It was encouraging to read about the extremely low numbers of women who answered Playboy magazine's recent cattle call for models to grace their upcoming October issue featuring "the girls of the Big Ten."

I would, however, like to address my comments to those few dozen women who did honor aging photographer-lothario David Chan's request to sashay over to the Atherton Hilton for a quick Polaroid and interview.

I assume these women who expressed an interest to pose (nude or otherwise) for the popular men's magazine are entirely comfortable with continuing to support male fantasy, and have no plans throughout their lives to expect equal pay, treatment, health care benefits or other equal rights, since they seem willing to surrender the image of their bodies for a paltry 500 bucks.

Do these women expect to go from the shiny pages of Playboy into the executive offices of corporations and other enterprises and be viewed with unbiased equality?

As long as some women continue to provide their faces and bodies for this purpose -- or for that matter modeling, pornography's kid sister -- they are hurting the cause for equality of women everywhere, and are no better than demi-whore Christy Brinkley, a woman whose only known contribution to the public good is a cheerful willingness to shampoo her hair on television.

Wouldn't Penn State's inauguration into the Big Ten be best celebrated by the complete absence of our women students from the pages of Playboy next October?