At the end of an admirably neutral citation of my previous post here, Pennywit asks:

I just have one question. If we assume that the advertisement is sexist and that it appeals to the prurient interest, what should tbe the penalty for airing it?

As a practitioner of what might be called old media craft, I am not at all in favor of censorship. The hand-wringing brigade also known as President Bush's FCC has done our country and culture a disservice with its draconian fines over rather innocuous incidents involving the exposure of the female body.

If only they handed out such fines for the obscene body count in True Lies reruns. If only they didn't make vague threats of fines for any stations that would run Saving Private Ryan.

The issue is not censorship, or "penalty," or shutting anybody up. As far as I'm concerned, the network in question has every right to run whatever it deems appropriate. And feminists have every right to take offense at yet another sexist stereotype being perpetuated in popular media. And Kos has every right to call said feminists "sanctimonious."

If they -- we -- all don't have these rights, then who decides what crosses the line? The FCC? Senator Orrin Hatch? Sanctimonious film critic Michael Medved?

The real shame of "the Kos incident" is not that it happened, but rather the revealed bias held by so many self-proclaimed liberal men against women, especially feminists.

Ask a dozen feminists what "feminism" means, and you'll get a dozen different answers. But most of us would agree that, at its foundation, feminism is the radical idea that women are people. It's about basic equal rights -- equal protection under the law, for starters. (I'm no pollyanna when it comes to cultural attitudes and the power of "tradition.")

That most men don't really "get it" is not surprising. That they refuse to acknowledge its validity unless they, as men, "get it" is disheartening.

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