'DIVAS': TWO THONGS DON'T MAKE A RIGHT.

Byline: David Kronke TV Critic

``Reality TV'' reaches its sexual peak with ``G-String Divas,'' HBO's latest wallow in ``adult'' prurience. Produced and directed by Patti Kaplan, the brain - if that's the overriding organ at work - behind HBO's ``Real Sex,'' ``G-String Divas'' documents the lives of strippers at a Pennsylvania ``men's'' club.

The ``documentary'' series, which runs in 13 episodes, looks at the lives, the souls, but mainly the anatomy - explored in near-clinical detail - of women who are pneumatically enhanced, both between their shoulders and between their ears. We're given endless tours of this club's ``Champagne Court,'' where the women drag johns - er, admirers - for lap dances that are hardly confined to the lap. Booze is charged by the half-hour there, and it's not cheap - $60 - and the dancers go for three or four times that. But they work hard for the money.

In two screened episodes, one of which airs tonight and the other on Sept. 2, we meet Ginger and Chrissy, women who are both straightforwardly honest about their work and yet guileless about how manipulative they truly are.

Ginger is a barracuda of a performer with a Villanova diploma and an acute sense of what it takes to coerce a man into coughing up some serious money into her purse. ``Give me a little present,'' she bosses Carl, the most pathetic man to grace a TV screen since ``Big Brother's'' Ian O'Malley, and certainly the most deluded - he discusses his relationship with Ginger by suggesting, utterly misguidedly, love might be in the air. ``I was really appreciating the money he was giving me and he was thinking I was taking advantage of him,'' Ginger grouses after someone else estimates Carl has dropped a cool $800 on her in three hours.

Chrissy, on the other hand, is in a lesbian relationship, which neither adds to nor detracts from her ability to arouse her male clientele. She even recruits another dancer to perform a lap dance for her girlfriend, who edits a feminist newspaper, and says the dance ``felt like a massage on my soul.''

Do you get to see it? Indeed you do. But be warned: Chrissy's gal has dumped her by that episode's end, so maybe it wasn't that great after all.

Of her job, Chrissy enthuses, ``It's almost like a real office,'' as she wears nothing but a black bra and panties. She also disingenuously insists that her clients are more interested in just chatting in the Champagne Court than anything else - real therapists don't even cost that much (nor, in many cases, do hookers), but they don't come with a bottomless glass of booze, either - but alas, the show doesn't devote its energies to covering that aspect of her job as assiduously as it does the main part of her job description.

``G-String Divas'' is fascinating in that train-wreck kind of way, but here's the question: Would anyone care what these women have to say were their observations not interspersed with footage of their nether-regions being thrust into guys' faces? (Here's the answer: Get serious.) If it's a shot of the women chattering while driving their car, it's a sure sign you can feel free to zone out momentarily.

But, hey, when the gals aren't jabbering, the show is at least incredibly true to what it's about, with plenty of in-your-face anatomy - none of that endlessly tedious titillation with no follow-through that ``Big Brother'' continues to foist upon viewers. (And, hey, wasn't it a little creepy when ``Big Brother'' tried to squeeze a dance out of Jordan before she got bounced? As reported, Jordan's ouster was a fait accompli as soon as she was ``marked for banishment,'' so BB clearly realized that it was now or never in terms of eking out one last little humiliation from America's favorite exotic dancer.)

The women come off fairly sympathetically here, even if there are classier jobs available. But you really have to wonder what if anything was going on in the minds of the guys on hand here, who allowed themselves to be depicted - before television cameras clearly in operation - as abject losers who have to pay strippers for a little female attention. What are their friends going to tell them? - ``No, dude, honest, you only looked kinda pathetic.''

Still, it all feels a little manufactured to me - it's a nice, justice-is-served myth that these women enjoy wielding their power over men, but for many women, it's a myth all the same. I lived next door to a stripper back in the '80s, and it was nothing like TV; her fingernails, for example, over which she pasted chunks of exotic red plastic, were gnawed to their nubs.

She would complain to me bitterly of her objectification at the club, and how hard it was to both dance and pretend to enjoy it, which her bosses were always on her about - a complaint that seems to bother none of the women on this series a whit. She groused in particular that the married club owner had given her roommate - whom, by the way, he was dating - the cushy and, relatively speaking, far more lucrative and far less immodest job of waitress.

This melodrama went on for a few weeks; her roomie even drove their boss's Porsche home until his wife found out and the waitress rebelled against his dumping her. Then, the next morning, the neighborhood awoke to find said Porsche uselessly up on blocks.

Show me a scene like that on ``G-String Divas'' and I'll start believing.

The facts

--The show: ``G-String Divas.''

--What: ``Reality'' series about strippers.

--The stars: Bunny, Angel, Chrissy, Jordan, Ginger, Cashmere, Summer, Silver.

--Where: 11 tonight; hereafter, 11 p.m. Thursdays.

--When: HBO.

--Our rating: Two stars

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HBO presents an intimate series focusing on the lives of erotic dancers in a strip club in ``G-String Divas,'' debuting tonight.