Everyone hears about the college student paying her way through school by stripping, bullshit.

Actually I had two friends who did just this when I was in college.

I can't recommend it. But my friends were misguided, not trashy. One was practically a virgin - had only ever had sex with one boyfriend, her fiance. It was his idea that she strip, ostensibly because he thought she was "too uptight" but I think in reality because he wanted the money. Too bad for him, she had tiny boobs and stripped only a couple of times before noticing she had paid more for the shoes she was wearing than she was getting in tips. Yes, it's funny, although it was painful to her.

The other was a very nice girl who had been sexually abused by her father and had some serious boundary issues. This girl had "victim" written large on her forehead; she drew predators like rotten meat draws flies. But she was a sweet girl, at least when she started the job. The people who worked there got her involved with drugs. Before long she was spending her entire paycheck on drugs not just for herself but for her brand new loser friends. She was 18 years old, which I think means some allowances should be made for her total lack of judgment.

Whoever described the tip situation at these places is correct. The girls don't get paid, not even minimum wage; they work for tips only. Some, like my poor boobless friend, dance all night and go home with no money. Some, like my other friend, make hundreds of dollars a night, which is surely enough money to tempt any 18 year old girl. To say they are surrounded by bad influences is an understatement. Let's not kid each other about this: the people who run these places are involved with organized crime. They run drugs, prostitution rings, in our city they are also involved with the sale of illegal weapons. People get shot in the parking lots on a regular basis.

On the first night my friend (the small-breasted one) danced, at 4 am the cops woke her up by pounding on her door. "Are you Alexis?" they demanded. The girls are all required to take stage names, and she had picked Alexis. Woozy from being woken up in the middle of the night, she said, "No, I'm Christine..." (Both names have been changed.) The cops demanded to search her apartment, without a warrant. When she said they couldn't, they said they would come back with a warrant, and it would be much worse for her. So she let them in. They found nothing, since this was a girl who didn't even drink, so they left, with crude comments and a promise to be back later.

Don't suppose it occurred to the cops that this was someone's daughter, wandering into the realm of dangerous people, on the cusp of ruining her life, in desperate need of someone to pull her back from the edge. Cops don't seem to see things that way. They divide people into bad and good, and the moment a young woman takes her clothes off for money, she's one of the bad people, not to be protected, but to be harassed. In the same vein, it appears that to many people, if a 17 year old girl gets drunk at a college party, she's no longer a good girl and it's okay to rape her.

On another note: while I'm not intending to endorse anything Ben has to say, I would like to point out that "Patriarchy" literally means "Rule by the Fathers." If that's not the sense in which you're using the word, it would be good to choose another word. It's not unreasonable for men to be offended at the implication that all bad things everywhere are the fault of men and men alone. There are many women who have a lot invested in the current power structure, its use and abuse.

I love Melfi. As our window into the world of the "good people," she never fails to demonstrate how fucked up good people can be.

Leaving Tony was all about her hurt feelings, thinking that he doesn't respect her profession enough. She's so brittle. And she's still in love with Tony.

And then there's Elliot, her therapist. You know, the one who's a sociopath! The one who takes gleeful delight in hurting her as much as possible. Only he does it by quoting studies and leveraging dinner parties and betraying patient confidences, instead of shooting people, so he gets to call himself one of the good guys.

I confess to looking up the study, and buying Robert Hare's book, as a result of watching the show. What strikes me is that by Hare's definition, Tony is not a sociopath. Sociopaths don't waste time trying to understand the meaning of life and their place in the universe. They don't have deep and meaningful relationships with their wives. They don't go on vision quests trying to understand the lives of the people they kill. Sociopaths don't attack others to alleviate feelings of shame; in fact, they seem immune to shame. Tony, far from being a sociopath with no connections to society and no interest in following its rules, is a member of a society very different from our own. He's deeply invested in maintaining the health of that society and enforcing its rules.

Tony's just a criminal, not a sociopath. Like the majority of criminals (and the majority of criminals aren't sociopaths) when he commits atrocities, it's clear his behavior is motivated by shame, not by boredom and lack of connection to other people. In fact, the past few episodes have made the theme of shame as a motivation explicit.