracy that would have to have been plotted 10 years earlier, when Anita Hill first spoke of his behavior to her friends?

Those who believed that the men in both cases were telling the truth also came away with some new concerns. How are men to know what the rules are when they appear to be ever changing? At what point does misunderstanding become a crime? If the charges prove false, how does a man retrieve his good name? Are women, feeling victims of gender crimes, fighting back in a guerrilla war with weapons that men cannot defend themselves against?

All this is not an abstract parlor conversation about the differences between the sexes. The events of 1991 may have been unusual in their celebrated luridness, but they raised basic issues that touch everyone's life. A few observers noticed that in the wake of the Thomas-Hill confrontation, the analysis of the Palm Beach trial was slightly more nuanced, more sophisticated in its discussion of so charged an issue as acquaintance rape. The politics may have been vicious, but the Senate passed and the President signed a civil rights bill that will finally allow victims to collect punitive damages in harassment cases. Employers are making their rules more explicit, their reporting procedures more reliable. If men and women are temporarily more cautious and self-conscious about what they may say and do, that may not be too high a price to pay for a new understanding of what is appropriate behavior, and what is not.