The male-bashing taken to an extreme in "Waiting to Exhale" is starting to seem a little like crack for the female psyche -- exhilarating in the short term but ultimately crippling and dangerous. What viewers need is an outreach and intervention program to counteract the values the film portrays. PNS associate editor Joan Walsh is a San Francisco-based writer. A version of this article also appears in the on-line magazine Salon.

It's a measure of the media's drive-by approach to race relations that certain events make news for showing us what we should have already known. Just as last October's Million Man March drew huge acclaim partly because a million black men came together without violence, "Waiting to Exhale" is the blockbuster film of the hour because it shows black women not as long-suffering welfare-dependent moms but as beautiful, savvy professionals with disposable incomes and gorgeous clothes.

Now I don't know what kind of rosy-colored, Prozac-in-the-water planet I live on, but I certainly wasn't expecting violence at the march, nor did I need "Waiting to Exhale" to show me that most black women, despite racism, are striving and succeeding. If black America thinks the nation needs those affirmations, I'll concede that my view of race relations suffer from liberal white-girl optimism. But I won't cede my right as a woman to observe that the male-bashing taken to an extreme in "Waiting to Exhale" is starting to seem a little like crack for the female psyche, exhilarating in the short-term but ultimately crippling and dangerous.

Attacks on the film have centered on the bleak portrayal of black men, but black women don't fare much better. Three of the four heroines are trouser-chasing, champagne-swilling, bustier-wearing whiners, who make obviously wrong choices and then blame the nearest available target -- black men, white women, gay men, their mothers -- for their troubles. The movie made me want to run an outreach and intervention program for women leaving theaters across America, to counteract the values portrayed on screen. My program would be based on the following five principles:

*Nobody is obliged to love us: At least two of the women are patently unlovable unless they spend some time on the couch, or with a minister, a shaman, or a straight-talking girlfriend who helps them work through the combination of immaturity and female rage that's driving their bad choices. No healthy man, black, Chinese or purple, is going to want to put up with their drama.

*Contempt is not an aphrodisiac: Several of the audience's favorite scenes involved our heroines having extremely bad sex with selfish men, the type who get on top and grunt for a while and roll off -- wham-bam without the thank-you-ma'am kind of lovers. This is portrayed as typical of the injustice our girls must endure. But the women in question don't much like the men they're bedding in the first place. In one really disturbing scene, which the audience howled at, the lover-to-be is a short, fat, bespectacled brother who was extremely dark-skinned, in contrast with the gorgeous light-skinned heroine -- an ugly touch, I thought, in a black movie. She swallows her revulsion and fakes an orgasm, and later fakes love, because the overweight lover's got a nice big ... house. Why do these women expect good sex from men they don't like? Which leads to my next principle:

*It takes two people to have bad sex. These women seemed to think their role in the act involved lying around looking pretty in a push-up bustier, like a hormone-enhanced turkey on a platter. As RuPaul says -- the drag-queen singer comes to mind because in this movie, the robotic Whitney Houston is RuPaul -- "Girl, you better work."

*White women are not the problem. The film opens with a black man -- a cardboard cut-out, filthy-rich scumbag -- leaving Angela Bassett for a white woman. I won't minimize the pain in that, nor deny the creepy social and psychological factors that propel some black men to marry outside their race. But the simplistic, good and evil portrayal of black-white relationships is appalling. Relationships between black men and white women are depicted as just plain wrong, sick, revenge against black women, case closed, and there's absolutely no insight or epiphany to soften that kneejerk judgment. In fact there's a disturbing psychological subtext -- the only good white woman is a dead white woman -- when later in the film Bassett hooks up with a black man whose white wife is dying of breast cancer.

Male-bashing can be good, clean fun after a hideous breakup. But as a way of life, a philosophy of relationship, it's destructive. It exonerates women from the bad choices we make, and lets us forget that we usually get the men we deserve. Unfortunately, we get the films we deserve too, and the fact that women of every race are flocking to "Waiting to Exhale" is a disturbing glimpse of our unreadiness for movies that tell the truth -- ensuring we'll get more cheap thrills and psychological lies masquerading as social commentary.