Movies and motherhood.

• Author: Rapping, Elayne
• Position: Actresses

While I hardly qualify as a crone - at least in my own mind and mirror - watching the young female stars in the movies lately has had an increasingly negative effect on my normally upbeat frame of mind.

If you happen to have seen the recent Vanity Fair foldout cover featuring fifteen or twenty of Hollywood's hottest female leads, you know what I'm talking about. There wasn't a single one who looked as though she had logged even a quarter-century of life experience. But there they all were, dressed in spike heels and little else, looking for all the world like a lineup of recruits for an uptown brothel, and being hailed as this decade's successors to such truly impressive and mature former stars as Stanwyck, Crawford, Hepburn, Bacall, and Davis.

It was definitely an Oil of Olay moment.

And not, I might add, the first such moment. Indeed, I have only recently come to terms with the first wave of childlike female superstars, in roles better played by their mothers, alongside male co-stars old enough to be their fathers.

Did anyone really believe that Julia Roberts was a crack news reporter squaring off - a la Rosalind Russell - against the likes of Nick Nolte, imitating Cary Grant?

And what about the ubiquitous, terminally perky Meg Ryan playing a seriously troubled alcoholic recently as though she had auditioned by jumping out of a cake at a stag party? Bette Davis, who knew how to do seriously troubled women, must have turned in her grave.

These light-weight leading ladies were annoying enough. But to see them so quickly phased out in favor of Lolita-esque versions of what American males are supposed to desire in a partner is really too much.

There is a threatening political message in Hollywood's current obsession with child-women as sex objects, and in the related trend of pushing older, more seasoned actresses into marginal roles - mostly as asexual, martyr-like mothers. The stronger and more successful women seem to become in the real world, the more the movies portray female role models as child-women - sweet, cute, and unformed - and to relegate older, more powerful women to the asexual, unthreatening, sidelines.

As a much-publicized recent government study pointed out all too clearly, the idea that "women's lib" has taken over the world and hurled women into positions of power and authority everywhere is - Murphy Brown and Diane Sawyer notwithstanding - extreme wishful thinking: 95 percent of corporate leadership jobs are still - relax guys - held by white males.

What Edith Bunker...