Her other two opponents.(the bent pin)(Hillary Clinton)

POLLSTERS out to discover Hillary's psychological effect on the male sex should abandon the standard practice of asking questions, because probing men's fear and loathing of female dominance forces them into strong silent mode, even when, like Tucker Carlson, they are neither strong nor silent.

The way around this male policy of ask-but-don't-tell is to study the obsessions men sprout when they think women are getting too powerful and threatening. Take the '70s, the bra-burning Ms. decade of Women's Lib when feminism was at its height. Now ask yourself, What else was the '70s the decade of? Answer: Jaws.

On to the '80s, the decade of Geraldine Ferraro, entrenched abortion rights, and Crocodile Dundee. Thereafter, during the Hillary-in-training '90s and beyond, we were introduced to every cold-blooded man-eater known to herpetology, ichthyology, and the Discovery Channel: anacondas, boa constrictors, barracudas, piranhas, giant squids, and--the latest--killer jellyfish. All the while, Hollywood agents were still getting over-the-transom movie scripts with titles like Ink and Bites, written by male Scheherazades compulsively driven to tell one more story about being dragged down and eaten alive by something with a really big mouth.

Election '08 calls for a real savior, a St. George to rescue men from the dragon, and lo, he walks among us. He is Bear Grylls, star of Discovery's Man vs. Wild, a how-to course in surviving in jungles, deserts, mountains, and snowy tundras while armed with nothing but your two hands and ... well, those other two things.

If Bear sounds like a muscle-bound troglodyte, guess again. His name is Edward Grylls, he went to Eton, and his father was Sir Michael Grylls, a Tory politician. He climbed Mt. Everest at 23 and served in the British Special Forces, where he learned the survival techniques he demonstrates on his show. Now 33, he is clearly a "gentleman" in the full British sense of class distinctions, which is what makes his stomach-turning exploits so fascinating.

Each show has Bear parachuting into the middle of nowhere and making his way to the middle of somewhere without dying of thirst, starvation, or exposure. "Only the toughest can survive," he proclaims in his own voiceover, and proves it by eating a live snake ("Wait till the muscles stop twitching"); a wriggly muddy earthworm ("Tastes like he went to the 100 in my mouth"); and an uncooperative spider ("He bit my lip on the way down").

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