Nussbaum is the polished University of Chicago professor of law and ethics who surfaced in the mainstream media during an odd moment in the 1996 trial over Colorado's anti-gay rights amendment. She was asked to rebut the testimony of one of the state's expert witnesses, who claimed that even the ancient Greeks found homosexuality morally repellant. Lately, she's turned her attention to feminist matters. Last month she attacked Judith Butler in the New Republic for her "hip quietism," which Nussbaum characterized as infuriatingly coy, apolitical and pessimistic about the feminist quest for justice. The diatribe provoked a flurry of responses from big-name academic feminists who defended Butler's political usefulness. Nussbaum responded by dismissing the substance of each letter with the same lucid if slightly impatient tone she'd used on Butler.

As Nussbaum squares off with her fellow academic feminists, her hefty new collection of essays, "Sex and Social Justice," sets its sights beyond the academy to a public forum awash in books about women's issues. In some ways Nussbaum's timing couldn't have been better. As often as not these days, books about women are written by young, mediagenic women who have noticed a pattern in how they and their friends feel about being women. From Naomi Wolf's paean to bad girls, "Promiscuities," to Wendy Shalit's plea for good girls, "A Return to Modesty," the genre has poster babes from every part of the political spectrum. If she's at all cute, her photo lodges in the public imagination as surely as her ideas do. The ever-unsubtle Wurtzel hammered home this reality with that topless cover shot on last year's "Bitch." Her naked left breast, along with an uplifted fuck-you finger, helpfully literalized the link between her own body and her argument that women with bitchy, erratic personalities should be more socially accepted. If no one read the book, well, she still gets her message across.

As Time's "Is Feminism Dead?" cover story last year pointed out, the bar is set pretty low if you want to write a book about being privileged, young and female in America today. This may not mean the end of feminism, but it does represent a shift in the media's production of feminist faces.

Can an academic like Nussbaum -- trained to do actual research, careful in her arguments and evidently champing at the bit for a chance at cultural influence -- rescue the genre of the feminist book? Nussbaum scores a partial victory: She shows brilliantly how sex is used to deny some people -- i.e., women and gay men -- social justice. But she doesn't convince us that theories of social justice are the best intellectual tool for constructing a sexual philosophy.

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