All of the subjects claimed to totally dig gender equality and feel "victimized by rhetoric demonizing pornography," according to the press release. Simon Louis Lajeunesse, the Université de Montréal researcher behind the study, which is still in its infancy embryonic phase, reports: "Pornography hasn't changed their perception of women or their relationship which they all want as harmonious and fulfilling as possible," he said. "Those who could not live out their fantasy in real life with their partner simply set aside the fantasy. The fantasy is broken in the real world and men don't want their partner to look like a porn star."

I don't doubt that most young men do not want their partner to look like a porn star and that X-rated flicks can be part of an innocuous -- and even healthy -- private fantasy life. It's just -- this isn't science. You don't determine the impact of porn by merely asking a small sampling of typical dudes whether it changed their view of women. If it's all they have known (since the age of 10 for most of the study participants), how the heck are they supposed to evaluate how it changed their view of women? I'm a female and feminist member of this porned generation and I'm only just beginning to pick apart how smut shaped my views on all things related to sex. I know one thing: It had an impact. I don't know how small or how big an impact, but I can't deny that such a major cultural influence had ... some influence.

These conversations are so often shouted across the chasm between political extremes -- whether it's an argument by Ariel Levy (for the record, a writer I greatly admire) that mine is a generation of "female chauvinist pigs" or a proclamation that porn is, meh, no big deal, so get over it. Neither position represents the whole truth, and half-baked research like this won't get us any closer.

The search for a "female Viagra" makes clear that there is no easy fix -- but writer Daniel Bergner points out that there isn't an easy definition of the condition, either. The current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (D.S.M.) defines it as "persistently or recurrently deficient (or absent) sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity." These are women who can become physically aroused but mentally just aren't going there all that often. An essential element of the diagnosis is that a patient is "distressed" by these symptoms, he explains. In other words, it's only a problem if you think it's a problem. An interesting paradox arises: Does the act of defining hypoactive sexual desire disorder play a part in creating and reinforcing the condition?

Critics argue that the "distress stems not from within the individual but from the infliction of societal standards, from the culture’s disapproval and aversion." To make this point, Bergner invokes "icons in heat" like "the model with swollen red lips gazing out with molten need from the billboard." From the libidinous lass selling cologne, aftershave, or [insert any product under the sun] to the exaggerated moans of porno flicks, we fetishize enthusiastic female availability. On a day-to-day basis, that degree of spontaneous chest-heaving -- not to mention multiple orgasms at the touch of a (cough) button --  isn't realistic, generally. By those standards, most women would feel "deficient."

There's an important distinction to make here, though: We fetishize eager female availability, but not self-directed female desire. When we talk about sex "icons in heat," we're specifically talking about women who are prone and receptive. Culturally, truly libidinous women are not only treated as unsexy, they're considered abnormal. They're fucking scary! Maybe for some women it isn't that they feel a lack of sexual desire, per se, but an absence of a particular type of desire they think they're supposed to have. (Nowhere in the article is masturbation mentioned, by the way.)

Lori Brotto is the 34-year-old psychologist tasked with defining hypoactive sexual desire disorder for the next D.S.M., and she's aware of the sticky issues. She has proposed adding the symptom of not being "receptive to a partner’s attempts to initiate" to the criteria for diagnosis -- which only raises the additional issue of the role a woman's partner plays. Brotto would also like to do away with the word "desire" altogether: She's consciously moving away from a "male" model for sexual desire toward her colleague Rosemary Basson's "Sexual Response Cycle," which characterizes female desire as coming after arousal. Basson argues that women often commit to the idea of sex and display a "willingness to be receptive" to their partners' advances. Only after foreplay gets a woman aroused does she become hungry with desire, says Basson.

The "male" and "female" model seem pretty interchangeable to me. In a long-term sexual relationship people often take turns being receptive to each other's advances. Sometimes you've had a crap day at the office and you're just not into it -- until your lovah touches you just like so. That isn't a strictly male or female thing -- it's just a human thing. On a similar note, both sexes are under pressure to perform in very different ways, and when there is all that play-acting going on, it's no surprise that some are left unsatisfied -- not to mention unenthusiastic about a repeat performance.

The truth is female sexuality isn't easily categorized into "normal" and "abnormal" -- it's variable and idiosyncratic. There is no definitive all-purpose map; the best we've got is a caricature. As is often the case with such things, many women will look at this sketch and exclaim: That doesn't look like me at all!

Unsurprisingly, Douglas McGeorge, past president of the the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, told the BBC he thinks the concern is "over the top. Essentially this is just about removing a bit of loose flesh, leaving behind an elegant-looking labia with minimum scarring." Oh, well if that's all it is! I mean, obviously, if you want to be taken seriously at a job interview or get a decent table at a hot restaurant, you can't just show up with inelegant-looking labia. Adds McGeorge, "Lads' mags are looked at by girlfriends, and make them think more about the way they look. We live in times where we are much more open about our bodies -- and changing them -- and labioplasty is simply a part of this."  By "this," you mean "a painfully sexist culture that encourages debilitating body shame," right? Because otherwise, you might want to think that one through a little more.

On the other hand, there are women out there who really do need genital reconstruction. Amanda Hess at The Sexist shares the stories of two of those, women who didn't just have "more than enough labia" but serious post-pregnancy complications described by one as "My vagina is falling out of my body!" (Actually, it was her uterus. Also, for the record, that woman had labioplasty while she was at it and reports that it "was brutal. All of 'Dr. 90210''s patients who say it doesn't hurt are lying. I'd rather get my teeth pulled out than do that again!") But after all that suffering, both women describe their new equipment as A) equivalent to a virginal young woman's and B) therefore incredibly desirable. Allison Henry, who nearly bled to death more than once: "We just had a cocktail party to celebrate me feeling healthy. And I do have the vagina of a 13-year-old virgin, with a perfect labia, as a bonus." MomLogic guest blogger Sara: "So now I'm on the mend, with a teenage-sized vagina ... The way things are at present, no man's apparatus, even of the Fisher Price variety, could ever fit down there. Still, I'll try to write a follow up report when it happens. That is, if my husband and I ever leave the bedroom again!"

To recap: These two women suffered severe trauma to their reproductive organs, but the big silver lining is that they now have vaginas reminiscent of girls too young to consent to sex. It's what every man wants, without the pesky statutory rape charges -- lucky hubbies! Sara even jokes (I hope) that her husband bought her cheerleader costumes to go with the new model. Look, I'm all for making inappropriate wisecracks about horrifying things, and any woman who has ever had to say or even think the words "my vagina is falling out of my body"  has earned the right to be seriously inappropriate,  but what the hell? Neither of you squicked yourself out, writing that? Hess puts it best: "I'm happy for you. I am. You went through some bad shit, and now your vagina is back inside your body, and I think that's wonderful. But I never, ever, ever, ever again want to have to think about a grown woman having a 'the vagina of a 13-year-old virgin.' That's some messed up heebie-jeebies shit."

And it's the same messed-up shit that drives perfectly healthy women to pay someone to cut into their genitals for purely aesthetic reasons. Oh wait, I'm sorry, did I say "messed-up shit"? I meant openness about our bodies. Now that our culture is much less repressive, we've learned important information that used to be hidden away -- like that pubic hair is disgusting (on a woman), which means we must wax it all off to avoid offending our sexual partners, after which we might just discover our vulvas are kind of funny-looking and thus require surgery to give us the "elegant labia" of ... children. Such progress we've made! Why, if people had never broken the silence, we'd all still be walking around assuming adult-looking vaginas are perfectly fine! Instead, we've completely eliminated all that old-fashioned shame about our bodies and backward thinking about sexuality. Whew. 

Flogging her book "Still Standing" on the "Today" show this morning, Prejean brushed off the term "sex tape." She described the footage as "me by myself, there was no one else with me. I was not having sex," failing to consider that "me by myself" qualifies as sex for roughly 80 percent of the Internet population.

The news of Prejean's one-woman show comes the same week Jennifer Lopez hit her ex-husband with a fat $10 million lawsuit over his attempts to peddle footage from their 1997 honeymoon and Colin Farrell's antics with a Playboy model have resurfaced. In a world where Fred Durst has a sex tape, is there anybody left who doesn't?

Kids, back in the day, a sex tape used to mean something. There was expensive equipment to set up and hide, cassettes to load, storyboards to be drawn. It was a big freaking deal when Rob Lowe had a romp with underage girls or Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee enjoyed connubial bliss (if that's what you call it). Sex in front of a camera was still considered something porn stars did, and breaking that barrier was exciting -- and blurry.

Today, anybody can just aim the phone at the interesting bits and upload the results before they even finish. So much for our happy ending. 

The celebrity sex tape -- as well as its close kin, the much forwarded naked snapshot -- started veering toward that fabled shark tank in June of 2004. That's when "1 Night in Paris" made its Web debut. Unlike other stars who'd been caught knocking boots, Paris Hilton didn't adopt a demeanor of scandalized abasement when her video emerged. Instead, she shrugged it off with the same bored lack of interest she'd displayed during her coital performance. Her career didn't suffer. Her fame didn't abate. On the contrary -- it skyrocketed.

In the ensuing years, compromising footage of the quasi-famous has become as commonplace as conspiracy theorists at a town meeting. And amazingly, it's proved an effective way of giving Hollywood has-beens a jolt of, well, exposure. Are you a Dirty Sanchez-dispensing, former "Saved by the Bell" cast member? Are you a man whose most famous role is playing a character called "McSteamy"? Smoke a little weed, head for the hot tub and don't forget to invite a friend. (Sweeps week crossovers await! ) Is your last name "Kardashian"? That and a little raw footage can get you your own perfume line. Excuse me, I have to go roll my eyes and yawn in an exaggerated manner now.

With each new revelation of a dirty video lurking in a famous closet, the shock at the genre itself dies a little more. Had honeymoon movies of J.Lo emerged when she married her ex in 1997, it might have been a cause célèbre. Now? Big whoop. The explicit sex tape and the compromising photo are no longer potential career ruiners, nor are they the hallmark of a wild, anything-goes character -- not when so many of us, famous and not, have been there and done that. It's a fair assumption that if there aren't explicit images of you floating around somewhere, you may not have a sex life. Or a phone.

While it's easy to enjoy a moment of delectable schadenfreude watching right-wing sweetheart Carrie Prejean, who says in her new memoir that "We should earn respect and admiration for our hearts, not for showing skin to look sexy," tell Meredith Vieira about "the biggest mistake of my life," it shouldn't really come as any surprise. Prejean may be a smug, backward-thinking idiot, but she's not the whore of Babylon. So when Prejean kvetched on the "Today" show that "nothing is private," she may have sounded whiny -- but she wasn't wrong. Some people learn it in more public and embarrassing ways than others, of course (like having your mom and some lawyers watch the footage you made for her boyfriend). But what Prejean did isn't different from anything many, many people are doing in their homes and hotels and dorms right this minute, alone or with a friend or two. Deviants, perverts, married couples, teenagers and "normal, churchgoing" folks like Carrie Prejean -- we are all sexual beings, and we don't need to send our images to the Fotomat for processing anymore. Stuff's bound to happen. Prejean wanted to be Miss USA. Turns out she's everywoman after all.

Know who else has responded to the study just as feverishly? A religious leader on campus, whose blood pressure has risen for an entirely different reason: He's pissed. Father Joe Vetter, director of the Duke Catholic Center, said: "I think it can give the impression that the university is endorsing behavior that I don't think the university should endorse." God forbid the university allow its researchers to issue an open call for women -- that's right, adult women -- who are interested in attending a sex toy party to help further the study of sex. No one's being forced into a sex den filled with vibrating silicone and rubber. Women are volunteering to check out some naughty novelty items and, both before and after, speak openly with researchers about their attitudes toward sex.

The school's vice president for public affairs, Michael Schoenfeld, bless him, has issued an utterly rational response to Vetter's public outrage: "Not all research will make people comfortable," he said. "In fact, there's a lot of things, there are a lot of questions, there are a lot of issues that are studied at a university that make people uncomfortable. That's how we get an understanding of things like ethics [and] behavior." Science -- not always politically correct!

Vetter is under the impression, although he doesn't say why and researchers have remained mum on the topic, that the study is driven by a "concern about promiscuity on campus." He seems to believe that the study is looking at sex toys as an alternative to partnered sex. If you think a man like Vetter would celebrate such an goal, you're wrong. While he is "concerned about promiscuity," he's more concerned that "these students are in this developmental phase," he told The News & Observer. "I don't think it's a good developmental practice to just tell somebody to just sit around and masturbate. I don't think that promotes relationships."

I'm 99.9 percent sure the researchers aren't asking young women to "just sit around and masturbate." But you gotta love the apocalyptic fear of sexuality on display here; the assumption seems to be that self-pleasuring women will lock themselves in their rooms with no more motivation to relate to the opposite sex.