Among the many afflictions distorting our current politics, one has gone unrecognized: We're in the midst of a zero-sum struggle over which gender gets to own the hero's journey, that ancient story formulation in which the hero leaves home, faces monsters and temptations and returns to reclaim his kingdom and his woman from usurpers. The fight is about more than a story; whoever owns the myth owns the culture. It's hard to get more foundational than Homer.

Sitting in a local Cinemark midway through a film that hardly veers from the high-testosterone man-on-a-quest Homeric template, one is struck by an odd sensation. Indeed, the same version featuring a female protagonist who journeys by car, boat, spaceship, bicycle, snowmobile and Rollerblades to a foreign land fraught with perils was seen in the same theater just three years prior. Both feature a beach battle with flotillas of bowspritted landing ships and an equine theme, though the horse figure stranded on one beach is fashioned of pink plastic sand.

While the boys brawl, the girls regain the kingdom; matriarchy is restored. To a topologist's eye, the films are the same objects with different shapes, one suffused in Crayola hues with wit and higher opening weekend gross. The showdown over the hero's narrative is corroding our political and public life, and disfiguring our government.

All the way to the top, a recent president sees himself embarked on a Homeric quest, tossed from his rightful throne and now wreaking vengeance on those who betrayed him. His rival as he sought to recover the crown was a woman, and since Inauguration Day, the administration has been hellbent on reversing women's fortunes at every level. The battle is not found within the films themselves, but between competing claims to the ennobling elixir of the monomyth.