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Advertised as "the most erotic Ally McBeal ever," it was really just the most reactionary. Not that it didn't turn me on, mind you. But sometimes, reactionary can be erotic, too. Just ask my Republican friends. The show contained two sub-plots - only one of which was legal (how long until there is no law at all in Ally McBeal? Or only a minute of law?) Both purported to be about women but both were really about men's fantasies about women. This is ironic given Ally's loyal female viewers, and the spin on the show as being about and for women.

Reactionary Sub-Plot #1: Sexual Harassment Lite

Subplot #1 - a sexual harassment case - caricatured sexual harassment to defend male desire (and, worse, Billy's male desire).

We'll get to the girl-girl action later, but first indulge my little lecture. Pretend to pay attention - envision me wearing a short skirt and low-cut blouse. You don't need to really listen. Just look like you are.

I hate to be pedantic but, as Michigan law professor Catharine MacKinnon has pointed out, there was a time when no one dreamed sexual harassment law would raise First Amendment and privacy issues. The conduct women once endured (and some now still endure) was so grave and, often, physical that these issues didn't really come up. Professor Eugene Volokh was the first to raise the speech issues - decades after MacKinnon invented the area of law - and Professor Jeffrey Rosen the first to elaborate fully the privacy consequences of sex harassment law. While the privacy and First Amendment issues are sometimes valid, we're getting close to thinking of sex harassment law as only raising these issues. We're forgetting the incredibly hurtful physical harassment so many women have endured. We concentrate on "hostile environment" harassment, but forget the nasty quid-pro-quos where the quid is your body, and the quo your job. We see the crazy, outlier case - where merely repeating the plot of Seinfeld is deemed actionable - as a model for what sexual harassment law is all about. That's a mistake. Just ask the lone female investment banker in an office where her sex is an issue and an obstacle all the time, every single damn day of the year.

Ally McBeal - in its own, seemingly innocuous way - goes even further than the current caricature of "hostile environment" law - where the paradigm is that chat about Seinfeld, as opposed to the gauntlet of workplace pornography and comments the female blue-collar worker in the seminal Supreme Court hostile environment case had to run. On Ally McBeal, "hostile environment" gets transformed into "sexually charged environment" when a bunch of plain women file a lawsuit contending that a sexy woman in their workplace oppresses them because she distracts the men in the office and gets extra help from them.

Our friend Billy, of Fish & Cage -- that progressive firm where the two name partners shtup associates many years their junior -- represents the corporate defendant that employs Plain Women and Sexy Woman. Billy's got one heck of a clever argument: "Everyone wants to shtup the sexy woman. Is that a crime?" (This is why he gets the big bucks). In between his courtroom speeches, Billy finds time to tell Renee (who represents Sexy Woman) that she is herself dressed way too sexy for the law. Too sexy by far. Renee, though, defiantly continues to show cleavage and advises her client to keep doing so, too.

(Meanwhile, I keep thinking cleavage that is too dramatic - like, say, Renee's here - just looks a lot like someone's butt. So, if you buy that three-click bra from Victoria's Secret, I would stop at the second click. To avoid the butt look. Really. Maybe Victoria's Secret could have a sixteen-click bra where your breasts end up above your head.)

Throughout the episode, sex harassment is presented as an unworkable Catch-22 for the employer - and for men. Instruct Sexy Woman to wear something other than her lavender shrink-wrap blouse, and she can sue for sexual harassment on the ground that she is being told to dress differently based on her gender. (She'll get a Saran Wrap halter top in restitution). Ah, but then if the corporation tells Plain Women to shut up about Sexy Woman's outfits, they'll sue. Pesky women. Gosh, why can't they all shut up? And lie back. And think of England. Or at least make out so we can watch, see Section II infra.

In the midst of all this, Billy and Renee ignore their clients' interests, and the need to coordinate their defense, to indulge instead in petty personal attacks and insults. (Now, finally, we're getting legally realistic!) And (in my unstable persona as a lawyer) I wonder: Can you even sue a co-worker (like the Sexy Woman) under Title VII? Maybe Renee should have moved to dismiss. Where are the depositions? Where is the motion practice? I feel cheated.

As viewers already know, most workplaces outside the Gulag Archipelago are "sexually charged environments" where pheromones float in the air like loose body glitter. The workplaces the law should care about are not these, but the ones in which gender still hangs in the air like a threat. More and more frequently in our culture sexual harassment law is being portrayed - as it is in the parody presented by Ally -- as an all-out assault on speech, privacy, and, especially, male desire. Even if it's done in jest, it may be subtly - and wrongly - changing our minds about the whole value of this important area of law.

Reactionary Sub-Plot #2: Lesbianism Lite

I'm a straight girl, too, Ally. Most days. But I am not as scared as you.

I admit I find you, Ally, almost unbearably sexy in your quasi-tie-dye from Bebe -- described by my fashion-savvy friend as "slutty career clubwear" -- with your Lucille Ball-like lipsticky lips and physical comedy. I admit I find Ling sexy too -- so vulnerable, yet so manipulative. And that diamond barrette . . . Man. (For the record, I don't find Nell sexy, with her Crayola eyebrow pencil and crimp-o-rama hair. I'm not indiscriminate, you know). I admit, too, that I watched this episode of Ally with a beautiful brunette in knee-high leather boots. And, I admit, over the course of my life, to certain astonishing dreams that could just as well have been real. Wait, were they real? What are all these strange women's names in my Palm Pilot?

But Ally, instead of dreaming, only complains: "Gay women love me!" That and the fact that they "guise it in 'let's be friends'." How deceptive! Because men never do that. I mean, men never pretend to be your friend after a break-up, insinuate themselves into your life for months, and then, one evening when you've had one margarita too many. . . . Sure, I'm bitter.

And Ally, instead of dreaming, is repelled: Lesbian sex "grosses me out," she says. But wait. The thought of kissing Ling "isn't repulsive." The kiss is "just to see what it's like." And then Ally reaffirms after kissing Ling, "I'm not gay," and "I'm not ashamed to say I don't want to be gay." She promises Ling (and us) "I'll never kiss another woman."

And from Ling (with fear): "I don't want to turn gay." "I think I'm going gay." "What I really want, at the end of the day, is a penis." And -- after kissing Ally -- with wonderment: "That didn't suck." But she and Ally agree -- it's not the same without "a penis." (Yes, I know. This really is a show about law.)

And from Renee: Thinking about kissing Ling makes Ally "a perfectly normal dyke."

And from Fish: Kissing another man "disgusts me." "'Butt-pirates,'" he claims, threaten the species.

The point: Baby did a bad, bad thing. But now she's come to her senses.

And the words "homosexual panic defense" take on a whole new meaning.

Maybe some of these comments (for example, Fish's) are meant to seem benighted. Maybe they protest too much -- Ally can't have been all that repelled. But does the show really want us to think all its characters are in some benighted place? No, I think it sides with them. Straight people. In a straight law firm. In the straight legal world. If you put one toe in the water, be sure to draw it out quickly. Someone might notice you're different in some way.

So there are ten or twenty laugh lines that reassure us: I don't really want this kiss. I don't really want a woman. Actually, I want a penis. Laugh lines, to reassure the viewer that when two of the most beautiful women on television kiss, it's really for him (or her?) -- just as Ally and Ling's sexual dancing together is only to arouse and frustrate some guys watching from the bar. Ally and Ling could never really want it; never really want each other. Indeed, by the end of the show, Ling is back dancing in the arms of needle-nosed Richard Fish again (isn't he just a second rate Liev Schreiber?).

I'm disappointed in Ally. I thought the trick would be that, after pretending to each other they were dancing to arouse the guys at the bar, Ally and Ling would actually arouse each other. And maybe go to bed. Or at least Ally would be aroused, and want to go to bed with Ling. But while Ling rejects Ally's invitation to come upstairs (and, presumably, go further), Ally later reneges on having given the invitation -- she didn't really want Ling to come upstairs, she insists. And we, seemingly, are meant to believe her, despite the look she exchanges with Ling as Ling is dancing with Fish.

What a shame. I love Calista Flockhart when she's thwarted -- as Ally, or in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Thwarted is the emotion she acts the very best. There is something lovely about watching her get very vulnerable, and then very thwarted. She is so open to us, so hopeful -- then we watch her, in her vulnerability, be hurt. She practices losing farther, losing faster (starting by losing Billy, but . . . no great loss). This is what Ally is to us: The skinny incarnation of hope, that thing with the feathers, and the plucking it suffers every single time. But here, Ally doesn't pursue Ling far enough to really be thwarted. She reneges. Some are Lesbian Until Graduation. (Don't understand? Spend a little time at Smith or Holyoke, or even a school with men, like Wesleyan.) Ally is Lesbian Until Commercial Break.

We deserve better. Not that she has ultimately to be gay, but she has to be more than curious. Ain't that close to love, baby, ain't that close to love? It ain't that far to go. Go there. Or get a little closer. Or something.

Well, one might point out, at least it titillates some guys in the audience. It is a proposition generally accepted that a single woman, with a boyfriend, will someday be urged by him to kiss another girl. Yet if I asked a guy I was dating to kiss another guy because it turned me on, I know what answer I'd get. Why is seeing your girlfriend with another woman so sexy? Because she can't really mean it? It wouldn't be so sexy if she left you. But she wants your penis too much, she's too weak to ever do that. So this episode needs us to believe, so men may believe. But see, real life.

Again, as in the sex harassment subplot, male desire - and male reassurance -- is the key. There, the corporate sex harassment defendant wins, and the men can ogle Sexy Woman all they want. Here, Ally and Ling dally with each other just enough to titillate their male colleagues (who incessantly discuss the flirtation), the men in the bar, and those in the audience. And then they race back to their sanity - where the penis is king.

Next week: The Listening to Prozac Argue A Motion In Limine episode. Maybe if Ally weren't in denial about her sexuality, she wouldn't need meds.

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