(FORTUNE Magazine) – As is well known, the National Organization for Women (N.O.W.), the Women's Legal Defense Fund (W.L.D.F.), the Fund for the Feminist Majority (F.F.M.), and their ever eager collaborators in the media have been laboring overtime to make They Just Don't Get It (T.J.D.G.I.) the cliche of the day. On October 15, some 200 feminist demonstrators stood on the Capitol steps chanting the line for hours. The Nexis database tells us that the tiresome phrase lurks in 38 news stories and articles published in the three weeks beginning October 1. To be sure, one of those articles was about hockey. It seems the Washington Capitals are still stubbornly resisting the widely held perception that they are inferior to the Rangers and go right on beating them. Most of the 38 articles were of course bounced off the Senate hearings on Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and sexual harassment, and typically belabored a certain dull-witted sex for not getting it about S.H. That male obtuseness is not exactly new was signaled in the Newsday op-ed piece by Harvard law school professor Kathleen M. Sullivan, who began her tirade against Thomas by reminding us of the plot of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, wherein the femmes talk sense into their militaristic husbands by vowing not to sleep with them until they stop the Peloponnesian War. What does that have to do with Hill and Thomas? Tenuous connection made by Kathleen: ''Men in power just don't get it.'' Your servant came away from the hearings persuaded anew of two propositions: $ (1) Feminist perspectives are overrepresented in the media, and (2) the movement's basic views are still not being bought by most American women. Media coverage of the hearings was ludicrous. Its basic line: that Anita Hill's testimony was overwhelmingly endorsed by, and triggered an outpouring from, women fed up with male insensitivity and oppression. All too exemplary was the article by Martin F. Nolan in the Boston Globe, which earnestly reported: ''The week that Hill's charges surfaced was the week that millions of women fairly bellowed across the workplace, the pillowcase, the lunch counter, and the U.S. Capitol: 'You just don't get it!' '' Doubtless protecting his sources, Martin did not elaborate on the reportorial legwork underlying the news about bellowing across pillowcases. The TV folks were generally worse than the newspapers, especially in depicting the Hill-Thomas confrontation as emblematic of women vs. men in America. The Center for Media and Public Affairs did an analysis of 74 network news stories on Hill and Thomas, and found CBS, NBC, and ABC all working hard to show that Hill was backed by women and Thomas by men. Overall, interviews shown on the nightly news shows had 86% of men supporting Thomas and about 75% of women supporting Hill. Both the media and the movement were badly embarrassed when the survey data started coming in. The Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed that Thomas's approval ratings rose during the hearings, which ended with 70% of the voters believing he would make a good Supreme Court Justice. The Washington Post/ABC poll, which had a breakdown by sex, was even more interesting: It showed that women watching the Hill-Thomas dispute increased their support for Thomas even more than men did (with 57% of women being for him just as the hearings ended).

Those polls can be viewed as the latest set of data demonstrating that the feminist movement has no mandate to speak for women. In 1980, 1984, and 1988, most American women voted against the presidential candidates powerfully preferred by the movement. Survey data, including the exhaustive polls run by the New York Times, have shown no significant difference between men and women on abortion, with slender majorities of both sexes rejecting an unlimited right to abortion. So why do the media continue to identify the movement with women generally? Could it be that T.J.D.G.I.?