The Talk of the Electronic Town : Commentary: In television’s court of mixed messages, the line between sexual impropriety and illegality is a blur.

Will this week’s rekindled “fires of feminism,” as KNBC reporter Linda Douglass described them, reduce gender inequality to ashes?

That’s unlikely, even though television’s repeated running of side-by-side pictures of Judge Clarence Thomas and Anita Faye Hill may convey an impression that America is about to see a winner-take-all war of the sexes, he representing the dominant male Establishment, she Thelma and Louise.

Meaningful social change rarely turns on a single conflict or set of public figures. Yet in this instance, TV is correct in following its instinct to define issues in terms of personalities, for the fate of Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court--if hardly that of feminism--may indeed now hinge on his public-image battle with Hill, the law professor whose accusations of sexual harassment have turned her into a reluctant instant celebrity.

It’s a battle destined to be fought in front of the TV cameras when the Senate Judiciary Committee returns to consider Hill’s allegations against Thomas. The experts are predicting that this will be an occasion when the dirt really hits the fan.

Yet this is not the only such combat occurring in TV’s court of mixed messages, where the line between sexual impropriety and illegality is as blurred as it probably is in the minds of many Americans.

On Monday--ironically at the same time Hill was on CNN making her initial TV appearance to explain herself and deflect countercharges that she was point woman in a political move to sabotage Thomas’ nomination--Rosie Jones and Robin Young were defending themselves on “The Maury Povich Show.”

A former Miss Black America, Jones is suing former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson for $100 million for allegedly grabbing her buttocks at the opening of an Indianapolis convention, where his appearance also led to a separate rape charge for which he’s been indicted. Meanwhile, actress-model Young is suing Tyson for $2 million, charging that he grabbed her in a “sexually suggestive” way at a nightclub.

But the star of the Povich show (airing here on KCBS) was not Jones or Young, but Temperance Lance, an actress and self-described “activist” who shrilly defended Tyson while accusing Jones and Young of being liars and gold diggers. If anyone wore the mantle of opportunism, however, it was Lance herself, who was just as noisy and combative here as when confronting Jones in an earlier appearance on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”

Just what qualified this woman to speak on behalf of Tyson? On the King show, she claimed to have dated Tyson once. She was on TV, however, solely because she was good TV, provoking her targets on the Povich show into a shouting match and jumping up and threatening to walk out in what appeared to be feigned anger. Even though Povich protested her behavior, you had the impression that he was really loving and feeding off it.

The truthfulness of the charges against Tyson remains to be seen. What was revealing, though, was how many of Povich’s studio audience and especially King’s call-in audience appeared to support Lance, and how the amounts of damages Jones and Young were asking from Tyson became the central issue instead of the charges.

Do these people reflect the real America? Or is public opinion more accurately reflected by those who appear to have risen up and demanded that Hill’s charges against Thomas be given a thorough hearing?

Meanwhile, it’s ironic also that this focus on men’s coarse, sexually harassing behavior toward women has come at a time when the prevailing fashion code is for women to wear miniskirts or microminis that rivet the male eye to the female thigh.

Now, this has nothing at all to do with Thomas and Hill, whose wardrobe seems to match the reported conservatism of her politics. And even if she wore hot pants, her rights under the law wouldn’t change.

But it has everything to do with the way men view women, and everything to do with mixed messages.

On the one hand, women want to be viewed in the workplace as, in a sense, androgynous. On the other hand, you don’t have to be a grubby old man to notice that the hemlines they frequently wear on TV are provocative.

On NBC’s “One on One With John Tesh” Wednesday, actress Teri Garr was interviewed in a dress that extended maybe six inches below her waist. On a recent episode of ABC’s “Anything but Love,” Jamie Lee Curtis wore a micromini in the newsroom that could have stopped the presses. And after a somber interview with a male political figure recently, the camera pulled back to show the female TV interviewer wearing a dress whose hemline ended only halfway down her thigh.

They’re doing this just to be fashionable or because male designers give them no options today? Oh please. You’ve spent too much time in the sun. No wonder even some men who respect women as equals in every way are confused.

With the sun possibly setting on Thomas’ nomination, nonetheless, words become at least as symbolic and revealing as the above pictures. The Thomas-Hill matter was the topic of a Tuesday panel discussion on CNN whose participants included columnist Jack Anderson and Harriet Woods, president of the National Women’s Political Caucus.

“You mean if a man asks a girl out at the water cooler it’s sexual harassment?” Anderson asked.

“Well, I wouldn’t call her a girl,” Woods replied.

The fires burn.