I have been very unimpressed with the chef competition shows because of how the women never seem to win. Unfortunately I don't remember all of the details of these examples, but they made my blood boil enough at the time that I can't resist posting. If you've TiVo'd Top Chef or The Next Iron Chef, you might want to look away.

1. Top Chef 3, the Le Cirque challenge with the sea bass. Hung went first. He was praised. Casey went second. She was praised higher. The guy even said "that's the one to beat". There were I think three other chefs left at this point. So who won that round? You'd think it would be Casey, right? Wrong. It was Hung. Excuse me? The guy specifically said that Casey's was the one to beat. Nothing ambiguous in that comment. Casey was robbed.

2. Also Top Chef 3, the elimination that left the 4 finalists. It was between Sara and Dale. Sara had an excellent well-balanced composition, but she had a couple of technical flaws. Dale had a boring, safe, dull, but more technically accurate meal. Who wins? Which is a chef more prized for? All through the competition they've been harping on creativity, and her technical flaws were minor, but was Sara chosen? No.

3. Finally, the Next Top Chef. I forget the names here (there's only been one episode). But it's down to the bottom two - a woman, who has the most experience of the entire group, and a man. Actually my problem here comes before this point... Based on the comments we heard, she should not have been in the bottom two. There were at least two others where the judge's comments sounded much worse than their comments about this woman's cooking. And yet, she is of course given the boot.

And I've only mentioned the blatantly obvious things. Not the "booting three women in a row" which has also occurred on Top Chef. Maybe the editing was just better in those episodes, to hide the misogyny, or maybe those really were the three weakest chefs that week. But, at least on the cooking competition shows, women are still getting the shaft.

I never pole-vaulted. I meant using the pommel horse or vault box to do flips, etc.

girls had lots and lots of way to get "fun and exercise" (Thank you Title IX and a good community park and rec department). Here's just what I can remember participating in over the course of my childhood:

ballet, tap, jazz, "theatre dance", gymnastics (including parallel bars even and uneven, and pole vaulting), soccer, softball, volley ball, tennis, swimming, ice skating, dodge ball, kick ball, cheer leading.

Other girls also played: field hockey, lacrosse, basket ball, track and field, golf and ice hockey. And I'm sure there were more.

Really, what void does pole dancing fill, other than sexualizing pre-pubescence?

Just kidding.

Actually the stripper pole conversation touches on what I think to be the major difficulty in the so-called pro-sex/anti-sex debate. At the same time people have to be responsible for their own decisions, they can never fully "own" those decisions. Sex is never "just" sex, as my local Hustler Hollywood boutique asserts. There is a massive complex of motivations and desires--not to mention a heteronomous logic, language and currency--in play in every social exchange.

On the one hand, we want to say that pole dancing is just a good way to get some excercise.

On the other hand, we have to admit we're not really talking about boys signing up, because it's sort of understood that pole dancing is tied into the sexualization specifically of girls. Moreover, we worry over how much the sexuality girls learn from places like pole dancing class blurs the boundaries of objectification.

Then we're a little disturbed by the ages of some of the girls in the class, because we're clued into the destabilizing effect fully sexualized preteens might have on society, and at some point we'd rather have clear and unquestioned boundaries for our kids, simply because they're not yet old enough to know better.

Finally, we might find ourselves anxiously wondering if our enlightened attitudes about sex haven't trickled down too far so that our 14 year old daughters and sons really get turned on stripping on a webcam for 50 year old pedophiles.

Liberals and libertarians can be a little hamstrung as parents by their assaults on paternalism.

1) Parental consent. If parents want to let their kids do something that is not illegal, well, I may not like, but I am not the parent. If parents do not consent to handing out BC pills because they already have a responsible method of talking issues out with their kids, I see no reason that the schools should be handing out BC pills OR condoms or non-teenagers.

2) I don't know what parental/kid pole dancing exercises look like. I understand that many women are getting poles installed in their homes. I am curious how you feel these poles should be discussed with their kids. Please help me out with that conversation. I suspect parental/kid pole dancing exercises are pretty tame. And unlike a jungle gym, they can be housed indoors and used throughout the year.

3) What is wrong with adults stripping? Why all the stripper hating going on? I thought we were all pro-sex feminists here and agreed that consenting adult behaviors were their own business.... I wish you folks would tag your comments so that we can tell with each one whether we are supposed to be pro-sex or anti-sex.

I am hopeful the school and society will just take over my kids since they won't consent to letting me be the parent and then they insist on doing things that I don't consent to.

Peg Bracken, unsung feminist heroine who wrote "The I Hate To Cook Book" and "The I Hate To Housekeep Book" died yesterday.

Ms. Bracken's books, however "camp" today, were major breakthroughs for the trapped housewives (like my mom) in the early 60's. They dared to say that housework and cooking (strangely enough, she didn't touch on child care, at least not that I know) need not be the be-all and end-all of a woman's existence. If you can find short-cuts to cleaning the carpet and making a tasty meal for your family, by all means do so! That frees up time for you to relax, socialize or maybe actually do something that YOU want to do! (And for a lot of ladies, that eventually meant "Get a job" and other pre-feminist acts of rebellion.)

In other words, there was a REASON for Ms. Bracken, Poppy Cannon, and other "can-opener cookery" advocates to rhapsodize about convenience foods and their place in the family's diet. Such recipes freed up the post-war wife to make use of her time elsewhere. However snobby we may feel about such an approach to eating today, we must give the Pegs of the world their "props" for contributing, however unwittingly, to the feminist movement of today.