Yesterday, I appeared on WNYC's "Soundcheck Smackdown" to debate the merits of the floundering 2010 Lilith Fair tour. I took the "it kinda sucks!" position; Marisa Meltzer presented the opposite viewpoint. I'm a big fan of Meltzer's book, Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution In Music, so it was fun. Bonus: at the end of the segment, Meltzer calls out a dude listener for his "patriarchal" dismissal of our youth. The online comments from listeners are interesting, too: Everything from "is there something a little creepy about women of necessity having a commonality, simply based on gender determinism?" to "Younger women have a tendency to be entirely embarrassed of anything explicitly labeled 'feminist' or 'women only' . . . that territory [is] just shy of absolute taboo." Listen here.

* Early Tuesday morning, a 23-year-old Capitol Hill woman was stabbed 17 times by an intruder after she fought off his sexual assault. She is expected to survive.

* Eliminating tired, gender-specific table manners is bad business for some New York restaurants, reports the New York Times:

restaurant owners, managers and servers say that in ways that are often laughably clichéd, men and women—viewed as groups, not as individuals—don’t gravitate toward the same dishes, communicate the same priorities or seek the same emotional payoff from dinner out. All of that is taken into consideration when menus are written, rooms are painted and thermostats set. . . . “The truth . . . is that there is a difference. And in the service industry, it’s your job to acknowledge it, predict it.”

Aren't there any restaurants, though, that find bucking the staid gender trends actually pleases the customer? Surely, there must be some hipster vegan pho cafe-cum-nightclub that's benefiting from the switcheroo.

* This week, Tim Dickinson for Rolling Stone detailed John McCain's lifelong bone/hate relationship with the ladies. Earlier, Ana Marie Cox for Elle investigated why so many women helped run his campaign, anyway.

* Upcoming: WNYC tackles sperm.

* Chuck Klosterman predicts the remainder of the 21st century. It doesn't look good:

NOV. 6, 2012: Obama defeats the incumbent McCain in a landslide. However, the most curious aspect of the election is the candidacy of Digger True, a grassroots "blogucrat" who runs as an independent, solely using the Internet. True does not express any concrete views and does not participate in debates. Instead, he produces online supercuts of patriotic aphorisms, set to the music of Collective Soul. To the surprise of many in the mainstream media, True gets 3 percent of the popular vote. Blogucrat disciples begin petition drives advocating the elimination of copyright laws and the option of voting over the Web. [via Esquire]

* Finally, Belgian cock celebs [via Gawker].

Photo by Podknox.