There is little in the carnal realm that HBO, the network that brought us everything from “Real Sex” to “Sex and the City,” has left untouched. As the New York Times noted, it’s now given us “Game of Thrones’” historically accurate twincest story line, “Boardwalk Empire’s” sex between a similar-in-age mother-son pair, and “Bored to Death’s” unwitting romance between the byproducts of the same anonymous sperm donor. Unlike these fictional story lines, the “incest stunt” video has inspired actual outrage – as opposed to horrified titillation – precisely because it’s real. The Minnesota high school that hosted the event made headlines everywhere from ABC News to the Daily Mail, and the school’s principal had to issue an international apology.

It could be a total coincidence that these examples have all coincided: Given the preponderance of incest tales throughout history, it’s inevitable that these story lines will occasionally overlap. Writers in need of creative inspiration – maybe especially harried TV writers — will turn to classic areas of drama, and the incest theme goes as far back as the Bible. (The latest season of “Dexter” was explicitly built around biblical references, actually.) It’s no coincidence that all four incest-happy shows air on premium cable channels that have the freedom to fully exploit both sex and gore for shock value. In fact, they are expected to perpetually push the boundaries of adult drama — and “nothing trumps incest,” says James B. Twitchell, author of “Forbidden Partners: The Incest Taboo in Modern Culture.” “For reasons that are complex and psycho-biological the human is electrified by [it],” he says in an email. “If you want someone not to hit the remote control clicker, show a hint of incest.”

It’s happened in the past that incest tales have appeared to be having a moment. Behold this excerpt from a 1997 Times feature:

If a dozen movies, television dramas and memoirs are any indication, incest, one of humanity’s last taboos, is taboo no longer. Incest is the plat du jour in the 90′s marketplace, the sudden Zeitgeist zapping a jaded American audience. What’s more, the new permutations make this societal crime seem almost ordinary.

Reports of the taboo’s death continue to be greatly exaggerated. The recent spate of incest plotlines inspired an article by Jace Lacob in the Daily Beast declaring that these shows “break the incest taboo,” but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, these fictional imaginings reinforce the taboo by playing on our supreme squeamishness toward the idea of incest. That’s how these stories typically work — except in the case of a certain subset of erotic fan fiction, of which Lacob super-earnestly writes, “In a world where victims of incest can’t come forward to accuse their abusers for fear of their safety or of not being believed or of being humiliated, it’s disconcerting that a group of fans would willingly choose to project incest fantasies on fictional characters.” What he calls “disconcerting,” I call Human Sexuality 101. Yes, we tend to eroticize taboos, especially in our fantasy lives — yawn.

None of this is to say that the recent incest trend is irrelevant to our current social climate. Mary Jean Corbett, author of “Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest From Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf,” writes in an email, “Incest tropes always test the bounds of what’s ‘natural,’ and in a time where there’s a fairly strong effort to legitimate and/or delegitimate different forms of sexuality, there may be some other symbolic or cultural work that incest … now does,” Corbett says. She adds: “I do tend to connect incest plots in general to fear of difference, desire for sameness, and a conservative investment in the familiar/familial.”

Whatever the reason for the recent uptick in incest tales, it’s clear that the “horror of incest,” as Freud called it, still endures — and so too does our desire to confront it; we are at once drawn to it and repulsed by it. Note that these shows toy with a very limited range of incestuous relationships — except for one relationship between a mother-son pair separated by only 13 years, these fictional romances are between siblings. Nancy Fischer, a sociology professor and author of the journal article “Oedipus Wrecked? The Moral Boundaries of Incest,” importantly emphasizes, “Sibling incest isn’t that common and when it occurs, it’s more likely to be an older, bullying brother with a younger, powerless sibling.” Similarly, Robin J. Wilson, a clinical psychologist and president of the Florida Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, notes that these TV examples are “not your typical father-daughter incest we usually see in forensic settings” and adds that sibling incest is “perhaps, more socially palatable, if you will, but still racy enough for sweeps.” It’s just the right amount of horror to keep us interested — kind of like a serial killer protagonist who only kills bad guys.

His message — which builds on that of his Ph.D. advisor, Eric Anderson, author of “Inclusive Masculinity: The Changing Nature of Masculinities” — flies in the face of a spate of horrifying stories stateside of bullied gay teens committing suicide, but McCormack says the U.S. is a decade behind the U.K. on this particular front. That said, he also believes that recent attention paid to gay teen suicides doesn’t accurately reflect the reality of homophobia in America today, or how much progress has been made: “We need to look beyond the worst-case examples to see what is happening in the majority of schools,” McCormack writes. ” We do no-one any favors if we only fight prejudice that is, for some, yesterday’s battle.”

Salon spoke to McCormack by phone from his office at Brunel University in West London about the disappearance of the insult “that’s so gay” — across the pond, at least — and why the U.S. still lags behind.

How has homophobia changed over the past couple decades in the U.K.?

In the past, homophobia has been hugely significant. Being gay was criminalized up until 1967, so it’s only in the past 45 years where it’s been possible to be openly gay. In the ’80s and ’90s, when I was growing up, there was Section 28, which prevented teachers from talking about homosexuality; they didn’t feel able to combat homophobia in schools.

It used to be in the ’80s that there was “homohysteria,” which is the fear of being socially perceived as gay. What boys needed to do was to make sure they weren’t seen as gay. It was kind of this game of tag where boys would deploy homophobia competitively because the person perceived as gay would be the person who was bullied and marginalized. What better way to prove that you’re not gay than by being homophobic yourself?

But you’ve found that that’s changed dramatically.

Only in one of the three schools I studied did I hear of any form of homophobic language, and that was heard twice by two different kids. Apart from that, homophobic language wasn’t used.

Why this dramatic change over a short period of time?

The gay rights movement has been very successful, even just in terms of gay visibility. When people see famous gay people, people whom they like who turn out to be gay, that has a huge impact. People are bigoted about people they don’t know; when you get to know gay people, the homophobia drops off.

Another key area of change is the Internet. The Internet has meant that closeted kids have the ability to make friends, to be more confident, to come out earlier. Social networking sites like Facebook ask you your sexual orientation, you click whether you’re male or female, and then you click whether you’re interested in men or women. When I was at school, that question wasn’t even asked — you were straight, or if you weren’t, you were pitied.

Part of the reason it’s spiraled so quickly is that as homophobia decreased, boys could kind of hug each other a little bit or say to their best mate that they loved them, and then they could kind of cough and talk about girls. Then they realized that actually it wasn’t disgusting or repulsive, and so that undid some of their homophobia a little bit more. It’s a virtuous circle.

What about those other letters in LGBT? How are things for lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in the U.K.?

I did focus on heterosexual people, really; the book is primarily about masculinity. So, it’s hard to say, but there’s been research out there saying that gay kids are the ones who have the best experience dealing with these issues.

In the U.S., we’ve had a terrible spate of stories about gay teens committing suicides. Is the situation that different in the U.K.?

There are two different issues here. The first is that the spate of suicides has become the media narrative; maybe it was guilt from not covering it 20 years ago. While [these stories are] terrible, and they show that homophobia is still out there, they aren’t evidence of increased homophobia.

The other thing I would say is that America is a country of polarities. The U.S. is further behind but things are changing; homophobia isn’t socially acceptable in the way that it used to be.

Why do you think the U.S. is so behind on this front?

It’s an interesting question. I think what the U.S. had in a much bigger way than the U.K. was the evangelical Christian movement, which really did politicize it. They used it as a wedge issue to get money to exert influence. AIDS also had a bigger impact in the United States; I don’t mean in terms of numbers of deaths but in terms of the stigma that AIDS is a gay disease.

One of the interesting things about the U.S. is that you now have over 5,000 gay-straight alliances, and we really don’t have them in the same way in the U.K. At some schools in the U.S., you’ve got active, powerful gay-straight alliances with out and proud gay kids, and then you’ve got other schools where that doesn’t happen and there’s quite a bit of homophobia. So there’s that issue again of there being polarities.

When would you say that homophobia peaked, culturally speaking?

It was pretty much 1987, 1988. It was the time of the AIDS epidemic. Before then, gays were considered the perverts, the people we didn’t know, and AIDS brought the recognition that it was the man you worked with that died of AIDS, it was Mark Hudson, it could be anyone. That’s when homo-hysteria really kicked in.

You argue in the book that in some cases, we’re fighting “yesterday’s battles.” Can you give an example?

Like the issue of [the phrase] “that’s so gay,” actually not all kids hear that as homophobic, while most adults do. There’s this big push saying that we’ve got to combat [such language] — well, I fully agree that it’s heteronormative, it promotes straightness in some ways, but it’s not the battle we should be fighting. We’re at the stage where most progressive people, particularly in the U.K., need to push much more for talking about different families in schools, recognizing gay history, that kind of thing. The battle we should be fighting is about sex education, looking at some of these issues more openly, more broadly.

The question of why the money shot has since then, ahem, exploded in popularity is more complicated. The most obvious explanation is one of pure mechanics. “It has to do with the real physiology of orgasm and ejaculation,” says Lisa Jean Moore, author of “Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid.” “The way that male orgasm is external, as opposed to female orgasm, which is internal, it sort of lends itself well to cinematic capture.”

In terms of evolutionary biology, the money shot also triggers sexual competition. Ogi Ogas, author of “A Billion Wicked Thoughts,” a book that explores human sexuality through popular porn genres, says, “The penis itself is a sperm competition cue, unconsciously triggering arousal designed to motivate a man to have more vigorous sex with a woman than the man who just finished,” he says, drawing on theories in evolutionary psychology about sexual competition. (For example, one study showed that heterosexual men produced more potent ejaculate when masturbating to images of two men having sex with a woman, compared to porny shots of three women together.) “The sperm might also function as a sperm competition cue in the same manner,” he says.

It’s also simply the case that viewers desire proof that the pleasure they’re seeing performed on-screen is authentic — and in the age of Viagra, an erection itself isn’t convincing enough. “The money shot actually implies that what we are seeing is real,” says Cindy Patton, a professor of sociology, anthropology and women’s studies at Simon Fraser University.

The irony is that such proof actually requires suspension of disbelief, because “the male pornographic film performer must withdraw from any tactile connection with the genitals or mouth of the woman so that the ‘spending’ of his ejaculate is visible,” writes Williams. “Within convention, viewers are asked to believe that the sexual performers within the film want to shift from a tactile to a visual pleasure at the crucial moment of the male’s orgasm.”

In recent years, in a bizarre sleight of … penis, some “pornographic videos, and particularly the cover photographs that entice one to buy, feature partially concealed artificial yet very realistic phalluses that shoot decidedly unrealistic quantities of artificial semen when squeezed,” writes Michael Thomas Carroll in “Popular modernity in America: experience, technology, mythohistory.” He explains, “This desire to provide the ‘evidence’ of male sexual pleasure has given way to ‘natural magic’ and illusory spectatorship.”

Some cultural commentators have paradoxically argued that the money shot is the result of the relative invisibility of the typical female orgasm. “The problem of an equally irrefutable and visible proof of female orgasm, at a physiological level, both leads to the convention whereby male orgasm stands in for female orgasm and to attempts to convey female orgasm by more indirect means,” argues Bill Nichols in “Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary.”

Williams writes in “Hard Core,” “While undeniably spectacular, the money shot is also hopelessly specular; it can only reflect back to the male gaze that purports to want knowledge of the woman’s pleasure the man’s own climax.” She calls the cum shot “a poor substitute for the knowledge of female wonders that the genre as a whole still seeks.”

Some would rather explain this gender divide in terms of sexism. In heterosexual cum-shot porn, Carroll argues, chauvinism is evident in the “domination of the standing male/kneeling woman stance that is one of the most popular forms of this image, but also in the implied degradation of the phallus ‘spitting’ on the woman’s face — that part of the body which is most closely associated with one’s individual dignity and personality.” (It’s worth noting that a similar dom-sub dynamic plays out in gay porn, too.)

In some but not all contexts, Moore sees the money shot as a way of “marking” a partner as “territory or property.” In a paper titled, “Cocktail parties: Fetishizing semen in pornography beyond bukkake,” she and co-author Juliana Weissbein wrote, “The most prominent type of [cum shot] video on X-Tube … was of disembodied males masturbating to ejaculation onto a still photo of a female,” they explain. “The women in these photographs, often difficult to see, are described variously as ex-girfriends or ex-wives, famous models or actresses. Ejaculating onto photos of a specific woman allows the man to claim her as his property.”

Perhaps most important is the impact of AIDs and HIV since that seminal moment in “Deep Throat” four decades ago. “In heterosexual contexts, women have avoided semen for a long time, partially to prevent pregnancy,” as well as various STDs, says Moore. But the AIDS and HIV crisis gave ejaculate an even greater “toxifying, disease-ridden” image. “Semen is something we’ve tried to sanitize and protect ourselves from in a prophylactic sense — we’re covering the body up, or covering the penis up, figuring out ways to avoid contact,” she says.

The funhouse mirror of sexuality often eroticizes that which we most fear and abhor, thus “a fantasy develops about somebody actually wanting [semen], and they want it so badly that they want to drink it and they want to slather it all over their bodies and they want you to wipe it all over their faces,” Moore says. “The messages that are so adverse and make semen to be this abject, disgusting substance have had this other effect of making male spectators want to live out the fantasy that women and men actually want it and are celebrating it.”

Carroll argues that it “is not merely a carnal fantasy; it is also an emotional one — a fantasy of ‘unconditional acceptance’ in which the female” — or male, presumably — “seems to say ‘I exist wholly for you. I will never reject you. You cannot disappoint me.”

A few years later, after a stint teaching sex ed at an after-school program, she started Boinkology, a site about sex and pop culture. That got her noticed by the folks at Fleshbot, which has always specialized in a mix of sexy content from both porn and mainstream entertainment (for example, a red-carpet shot of a celebrity with a see-through dress or a sex scene on “Weeds”). She quickly rose from a contributor to associate editor to editor in chief.

The recent split with Gawker was a result of the fact that “Fleshbot required all this special attention,” she says, because everyone from advertisers to banks are scared of being associated with an adult site. “They couldn’t devote the energy to optimizing it, and it wasn’t bringing in enough to justify the problems it was creating.” In an interview last year, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, who recently reported a record of 35.6 million unique visitors across all his Web properties, said Fleshbot accounted for only 5 percent of the company’s traffic.

So Denton put it up for sale. Alptraum can’t go into details because of “some nondisclosure stuff I signed,” but says, “Basically, they had a really short timeline on a sale, and there were interested people who just couldn’t make an offer in time. So it ended up going to me, basically.”

Now she’s the 29-year-old CEO of an adult site, and one of a growing number of women taking the helm of everything from porn production houses to sex toy companies. That said, the industry is still dominated by old white guys. But that’s slowly changing. Quentin Boyer, who has been in the industry since 1997, says “the shift in the ‘porn executive demographic’” began “in the late ’90s, when Internet-based companies began to assert themselves in the adult entertainment market.” Says Boyer, the public relations director for Pink Visual, a porn production company that advertises on Fleshbot and also happens to have a female CEO: “In my view, Lux is part of the wave of new talent that has arrived in the adult entertainment industry as a direct result of the industry’s ‘webification,’ if you will.”

Alptraum agrees. “I’m someone who’s kind of a Web native and who comes from a sex positive background of not necessarily embracing the dominant narrative of what’s sexy,” she says. “I’m kind of like the embodiment of what the Internet has done to porn.” By freeing up the means of production and giving direct access to niche audiences, the Web has empowered all sorts of people who don’t fit the typical porn mold to enter the business, and from all angles.

Women have slowly made progress outside the alt and Internet-based sectors of the industry too. “There are several video companies that have females in high-ranking positions,” says Mark Kernes, a senior editor at Adult Video News. For example, heavyweights Wicked Pictures, Vivid Entertainment and Digital Playground. Miller says, “Certainly the assumption from outside the business is that it’s male dominated, and that’s the majority still, but women have made a big impact in recent years.”

Much like Alptraum, Fleshbot is unusual within the industry. “They have tapped into a unique niche within the adult media and publishing world,” says Dan Miller, executive managing editor of XBIZ, an industry news source. “They’ve been able to dip their toes a little bit into both worlds.”

The site’s also unusual in terms of its “feminist and respectful ethos,” argues Alptraum. “It’s not vulgar, it’s not treating these performers in a degrading way,” she says. “We never shame anybody’s body because we believe that anybody who’s willing to put themselves forth as a sexual object is worth celebrating.”

But the biggest thing setting Fleshbot apart from other porn blogs is that it publishes straight and gay content side by side. “From a marketing perspective, that’s a real departure from the industrywide tendency to categorize and segregate content starting with sexual orientation as the first point of separation,” says Boyer. Instead, Alptraum sees the site as a collection of “anything that we feel could be hot.”

It’s a decidedly Internet-era mindset of plurality and pansexuality. “The reason why I’m able to run Fleshbot, and the reason why Fleshbot is in ascendance, is the same reason why alt porn became popular: the Internet is dramatically transforming the adult industry,” she says. “It’s not so much of a top-down dictation thing anymore.”

“I wish I knew.” That’s Barry Komisaruk’s matter-of-fact answer, and he’s the leading expert on the science behind the female orgasm.

His lab at Rutgers University was the first to produce a video of the brain during climax in women — just last November. “We’re in the embryonic stage of understanding,” he says. “It’s not even in its infancy.” That’s in large part because it’s tremendously difficult to get funding for sex research — but that’s a story for another day (and you can bet I will be telling it someday soon).

Komisaruk, whom I’ve interviewed before, and his team have made huge strides, but still, he says nobody fully understands the mechanism at work here. Just to give a sense of the range of scenarios, Komisaruk explains, “What about people who used to have orgasms but now they’re on antidepressants or antipsychotics and they no longer can have orgasms? The blockage could occur in a part of the brain that’s different from people who, say, have had a traumatic psychological event like sexual abuse and no longer can have an orgasm.” There is no one thing that makes it difficult, or impossible, for women to orgasm.

It’s not unusual for a new partner to come with a change in your orgasmic experience. Recently, a woman who had never orgasmed called Komisaruk and volunteered to do a brain scan for his research. “I set it up and then a couple days before the scan was scheduled, she called me up and said she just got a new boyfriend and she had her first orgasm,” he says. “So, bummer — for me, not for her!”

What’s most interesting in your case, is that your experience of orgasm even during masturbation changed profoundly and, it sounds like, without a dramatic adjustment in technique. “It seems like it’s more of a psychological factor,” he says. “If somebody can suddenly start having orgasms, there could be attitudinal changes. It seems more likely that it would be an attitudinal change rather than a physiological change.” There’s also the annoying irony of getting what you want when you stop trying.

An important part of what’s going on here is that by no longer preempting your orgasm with fake ones, you were able to begin experiencing legitimate climaxes with your partner. I asked Komisaruk if it’s possible that you experienced a snowball effect: The more orgasms you had, the easier it became to come in the first place. In my supreme scientific in-expertise, I suggested: Maybe she, like, burnt new neural pathways? He responded: “We don’t really know; it’s possible.”

You see, there are many possible explanations. What’s important is that you’ve got ahold of your orgasm. Enjoy it, treat it well and don’t let it go!

A big part of that is that the “romantic-industrial complex that nets billions of dollars from Valentine’s Day and weddings, and it needs you to ‘buy into’ outdated ideas of love and marriage,” she wrote in a recent Op-Ed for the Nation. “The more you express your love through candies, chocolates, diamonds, rentals and registries, the more the RIC makes!” (Indeed, it’s estimated that consumers will spend roughly $17.6 billion on cards, chocolates, flowers, jewelry and the like this Feb. 14.) But instead of just trashing V-Day — or VD (i.e., venereal disease) Day, as its biggest haters like to call it — she wants to honor “the different ways we engage in loving relationships.”

A less political alternative is one introduced by everyone’s favorite fictional mid-level bureaucrat, Leslie Knope of NBC’s “Parks and Recreation.” She celebrates “Galentine’s Day” every Feb. 13 by getting together with her lady friends for a brunch of her signature dish, whipped-cream with a side of waffle, to celebrate female friendship. Leslie doles out quirky gifts (sculptures of everyone’s spirit animal or mosaics of their faces made out of crushed diet soda cans, for example). She compares the celebration to Lilith Fair — “minus the angst and plus frittatas.”

Granted, Galentine’s Day started as a comedy punch line, but the concept was popular enough in the real world that this year NBC put together a guide on how to create your own Galentine’s Brunch. Bon Appetit even cooked up a special waffle recipe for the occasion. It’s also inspired DIY-ers to make Galentine’s Day e-cards and re-create some of Leslie’s more memorable gifts, like crochet flower pens.

Of course, “Parks and Recreation” didn’t invent the idea of single friends getting together on Valentine’s Day — that’s no doubt been around as long as the holiday itself — it just popularized a cute term for it. Let’s not forget the gender-inclusive Palentine’s Day, Singles Awareness Day or the concept of having a friendly “anti-valentine.” Greeting card companies are increasingly cashing in on anti-Valentine’s Day card for friends, including — gasp! — Hallmark itself.

A similarly heartwarming option is Quirkyalone Day, founded by Sasha Cagen, author of “Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics,” a book about people who “prefer being single to dating for the sake of being in a relationship.” She tells me, “I’m not against Valentine’s Day, but I have never been particularly inspired by it. The aim of International Quirkyalone Day is to offer a fresh alternative where you get to create your own day free of all cliches.” It’s an excuse to “celebrate yourself and your whole life,” she says, and that can manifest in a number of different ways: “take a long walk alone (leave behind your cell phone), buy yourself daisies, start a neglected creative project, buy yourself hot lingerie, get a massage, host a dinner party.”

Of course, not all Valentine’s Day alternatives are so charmingly earnest. Anti-V-Day events across the country call on bitter singles to bring a photo of their ex to put through a paper-shredder or pin to a dart board, or exact some other form of questionable revenge. And make no mistake, while it’s nowhere near a $16 billion industry, there is a market for Cupid-hating goods — from cards reading “Love stinks” to T-shirts featuring upside-down hearts to candy hearts with sayings like, “U left seat up” and “Dog is cuter.” The social network game Farmville even has virtual anti-Valentine’s Day items for purchase, like a barbed heart and a black flower. The truth is this isn’t anything new: Long before there were pithy e-cards, there were Victorian-era vinegar valentines, insulting cards sent to one’s enemies.

Why has the holiday generated such cynicism and, sometimes, downright hatred? Cagen says, “Valentine’s Day has this way of making people feel bad, whether they are single or in a relationship. If you are single, you feel left out. If you are dating or in a relationship, you feel pressure and expectation to have a romantic evening.” She’s all for “a pure celebration of love in all its forms,” but “the problem is when we narrow that definition of love to a romantic connection.” Cagen explains, “Almost 50 percent of American adults are single, so people are bound to feel left out. It’s sort of like a Thanksgiving that only 50 percent of the population feels invited to.”