The controversy began during the early morning hours of October 4, 1997, when two female Georgetown University students — members of a new conservative campus club called the Georgetown Women's Guild — slipped booklets under the doors of 800 freshmen women. The booklets were entitled "The Guide: A little beige book for today's Miss G."

The guidance the authors were offering, it turned out, was through minefields of misinformation.

"Warning!" wrote co-editor Dawn Scheirer in an article titled "A Lie A Day Keeps the Truth Away." "One in four college women will not be the victim of rape or attempted rape," as feminists routinely claim. "150,000 females do not die of anorexia each year." And despite what you may have heard, "women earn nearly 100% of men's pay."

In an article called "Your Body, Your Right to Know," The Guide warned about the serious health risks celebrated by many of today's freewheeling women's magazines — magazines like Cosmopolitan, which urge women to go ahead and bed down with men they barely know. And in a piece called "Take Back the Date," editor Bryanna Hocking urged women to stop the degrading practice of going to parties, getting drunk and then "hooking up" with male students. Instead, she writes, women should force men to take them on real, old-fashioned dates — and pay all the expenses.

Why did The Guide's creators think this colorful combination of advice and warnings necessary? It's because today's young women have been brainwashed by radical feminists who fight with "half-truths, misrepresentation, and outright lies" in order to convince women that they have to "band together (read: become feminists) to fight male aggression." The Guide's goal was to expose the lies and "promote female achievement by emphasizing individual responsibility, independent thinking and initiative to reach our potential," Scheirer and Hocking wrote.

The freshmen class — not to mention most of the rest of the Georgetown campus — read this irreverent assault on the we-are-all-victims crowd, and it wasn't long before the editors were ducking verbal brickbats.

"The Guide made me ill," sniffed the former president of Georgetown's Women's Empowerment League, Aimee Goreman, to the Georgetown Hoya.

"I think it is dangerous to disseminate this type of information on a college campus, especially Georgetown," huffed Yea Afolabi, a member of the Georgetown University Student Association.

Hocking's and Scheirer's roommates promptly denounced them. Georgetown professors condemned The Guide in their classes. Both of the campus newspapers viciously attacked it. And that was just the beginning.

The faculty advisor to the campus Women's Center accused The Guide of being "truly dangerous." Hocking and Scheirer just didn't understand, she explained, that "the patriarchal system we live under must be transformed in order to truly combat sexism."

The Georgetown University Student Association took the unusual step of sending letters to all resident assistants of freshmen women, claiming that "many facts and statistics within [The Guide] are controversial and questionable."

Resident assistants — without the requisite permission from the Dean of Student Life — passed out flyers to freshman girls criticizing The Guide and telling students that if they wanted the "real facts," they could find them at the campus women's center.

Within weeks of its publication, The Guide was gossip in newspapers and magazines all over the country, and its editors were interviewed by everyone from Barbara Walters to Mary Matalin.

The publicity has died down in recent months — but the whole controversy still begs the question: Just who is misleading whom? Who's really telling the truth — and who's manipulating women with "dangerous" and "questionable" lies — The Guide girls, or their critics?

For the answer, look at The Guide's assertion that radical feminists are radically wrong in claiming that a full quarter of all college women will be raped, an assertion first made by psychologist Mary Koss and Ms. Magazine. According to the 1995 Survey of Campus Law Enforcement Agencies, which gathers crime data on nearly 6600 college campuses, the figure is closer to one sexual assault per 10,000 students. The Guide quoted this survey, along with statistics from both the FBI and the U.S. Bureau of Justice, which back up the much-lower figure.

Even more significantly, in her book, Who Stole Feminism?, philosophy professor Christina Hoff Sommers took on the Ms. Magazine study, and found that 73 percent of Ms. Magazine's "rape victims" say they did not consider themselves to have been raped at all. In fact, 42 percent of them continued having sex with their "rapists."

Not only are huge numbers of college women apparently NOT being raped, they're also not dropping dead from eating disorders. While feminists like Gloria Steinem, Ann Landers and Naomi Wolfe claim a death toll of 150,000 a year, Scheirer says the true figure, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, was 67 deaths in 1988 (the most recent year for which figures were available.)

As tragic as those deaths are, sometimes a diet is just a diet.

And that favorite feminist canard about how women make only 74 cents for every dollar men make? That's nonsense, too. The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth Data "shows that among people ages twenty-seven to thirty-three who have never had a child, women's earnings are close to 98% of men's," Scheirer wrote.

Then there's The Guide's article on sexually transmitted diseases — one that appears to be as thoroughly researched as the others. Among other sobering facts, Georgetown women learned that:

— A sexually-transmitted disease called the human papilloma virus (HPV) "is responsible for 90% of the 5000 deaths caused by cervical cancer each year," according to the National Institutes of Health.

— Some of the 20 or so other STDs jumping from bed-to-bed may destroy a woman's chances of ever bearing a child.

And don't count on a condom to protect you, The Guide warned: According to a Rutgers University study, "infection rates for students with chlamydia were the same for those who used condoms as for those who did not."

A freewheeling, Cosmo Girl lifestyle, it seems, is not as safe, or as free, as we've been led to believe.

I would think it's good for college women to know these facts — that it would be a relief to know its far less likely that you'll be sexually assaulted — or succumb to anorexia nervosa — than you may have thought. So what was the campus cacophony about? If Hocking and Scheirer's information is accurate, then why did feminists flip out over this little beige booklet?

It's because Scheirer and Hocking had the audacity to challenge the campus feminist hegemony — and my dear, that's just not done.

Ricky Silberman, chairman of the board of the Independent Women's Forum (IWF) and former chairman for 11 years of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, put it bluntly: "When one has attained hegemony, as radical feminists have done on campuses, it is quite understandable that they don't want that hegemony in any way diminished."

Silberman is right. Feminists want to be the sole voice on women's issues and in determining what young women think. Any independent voice, particularly a voice that questions their basic assumptions, is going to be unwelcome.

On a deeper level, gender feminism is based on advancing a particular ideology, or worldview. All ideologies are obsessed with power — who has it, who doesn't. If that's the way you view the world, anything you do that will alter the balance of power — such as telling whoppers — makes perfect sense. The idea of truth as a factual representation takes a backseat to the political purposes you're trying to advance.

That's why it really doesn't matter to feminists if, for example, 150,000 women aren't really dying each year from eating disorders. Making this claim is an attempt to draw attention to what feminists view as our culture's unreasonable standards of beauty. They have a point — but their ideology is not buttressed by concerns about morality or what's right.

Astonishingly, radical feminists themselves acknowledge this. At a public forum at Georgetown to discuss The Guide, one woman told Hocking and Scheirer that statistics on subjects like date rape SHOULD be inflated in order to draw attention to the problem. "You mean, you'd report statistics, even if they are not true?" an astounded Scheirer asked. "Yes!" her opponents shouted.

As Scheirer later wrote, "the angry mob seemed more intent on crushing [our] fledgling group than seriously debating ideas."

If so, then their tactics are failing. The third edition of The Guide comes off the presses in just a few days, and the Georgetown class of 2003 will shortly find them tucked under their doors — ready to challenge their preconceptions, to encourage them to think for themselves and become "architects of their own destinies."

Disgruntled radical feminists might like nothing better than to beam Georgetown's Hocking and Scheirer to another galaxy, but women on other campuses are watching, listening — and imitating their efforts. For example, conservative women at Yale published their own version of The Guide last fall, called Portia, named for Shakespeare's witty and compassionate heroine. Conservative women at Smith College — where Georgetown's Guide had an underground circulation last year — will midwife their own guide this fall. And Amy Holmes, a policy analyst for the Independent Women's Forum, which helped subsidize The Guide, says she's received "floods of letters from women at the University of Virginia, Claremont McKenna, Columbia, Vanderbilt and Villanova who say, 'this [the radical feminist dominance on campus] is something that upsets us, and we want to change, too.'"

That dominance is already changing at Georgetown, thanks in part to the feminists themselves. Holmes says the Women's Center's reaction to The Guide "showed the rest of the campus just how totalitarian their tactics are, and that the center, with its insistence on using phony stats, is no place for any woman not willing to spout the party line."

Rickie Silberman, for one, is glad that the truth about feminist lies is finally leaking out. "The goal," she says, "is to bring common sense to campuses. To counter the nonsense that is perpetrated by the radical feminists is the most important thing we can be doing."

A former feminist activist agrees. "I'm glad to see young women taking responsibility for telling the truth," says author, Christianity Today columnist and National Public Radio commentator Frederica Mathewes-Green. Thirty years ago, Mathewes-Greene led the charge to reshape her own college's guidebook for women students into a more feminist mold. "Looking back, I can see how, in our zeal, we were not always careful about truth and accuracy," Mathewes-Green recalls. "We were almost gullible in our haste to believe anything that conformed with our worldview of how everything was set up to oppress women.

"I've always thought," Mathewes-Green reflects, "there was a human impulse towards honesty and accuracy, and I'm glad to see young women take this responsibility now and begin to put things right."

And if their efforts make young women think twice the next time they hear outrageous claims about how women are being victimized — so much the better.