-- Peggy Orenstein is teaching women to write Op-Eds.

Ms. Orenstein asked: Could every woman at the large rectangular table name one specific subject that she is an expert in and say why?

...Of the next four women who spoke, three started with a qualification or apology. "I'm really too young to be an expert in anything," said Caitlin Petre, 23.

"Let's stop," Ms. Orenstein said. "It happens in every single session I do with women, and it's never happened with men." Women tend to back away from "what we know and why we know it," she said.

And then…

"What I want to suggest to you," she continued, is that the personal and the public interests are not at odds, and "the belief that they are mutually exclusive has kept women out of power." Don't you want money, credibility, access to aid in your cause? she asked.

Cristina Page, a spokeswoman for Birth Control Watch in Washington, leaned forward. "I've never heard anyone say that before," she said. "What you've just said is so important. It's liberating."

-- Also liberating: having a vagina + playing a guitar.

That she's now a woman who "shreds" — the verb for super-fast, heavy metal-esque guitar playing — doesn't strike her as unusual, even though many still see rock guitar playing as an expression of male sexuality, and the guitar itself as phallic prop... "I'm conscious that I'm a woman playing the electric guitar relatively well, and that it's not that common," Ms. Stern said. "But — and this maybe sounds really cheesy — there's the personal relationship I have with the guitar which doesn't have to do with gender or anything like that. It's the thing that produces a creative side in me. I just see it in a totally separate way."

-- File this under Branding Disguised as Liberation: Piece of CAKE: Recipes for Female Pleasure (the red velvet-covered inanity that was published over a year ago and billed as a bible to women’s sexuality) came out in paperback last month. Gone are the plush covers and fancy transparent slipcover. The book has been re-titled The Hot Woman’s Handbook: The CAKE Guide to Female Sexual Pleasure and the cover now features a tried and true photo of a bra and pantied torso, with no head. But this chick's got her hand on her hip, so you know, she’s sassy.