The Pussycat Dolls are all about … feminism?

But “Pussycat Dolls Present” is about female empowerment, the show’s producers explained to a group of television writers and critics here in January. “Everything the Pussycat Dolls are is everything that I’ve developed myself into being,” said the rap star Lil’ Kim, who is a judge on the show and who served a prison sentence for lying to a federal grand jury about a shooting outside a radio station. For the uninitiated, the Pussycat Dolls are a female singing group whose six members slither through their music videos dressed like Barbie’s nasty cousins. In their best known song they ask the musical question: “Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was a freak like me?” Dismiss immediately whatever pornographic inferences such a performance might bring to mind, said McG, the music producer and film director who is an executive producer of “Pussycat Dolls Present.” The Dolls, McG said, are simply making a heartfelt inquiry: “It’s just like saying, ‘Don’t you wish your girlfriend could be free and comfortable in her own skin and do her own thing, like me?’ ”

Yes, McG, it’s exactly like that. And I have no doubt that anyone who thinks otherwise is deeply confused. I also suppose that your first movie, Charlie’s Angels, which starred Cameron Diaz, Lucy Liu, and Drew Barrymore in a variety of suggestive outfits, was also about female empowerment? And that its tagline, “Get Some Action,” was not remotely intended as innuendo, but merely as an instruction for women everywhere to take charge of their lives and seek the adventure they crave? It all makes sense now.