I read today that Prince's Super Bowl halftime show was a little phallic for some critics' taste. Now I didn't watch the Super Bowl itself, but was hanging on YouTube first thing Monday a.m. in order to watch the man's performance.

Apparently some viewers felt that the shadow-behind-the-sheet portion rendered his guitar looking like Dirk Diggler's best asset. Hey, at least he didn't show his man-nipple.

The uncomfortable truth is that the old Baptist joke is right: the problem with sex is that it could lead to dancing, i.e., all music is sexual at some level, and all sex - excepting perhaps the clumsiest white sex - could be set to music, because it's all based on rhythm and until James Dobson decides that driving a stake through the heart in order to stop the jungle rhythm of the heartbeat is the greatest act of godliness - well, until then there's gonna be music that people will want to f*** to. And Prince uses this to his performance advantage.

Fred Astaire said it well: Dancing is a vertical interpretation of a horizontal intention.

The guitar is the phallic instrument. Also, the saxophone. The didgeridoo. The clarinet your seventh-grade daughter plays in band. And Prince knows how to stroke and point and thrust his guitar better than anyone since Jimi Hendrix.

And because Prince could make the crowd - our daughters included - think lascivious thoughts at a rainy football game makes some critics feel compelled to complain. I have yet to read any criticisms from WOMEN, mind you. The men might not know, but the little girls understand.

I suspect that the phallus police are just jealous. How can a little guy like Prince - 5'2" and steroid-free - be so damn talented and sexy that the big dudes holding a Budweiser in each hand suddenly question their own masculinity? I think that's a question that the couch potatoes have to ask themselves.

NTD