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What do men really want?

The evidence these days doesn't seem too hard to parse. Let's see. There's Maxime Bernier ... there's Nicolas Sarkozy ... there's Bret Michaels.

What? You haven't been following the romantic travails of American rocker Bret Michaels? They can be witnessed in almost pornographic detail on Rock of Love (CITY-TV; 9 p.m.) - just in case you were in any danger of thinking that Western civilization could be saved.

The show, now in its second season, is a reality matchmaking series in which Michaels invites two dozen "babes" into a Hollywood mansion for a series of contests that will help the 45-year-old entertainer select the perfect rock star girlfriend.

Apparently the main qualification, other than hair extensions and breast implants, is how well the candidate can straddle a striptease pole, if not her host. Michaels's idea of an icebreaker on the first episode this season was to ask all his newly arrived and scantily clad guests to take turns posing for his camera. He then praised the first woman to simply pull up her skimpy T-shirt and show "the goods" as a trailblazer in the tradition of Lewis and Clark.

And Michaels wonders why season one, whose winner rapidly dumped him for another man, produced lots of lust but no soulmate.

Maybe the guy should try a different approach: Perhaps he should get himself a country place where he can establish a polygamous cult in which young women are brainwashed into believing God demands they shack up with the old man and his other "wives."

Those community leaders in Eldorado, Tex., and Bountiful, B.C., could teach Michaels how to get religion working for him, because they certainly have it figured out. There's an element of sexual and social coercion in all the monotheistic religions, with their huge emphasis on female chastity. By enshrining marriage on the one hand and condemning premarital and extramarital sex on the other, Christianity, Islam and Judaism offer women male protection for their children in exchange for guaranteeing the father's biological paternity.

The polygamous fundamentalists take the proposition to grotesque but logical extremes, treating the women like brood hens while securing nubile partners for the men at the top of this nasty pecking order. (Where this leaves the younger men lower in the order is another, heartbreaking story.)

Find this analysis far-fetched? Return to Big Love (Showcase, 10 p.m.), HBO's brilliant critique of religion, sex and marriage in America. (This is season one, which is airing on Showcase starting tonight; no word yet on when Global might show us season two, which has already aired in the States. HBO has season three slated for January, 2009.)

The polygamous patriarch in Big Love is the apparently likeable Bill Henrickson. (Bill Paxton plays masterfully off audiences' tolerance levels in the role.) The owner of a Salt Lake City chain of home-improvement stores, Bill has returned to his fundamentalist roots and is now living undercover in the suburbs with his seven children and three wives - Barb, Nicki and Margene - settled in three adjoining houses.

The drama mainly revolves around domestic problems within this family and its continuing feud with the loopy commune where it originated.

The comedy, meanwhile, springs from all the practical problems and emotional considerations polygamy and especially undercover polygamy might entail if you looked at it from a suburban point of view. What should youngest wife Margene, already posing as a single mom, tell the nosy neighbours about her swelling belly? What should first and legal wife Barb tell her liberal - but perhaps not quite liberal enough - parents about her swelling marriage? And what can eldest son Ben do about his swelling feelings for pretty young mom number three?

Of course, this is not a show about polygamists any more than The Sopranos was a show about mobsters. This is a show about everybody that is both highly entertaining and merciless in its satire of the sexual double standards and false piety that plague North American life.

Check local listings.

John Doyle returns on June 30.