'I'M REALLY NERVOUS tonight, because my kid is here, and he's watching!" Simone de la Getto gulps as she takes the stage, decked out in a gauzy, pastel pink nightgown and high heels. This confession draws a big "awwwwwww" from the audience, which de la Getto is about to strip for. Hey, she's hot, and she's vulnerable!

In the Hollywood imagination, a sexy mom resorts to stripping only as a last-ditch effort to support her adorable spawn. She takes it all off in some sleazy peep show in front of a bunch of lecherous men. Think Demi Moore in Striptease.

In the Ladyfest Bay Area 2002 version, a sexy mom strips because she wants to, before a standing-room-only crowd of howling ladies at the San Francisco Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center. Bonus: mom proudly brings her kid to the show to see her perform.

"I am the only black dyke burlesque performer twirling her pasties for heterosexuals in this city!" de la Getto crows to cheers from the hardly het crowd. She muses aloud, "When do I stop being exotified?" But she drops that question, bragging that she's perfected the art of striptease, and proceeds to show how it's done, one titillating bra strap at a time.

That's the Ladyfest Variety Show for you – just a knowing wink of political savvy to salt your T&A. With more cancan than oratory, it makes being a revolutionary, feminist, firebrand superhero, well, fun. The opening-night festivities for Ladyfest, the five-day festival of art by "self-identified women," kick off with a red-fishnetted, blond-wigged "faux queen" – that's a woman dressed up in drag as a woman – named Windy Plains lip-synching the Loretta Lynn song "Fist City." It's a little ditty about threatening to pummel another lady if that tramp gets it on with your man.

Hey, how many feminist events open with a country-and-western paean to a catfight? "It's not the kind of attitude that we're supposed to have about other ladies," drawls the cheeky Windy Plains, mocking the good-girl feminist script. Then she orders the crowd to chant "Lady! Lady! Lady!" while "I Am Woman" plays in the background and she reels off a litany of legendary ladies: "Lady Di, Lady Chatterley, ladybug, ladyfinger, Lady Macbeth! It's Ladyfest!"

Ladyfest has indie street cred to spare. And the event has been put together in nonhierarchical, DIY fashion by groups of community-based volunteers to showcase the talents of "past, present, and future women." For opening night, even the bathrooms at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center have been radicalized, with homemade construction-paper signs reading "bathroom" covering the M and F on the doors.

But, mercifully, the organizers have done all the earnest processing behind the scenes, so we just get to be entertained watching the likes of the Cantankerous Lollies, a cabaret act, shake their fringe. Appearing behind a screen, in giant silhouette, the scantily clad noir vixens pose with handguns, tantalizing with a few well-timed wiggles. "She's wrecked more homes with lust's delight than most women could have with dynamite" is one Lolly's intro.

Still, at Ladyfest, politics has a way of peekabooing out, if only in the most highly ironic way. For instance, there's the vexing problem of sweet young things being exploited by their relatives for cash. "Grandma sells my panties on eBay!" coos one cutesy-poo keyboard player named Kitten, decked out in a child molester's dream of Pippi Longstocking-like red-and-white-striped knee-high stockings. Lamenting the fact that Grandma has sold her out as a "panty-whore," she's fretful that she's gotten nothing out of the deal except for a few shopping sprees at Target to buy more underwear.

Then there's the problem of sexual frustration. "Two to three times a week is all I ask for. Now that doesn't make me a whore!" the lead singer of Cotton Candy croons, accompanied by a cellist and an accordionist.

And let's not forget about women's food issues. Comedian Heather Gold declares that food images are straight women's porn. Her new magazine concept: Pantry, showcasing centerfolds of spread-eagled bags of Doritos, oozing with calories. Each month there's a special caught-in-the-act feature on a woman discovered munching on her favorite high-fat snack.

All of those pundits who periodically publish feminism-is-dead essays should be force-fed digital video of all five days of the Bay Area's Ladyfest. They might learn something.

Here feminism has come to mean making your gender your own – literally. "Gender isn't something that you are assigned at birth," Kyla Schuller, 24, one of the organizers, informs me about the concept of "gender fluidity." "It's something you can choose."

But whatever your gender – fluid or fixed, assigned or chosen – there's a few things that everyone can agree on. In the elevator, one of the few men at the festival grouses to another guy: "Breaking up over e-mail is a bad idea." His friend sighs: "I told him he is fucking tacky for doing that."