The debates are a serious smash, and smashingly serious. The first two were so good, I got to fantasizing about a Jim Lehrer-Gwen Ifill ticket.

Life doesn't work that way, of course. Between debates, we return to the booby hatch that is this campaign. Lately, the boobies are obsessed with maleness and femaleness. Does President Bush have a soft, sensitive side, and did it come out on Dr. Phil? Are John Kerry and John Edwards manly enough to protect the womenfolk? Can you get a manicure and still be a guy?

Tune in tomorrow as our political system explores these and other ancient gender questions. And I mean ancient. I'm all for getting to know the candidates as people, but the conversation about sex roles has a bizarre Dark Ages quality.

On the eve of this week's vice presidential debate, ABC's Bob Woodruff had this exchange with Edwards:

WOODRUFF: There's been criticism that you have been too soft.

EDWARDS: Do I seem soft to you?

WOODRUFF: You do seem relatively soft, certainly compared to Dick Cheney.

And would you mind dropping your pants for a moment so I can do a little gender check? I made that up, but that's where we're headed.

One day recently, USA Today ran a front-page story about the masculinity contest. "It's macho time in the presidential race. The best man could be the one who seems more manly." The piece noted Kerry's unvirile Lambeau Field goof and quoted various political pros on the larger testicular tussle.

This is all driven by the race for female voters, who in the media's telling are classic women, circa 1958—little wifeys holed up in the kitchen with the Rice-A-Roni, dreaming about their ideal man. He's sensitive and has a "soft side," yet is strong enough to make a gal feel safe. These women are called Security Moms.

"Security moms," The New York Times recently explained, "are an outgrowth of the 'soccer moms' who had emerged in previous elections as important swing voters. But soccer moms tended to live mainly in the suburbs and could vote either way. Security moms live everywhere and are leaning Republican."

These gender blocs have become so baroque, we need lineages to make sense of them. If Security Moms are "everywhere," how come you never meet one?

The he-she talk is mindlessly reductive, and divorced from social reality. Men are strong and powerful, while women are soft and fearful? The only place you'll hear that anymore is from the Pleistocene political parties and their stooges in the political media. Both are hostages to polls, and polls have a vested interest in men and women registering starkly different reactions to candidates, based on gender. Why? Because difference yields hypothetical voting patterns, which make good copy.

It's a cheap racket, and it blots out more-telling truths. When Bush was on Oprah Winfrey's show four years ago, there was a lot of tittering. A women's show! Oprah asked whether he'd ever had moments of "self-doubt." Bush was flummoxed and stammered that he wished he'd had advance warning about the question. If we hadn't been laughing about Oprah's soft audience, this might have given us pause. As NPR pointed out recently, it was an eerie foreshadowing of a similar exchange on the Iraq war, at a White House press conference this year.

After last week's Bush-Kerry debate, Fox News reporter Carl Cameron posted an online story with fake Kerry quotes. "Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate," one of the fictional quotes said. "Women should like me! I do manicures."

Kerry is actually pursued by endless stories suggesting extreme attentiveness to his own looks—rumors of Botox, fake tans, all the rest. I have no idea whether he's as preeningly vain as these tales suggest. If he is, I believe that makes him a fairly typical U.S. senator. But the point is, this has nothing to do with sexuality. Excessive self-regard is gender-neutral. It's a telling personal trait, but we'll probably never get to explore it.

Meanwhile, out in America, gender is another thing entirely—or rather, lots of things. This is the age of $300 designer blue jeans that "flatter the male figure," The Wall Street Journal reports. Guy magazines such as Men's Health offer advice on how to shave your legs and chest to achieve the elusive "smooth look." We used to have "frigid" women—now it's frigid men who take Viagra to please their hungry spouses.

Men still tend to be manly, and women womanly, and that's natural. But gender in America is a rich tapestry. The media that gave us NASCAR dads conveniently overlooked that 40 percent of NASCAR fans are women. Hockey dads? My son's coach is named Tanya.

The popular landscape is packed with alpha females with legions of male retainers fluttering around them, from Oprah and Martha Stewart to Hollywood amazon Jessica Simpson, whose husband is always struggling to find his own career. The Sex and the City girls are the Hugh Hefners of today. The symbol of warrior machismo run amok is Army soldier Lynndie England cracking her whip.

Do you really want to know how men and women will vote in three weeks? Ask them, one at a time.