Among the many questions to which I have never received a satisfactory answer is why a woman’s chest is considered to be something “dirty” that must be hidden while a man’s chest is not given a second thought — well, at least not in this particular context.

Shirtless men appear in G-rated films, while a certain number of frames worth of topless women will get a film an “R” rating, even if said film contains only the “PG” level of sex, violence, profanity or other “adult” subject matter.

At the beach or pool, we expect to see topless men, but if a woman removes the little triangles covering her “dirtypillows,” she will be arrested for indecent exposure to the sound of much tsk tsking about traumatizing children and how such displays of immodesty are contributing to society’s long ride to hell that old proverbial handbasket.

What sort of attitude is this in the land of the free and the home of the brave in the the 21st century? In other parts of the world, the female breast appears without fanfare on the beaches and near the pools and even in some clever television commercials. But here in America, the people get up in arms over a “wardrobe malfunction” which caused a part of a breast to be exposed on television for a few seconds.

Of course the really annoying aspect of all of this is not so much the Puritanism as it is the hypocrisy — case in point: that infamous “wardrobe malfunction” was one of the most often recoreded and viewed events in TiVO history — of a good number of Americans who will publicly denounce such “smut,” while enjoying it immensely in private.

So, here I am, with my drawer full of little triangles, wondering why I still have to wear them to the beach in order to keep myself out of jail.