stilettos, steak and... oh, right. sex.

The Times noticed recently that pole dancing has made its way to suburban living rooms.

“Their entire world is reduced to caretaking, and this is sort of the opposite of that,” [said pole dancing instructor Johnna Cottam]. “It taps into this kind of exhibitionism, or show-womanship, among younger women who did not grow up with the gender politics of the sexual revolution.”

Okay. But why does sexual empowerment – or even just a general feeling of sexiness - have to come via pole dancing? It’s just unimaginative. The bigger problem is that people have come to associate sex work (and all its accessories) with the ultimate in sexiness. But sex workers are people for whom sex is a job. That’s not to say that sex work, or sex workers, aren’t or can’t be sexy, or that they don’t have sex lives outside what they do professionally (the key word there being “outside”). Let’s just remember why that pole is there: sex work is a performance. That look of ecstasy these women in New Jersey are straining to imitate, in their new lucite n’ marabou stilettos? It’s not real.

It’s not “exploitative,” per se, for women to get their heart rate up by doing a strip tease. But it does carry nasty echoes of the advice given by women’s magazines - not so long ago - about how you can get exercise by cleaning your house. Do you see men consciously trying to combine sex with working out?

Not so much. Apparently though, Frank Bruni likes to eat steak at the Penthouse Executive Club. But seriously, he came for the meat. The steak, that is. That’s why the article is illustrated by a photo of a woman onstage and on her knees. A slideshow entitled “Two Kinds of Flesh” is captioned with some frat boy gems. In the main article Bruni writes,

On this visit to Robert’s and on subsequent ones, I was derelict in my duty, failing to sample much of what the restaurant had to offer.

But the beef, I devoured — breathlessly, ecstatically....Its atmosphere, granted, isn’t for everyone, and it has other shortcomings as well. The men who actually wait on the tables are less attentive and personable than the women who hover around them (and, it should be noted, vanish quickly if shooed away). The prices of some dishes, pumped up to reflect the entertainment on hand, might also be called topless.

But no matter what your appetite for the saucy spectacle accessorizing these steaks, you’ll be turned on by the quality of the plated meat.