Beyoncé Knowles rocked the Super Bowl halftime show last night, and, pearls clenched firmly in fist, Kathryn Jean Lopez is on it, and the national cultural decline Ms. Knowles apparently represents:

I don’t want to linger on this, but last night’s Super Bowl half-time show was ridiculous — and gratuitously so. Watching Twitter, it was really no surprise that men made comments about stripper poles and putting dollar bills through their TV sets, was it? Why can’t we have a national entertainment moment that does not include a mother gyrating in a black teddy? The priceless moment was Destiny’s Child reuniting to ask that someone “put a ring on it.” As I mentioned on Twitter last night, perhaps that case might be best made in another outfit, perhaps without the crotch grabbing. It seems quite disappointing that Michelle Obama would feel the need to tweet about how “proud” she is of Beyoncé. The woman is talented, has a beautiful voice, and could be a role model. And she is on some levels — on others she is an example of cultural surrender, rather than leadership.

I’d venture that there’s more dignity in Beyoncé’s marvelously controlled, rigorously choreographed performance than in Bruce Springsteen’s sloppy slide and camera crotch-bump of a few years back. And as much as her very much post-baby body was on display, Beyoncé’s performance was less allusively sexual than Prince’s silhouetted guitar. In fact, almost everything about Beyoncé’s off-stage life pretty much seems to meet Lopez’s criteria, from her long courtship with Jay-Z, to the child the two of them had once they were firmly ensconced in wedlock. If I were Lopez, I might actually think about striking the Knowles-Carters a medal for defying the Hollywood trend of shotgun or infinitely-delayed post-baby weddings.

But all of this is beside the point. What Lopez appears to object to, and what overrides for her any other consideration of ways in which Beyoncé might be a role model—including her financial success and careful control of her image— is the sight of a woman living in and very much enjoying her body, without needing to secure anyone else’s approval or ensure anyone else’s enjoyment. One of the hallmarks of Beyoncé’s lyrics, both with Destiny’s Child, and as a solo artist, is that no one is entitled to access to her. “Move, groove, prove you can hang with me / By the looks I got you shook up and scared of me,” she sang in “Bootylicious,” with its famous chorus. She warned a loutish boyfriend “Don’t you ever for a second get to thinking you’re irreplaceable.” In “Countdown,” she describes a relationship of equals, where she’ll “Do whatever that it takes, he got a winner’s mind / Give it all to him, meet him at the finish line,” and where “Yup, I buy my own, if he deserve it, buy his shit too.” And in “Independent Women,” Beyoncé and Destiny’s Child warned women “If you’re gonna brag make sure it’s your money you flaunt / Depend on no one else to give you what you want.”

And I think that’s really what makes Lopez twitchy. In the 1994 script for Little Women, Robin Swicord wrote that “nothing provokes speculation more than the sight of a woman enjoying herself.” And in 2013, few things get conservatives twitchier than a woman who will take a ring from the right man—and in fact already has—but will do it because she wants it, not because she needs it.

The Super Bowl comes just once a year with its orgy of wings consumption, its highly-anticipated halftime show, the football, and the multi-million dollar ad spots. The latter are a fascinating exhibit of whatever America is thinking about gender—or what advertising executives think America is thinking about gender—at any given moment. And as is always the case, there were babes, beers, and Danica Patrick chipperly selling out the rest of her fellow women for a lot of GoDaddy’s money. But for once, it wasn’t all apocalyptically terrible. Here’s what the Super Bowl taught me about gender in 2013, from best to worst:

The Good:

1. Ladies? We’re just as capable of being passionate sports fans as men—and just as capable of being devious if we think we can snag our team an advantage. Bonus points for turning household chores into a tool of team loyalty:

2. Princesses can lead armies:

3. Real men play princess with their daughters rather than blowing them off to hang out with their bros—even if they need Doritos as incentives:

The Bad

1. Ladies: overly-attached to their mothers:

Yesterday, Travis reported on Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard’s prediction that in 30 years, the National Football League will die because making necessary changes to improve the safety of the game will produce a sport that no one wants to watch. I think both that scenario and the one that Travis himself lays out are not unrealistic. But it’s also worth remembering that the NFL’s life or death won’t happen in a closed surgical theater. There are people other than the players and owners, and in college, the athletics programs and fundraising departments, with a vested interest in keeping football alive and immensely popular.

Significant among those interests? Broadcast television and ESPN. In the week leading up to the Super Bowl, the League is touting the performance of football on television. 55 percent of the television broadcasts since September 1, 2010, that averaged at least 20 million viewers were of NFL football games, or 135 out of 247 broadcasts. The next-closest program? American Idol, with 39 broadcasts, followed by the London Olympics, with 18. The first scripted program on the list is NCIS, with 11 broadcasts that hit 20 million. There’s no wonder broadcast nets pay big for the games they air: Sunday Night Football is part of what’s helped NBC rebound from fourth place to first in the ratings.

Some of that’s an indication of the increasing weakness of broadcast television, which has had a tremendously difficult time launching scripted programming that finds an audience anywhere near that large, and which has seen the numbers on big reality programs, like Idol and Dancing With The Stars decline. But that weakness means the value of football is two-fold. Football broadcasts prop up television’s advertising revenue model. And they provide a potential launching platform for new programming. That’s one of the reasons the Super Bowl rotates from network to network every year: it’s such a critically important platform for showcasing existing programming to one of the largest audiences that assembles in front of the television anymore.

And that’s just on broadcast: football’s even more important to both cable networks and the cable business model. People who oppose cable bundling frequently complain about the price of sports channels, but access to lots and lots of football is one of the reasons sports make cable seem like a good deal for the more than 100 million American households who subscribe to it. The death of football through formal dismantlement or a rising disinterest and distaste would make bundled cable television seem less valuable.

Television, in other words, badly needs the NFL to stay healthy. What that means the industry can, and will, do remains an open question. But football and television’s futures are deeply intertwined, and at a time when the content television is creating for itself is having trouble finding an audience, those ties are tighter than ever.

Yesterday, I wrote a piece about how organizers in New Orleans were likely overstating the potential economic impact of the Super Bowl, which the city will host on Sunday, February 3. It’s easy to think that such an overstatement is no big problem — if cities get a boost from such events, what’s it matter if it is $40 million or $400 million? But it is a problem, because the studies into the benefits of hosting a major sporting event attracting a professional sports franchise are almost always used to justify substantial public investment into the construction or renovation of stadiums and arenas. And, as we’ve repeatedly examined here, those deals almost always turn out badly for the taxpayers who finance them.

Take New Orleans, a city whose taxpayers dumped $121 million into the renovations of the Superdome to keep the Saints in town after Hurricane Katrina. To be sure, the Superdome needed renovations after the storm just to be safely used. But less than a decade later, the financing scheme that was used to pour public money into the project is going wrong. Very wrong.

And it isn’t alone. Miami is selling taxpayers on stadium renovations by saying they are vital for future Super Bowls. Dallas already made such a sale. In cities across the country, new facilities are the impetus for getting big events, keeping professional teams, or attracting new teams. In almost every case, proponents wield an economic impact study to tout the benefits brought by a new facility and the professional sports franchise and mega-events it would attract or keep happy. In each of those cases, the estimate was almost surely overstated, especially when research shows that new arenas don’t boost overall growth of metropolitan areas, and that the presence of a sports franchise probably doesn’t either.

For any city with a stadium or arena, turning down an event like the Super Bowl would be absurd, if only because there is an impact on the surrounding economy, however large or small it is. The problem arises, though, when these studies are used to persuade the public into financing expensive stadiums and arenas that are not good investments and never will be.

Sports leagues and proponents of new stadiums use “these promises of riches to convince cities that the construction of a new…stadium at significant public expense is a profitable investment, especially if it includes the promise of a future” event like the Super Bowl, sports economist Victor Matheson wrote in one study of the problems with economic impact estimates. “[T]his creates ample reason to be skeptical of any claims made about the reported economic impact since the sponsors of the impact studies have a financial interest in results that show large economic benefits from the game.”

When those deals occur, they almost always go bad, as they have in Glendale, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and virtually everywhere else. And every time, cities that sell the myth of economic vitality are left with burgeoning debt, and the taxpayers who financed the projects end up facing higher taxes or cuts to programs on which they rely to service that debt.

The problem isn’t that impact estimates are overstated. It’s that they are often overstated for the explicit purpose of selling a bad product.

Beyonce is set to star in Clint Eastwood's remake of 'A Star Is Born.'

As a dedicated Beyonce fan, I’m excited to hear that she is apparently confirmed to headline the Super Bowl halftime show in February. It’s always a lot of fun to get to see performers roll out some of their most beloved material in an environment that gives them license for dramatic staging. But as much as I like Beyonce, and look forward to whether she can get a stadium of football fans grooving to “Single Ladies,” it’s not just her music that has me excited about Beyonce getting a chance to take that stage.

I’m frankly glad to see an African-American woman back on that stage as the headline performer (rather than Nicki Minaj’s guest stint) for the first time since Janet Jackson in 2004. I’ve always been disgusted by the way that performance, in which Justin Timberlake ripped off part of her costume, leaving her breast exposed, got reduced to a “wardrobe malfunction” and associated with Jackson, rather than with Timberlake’s actions. The image of her, shocked and covering herself up, with Timberlake beside her sporting a serious case of sexyface is upsetting and uncomfortable. In the years that followed, the Super Bowl defaulted to a heavy rotation of old, white dudes, though that didn’t exactly save the game from sexualized incidents like Bruce Springsteen’s camera crotch-bump. It took until 2011 for a woman to return to the halftime stage: Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas performed in a full-body Tron-inspired suit. She was followed the year after by Madonna, Nicki Minaj, and M.I.A. in cheerleader outfits with Cee-Lo Green present as, alternatively, a band-leader and in choir robes—hardly a figure to cause a disruption.

Now, nine years later, Beyonce’s being allowed on the halftime stage, not as part of a band, not as backup to a white woman whose sexualized antics are so familiar and tired that they’re amusing, but as her own fantastic, pop-culture dominating self. Hopefully they won’t saddle her with a stable of backup performers, unless her husband wants to drop by for a duet. And it would be nice if we could all recognize that network skittishness over the halftime show in the past decade is due to incidents that stem more from the actions of white guys than Janet Jackson.