As one who just last weekend found herself in the throes of the mawkish self-pity brought on by an inexplicable sudden-onset stomach bug that arrived in tandem with the flu, I can fully appreciate the need to be rescued. In today’s world, it’s become anathema for women especially to admit they need to be taken care of from time to time. By a man. I don’t know why. The truth is, when you’re kneeling in front of a toilet bowl puking out your spleen, independent-mindedness quickly flies out the window because, contrary to prior fanciful feminist notions reached while you’re in the pink of health, you don’t feel mortified that the person kneeling beside you holding your hair back is dissecting with wonder and a low-grade revulsion the consistency (and colour!) of all you’re upchucking. No, in your weakened state you’re simply happy to have a strong pair of arms to help you back up on your feet and force-feed you chicken soup.

You take a lifeline from wherever it’s offered.

Which is why I suppose I didn’t do the usual exaggerated sigh and eye roll, a few days later, when I read that Kara DioGuardini was crediting a bikini for saving her life. To be fair, she said the bikini “probably saved her job”. Same difference, though. Noone knows more than me, after last weekend, that help comes often from the most unexpected places. So who was I to judge if a figure-baring outfit was one?

DioGuardini, who joined American Idol last season, was referring to her so-called career-defining moment, during last season’s ‘Idol’ finale, when she stripped down to a bikini and bared her “dream body”.

What happened was this, for the philistines among us who don’t watch American Idol (what in God’s name do you do with your time?): Okay, so DioGuardini did a duet with Katrina Darrell, also fondly known as ‘Bikini Girl’, a contestant who in earlier audition rounds had sought to cover up the fact that she couldn’t sing by instead wearing a bikini. DioGuardini had eviscerated her and both women clashed, provoking some skeevy ‘Idol’ producer to come up with the idea for both women to do a sort of singing face-off during the finale. But DioGuardini wasn’t simply to show off her far more superior singing skills; she was also to prove that she had the better physique. DioGuardini took the bait (“It… made people think, ‘She’s serious and industry, but also kooky as everyone else on this panel,'” she explained), on the season finale she rocked out and bared her almost-40-year-old bikini-clad body at the end of the song. The stunt paid off handsomely. The flagging ‘Idol’ was given a fillip, Bikini Girl looked like a fool and DioGuardini earned respect. She’s featured — in a bikini, no less — in the latest issue of Women’s Health, and plus she’s back on ‘Idol’! Considering the surprising turn everybody’s favourite boozehead third judge Paula Abdul’s career took, DioGuardini’s life could very well have been saved by a bikini.

The moral of the story: don’t look gift horses in the mouth when it comes to help.

It may well be that the fever got to my head and affected the part of my brain that would have previously been irked by the bikini story, but I found I understood DioGuardini’s actions. Well, at the very least, I didn’t condemn them, as I normally would have. Female objectification, you know, and all that. The world is a hard place for women over 25; hell, women over 20. That’s the truth. Kara DioGuardini, like it or not, in Hollywood is already considered past her prime. Deciding to appear on national television in an impy skimpy may be thought of as a backward move for women. But, realistically, what were her options? Women make choices about what it is they perceive they need to do to move their lives forward. These choices may not be popular or even what some of us deem enlightened, but do other women have the right to sit in judgement of them? Every once in a while, we have to climb down off that old feminist high horse and walk around in another woman’s shoes.

And, for that matter, a man’s.

There’s a sort of tempest brewing in a teacup at Tiger Woods’ staging his comeback to golf (after his few months’ time-out and atonement for sexual misconduct) at the Masters, which is hosted by the Augusta National Golf Club. Apparently, this club has the dubious distinction as being the “home of storied, institutionalised sexism”. The club, after all, just let in black people in as recently as 1990, seven years before Woods first won there. The one hurdle that still hamstrings them, however, is women. “We’re a private club. And private organisations are good. The Boy Scouts. The Girl Scouts. Junior League. Sororities. Fraternities,” its chairman Hootie Johnson said in a 2002 interview.

Yes, an all-male membership policy is discriminatory. And, in 2010, it’s just plain wrong.

The argument regarding Woods now is that taking part in the Masters at this discriminatory club is hypocritical for a man with Woods’ obvious predilections, with the, um, ladies, I mean. One woman hysterically opined, “That this is the place that Tiger Woods decides to come back with these apparently well-documented issues that he has with women is ironic at best, and, I guess you could say, a slap in the face to women at worst.”

Well, is it really? Woods, who has admitted to feeling a certain entitlement to having whatever woman he wanted, is suddenly to crouch in a circle of solidarity with women belting out a rousing rendition of Kumbaya? Woods, who will not refer to himself as black? Maybe a woman-free zone is just the place he needs to be to avoid temptation.

While we’re on the subject of slaps in the faces of women, why is it that these feminist shriekbots haven’t renounced Woods’ skanky mistresses who — in much the same manner that Monica Lewinsky kept the dress that, paradoxically, eventually screwed Bill Clinton — knowing full well he was a married man, retained the evidence that led to the Tiger’s spectacular demise and sprinted shamelessly to the media to capitalise on their 15 minutes of fame? How have they helped to advance women?

Perhaps men aren’t the worst enemies of the women’s movement.