-- Video and performance artist Amber Hawk Swanson got a Realdoll made to look just like her, and then “married” it in Las Vegas. She and the doll wore matching gowns. Now she’s putting Amber Doll to work,

in a project exploring the interplay between fantasy and reality in sexual relationships. The finished work, which is still untitled, will contrast stills of intimate “partnership” scenes with video reenactments of rape scenes from movies such as Irreversible and The Accused.

-- As the leader of Destiny’s Child and now on her own, Beyoncé presents herself as a hard-working, self-guided, amorous woman amid men who can be undependable but irresistible. Destiny’s Child sometimes aimed for songs of female solidarity like “Independent Woman” and “Survivor” — part of a Destiny’s Child medley during the set — while Beyoncé on her own usually keeps things one to one, addressing her man with passion or anger. Onstage she had an all-woman band, and the show used men only as dancers: decorative beefcake for her primarily female audience.

inconceivable!

Why, look. It’s an article about author and feminist Rebecca Walker in the Times Sunday Styles section. Walker has a new book coming out on Thursday called Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence. It’s even reviewed, alongside Peggy Orenstein’s similarly mommy-themed book, in this weekend’s Book Review. So what is it about this piece that makes it right for the Styles section? Is it the detailed description of Walker's estrangement from her famous mother, Alice Walker? Maybe. But more importantly, we learn that:

Ms. Walker and her partner, a Buddhist teacher named Glen (whose last name does not appear in the book), have been living in Maui, where [her son] Tenzin plays amid the lush landscape and is pushed about in a Maclaren stroller.

Oooh, I want a Maclaren stroller. And a trip to Hawaii.

In her review, Alexandra Jacobs calls Baby Love “a solipsistic open diary of gestation,” and prefers Orenstein’s account of trying to conceive by any means necessary. “Orenstein’s interrogation of her own profiteering pregnancy retinue comes across as a welcome, even necessary exposé,” Jacobs writes. “Walker’s merely a paean to pampering.” They both sound pretty excruciating to me. Jacobs’ lede is a gem:

One of the pill’s most pernicious side effects is bloat in the publishing industry. For most of history, having a baby — or heck, a dozen — has simply been women’s natural lot, not something they had time or inclination to examine at any length. Now the “journey to motherhood,” as it is often called, is something to be feared, postponed, mulled and eventually exalted in endless memoirs, or “mom-oirs” (though plenty of dads are writing them too).

But what luck! If certain insurance companies have anything to say about it, women will have a hard time getting those birth control pills (while men enjoy coverage for their Viagra). Less birth control and more babies might weaken people's interest in writing about their journeys to parenthood.

-- 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.

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.