NONFICTION - Jan. 22, 1995

REASONABLE CREATURES: Essays on Women and Feminism by Katha Pollitt. (Knopf: $22; 186 pp.) Katha Pollitt is out on the token-sucking front lines of feminism. Nobody gets away with anything; this means no stupid unspoken assumptions,no data-twisting, no expectations of gratefulness for paltry gestures toward equality, and no slack for her least-favored-nation: the “Magazine Moralists.� For example, “placing abortion in a context of extreme situations...sets the stage for someone--George Bush for example--to propose a ‘compromise.�’ Same goes for male violence: “We need to stop thinking of male violence as some kind of freak of nature, like a tornado. Because the thing about tornados is, you can’t do anything about them�The sorry truth is, it’s easier to do this in a regular column (Pollitt writes for the Nation magazine) than almost anywhere else (living room, board room, street), but Pollitt marshalls the evidence and the arguments, and wakes up a reader’s sometimes flagging nonsense-sensing sonar devices. Posing the questions is Pollitt’s art form. For example: “�Why, ask yourself, is everyone so hot under the collar about what to put on the required-reading shelf? Is it because while we have been arguing so firecely about which books make the best medecine, the patient has been slipping deeper and deeper into a coma?� Hilary Clinton, Baby M, the value of journalism degrees...it’s all here.