"She wants to have her Kuchen and eat it too"

Lainthro (editor for the Meine Liebe fansubs) has posted a rather detailed and interesting analysis, over on the LiveJournal ML page, about the gender politics present in episode 8, and I think it and the ensuing discussion is definitely worth a read. In that discussion is also a link to previous pre-fansub analysis along these lines, which I had read back then, and was in the back of my head while timing out the dialouge.