One night, while sipping wine in my apartment, we started adding items to the list of lascivious things we wanted to do together:

A shopping spree at a sex shop.
A threesome with another woman.
Sex clubs.
Light S&M.
Role playing.
Orgasm control.

I didn’t even know what “orgasm control” was. It sounded frightening.

“Anything else?” I asked.

There was one other thing Sophia wanted on our compendium of carnal delights: an open relationship. Sophia, who was openly bisexual, was convinced monogamy wasn’t for her, even though she’d never tried polyamory herself.

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"It looks like you're proposing," she joked.

"Would you like me to?" he asked.

She laughed. "Yeah."

"Do you want a ring?"

"Yeah."

He went into the other room and came back with a diamond. He slid the family heirloom onto her finger before she even got up from the toilet. They're now happily married and it's a cherished story that they share "more frequently than is appropriate," she says.

After I wrote about my own non-traditional proposal last week, people started sharing their own stories, like the toilet engagement above, with me. I couldn't get enough, so I started asking around for more. I was delighted to find that my feminism -- and basic critical thinking skills -- hadn't entirely inured me to romance. These stories of pragmatism, awkwardness and foiled plans were more enchanting than any viral YouTube proposal -- at least according to my warped sensibility. The traditional male proposal may still hold strong, as I wrote last week, but that doesn't mean that people aren't going against the ring-in-the-champagne grain -- or at least embracing the sweetness of imperfection.

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Enforcing basic sexual boundaries in the workplace is one thing. Blaming sexual assault on pornography, which is what the MIM press release goes on to do, is another. It reads, "Research overwhelmingly demonstrates a link between pornography consumption and increased sexual violence." What that sentence suggests is that there is a demonstrated link between porn-watching and an increase in perpetration of sexual violence -- and that is patently untrue. The availability of Internet porn has been shown to be associated with a decrease in sex crimes.

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The video, unoriginally titled "Backdoor Teen Mom," helps to confirm Farrah Abraham's costar James Deen's claim that the scheme was to film the video in the style of a personal homemade sex tape and then pretend that it had been leaked against their will. (Shortly after filming it, he foiled that original plan by giving an honest answer to a reporter's probing question about the tape, which was being shopped around.) Deen is behind a hand-held camera for much of it; sometimes he sets it down down to catch the entire scene from a distance. Former "Teen Mom" star Abraham repeatedly calls him "baby" (actually, it's a grating whine of "baaayyybeeeee"), as though they're in an intimate relationship and not strangers filming a porno. At one point, she attempts to lead him up the stairs to the bedroom with, "Come on, boyfriend." She engages in baby talk -- "give me kisses," "come cuddle" -- that is creepily reminiscent of scenes of her interacting with her daughter on "Teen Mom." She even calls him "butthead" at one point.

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As a college senior with plans to attend dental school, I never imagined my life would end up this way. I figured I'd graduate college, take the summer to prep for the Dental Admission Test, get into schools, then begin my trek toward normal, civilized life. That's what everyone else was doing in the biology department.

But I had no idea of the turmoil that lay in store. I ended up at Victoria's Secret the same way most men end up on daytime talk shows: I got dumped by my girlfriend; I couldn't get a new girlfriend to save my life; and, to top it all off, I began growing breasts. I now believe my boobs were the result of eating too much soy, which has a high amount of estrogen in it, and has been known to cause such reactions in prepubescent girls. But at the time I didn't realize this as I was simply too busy freaking-the-hell-out. It's one thing, as a man, to feel like you don't understand women; it is another to feel like you're becoming one.

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The lyrics echoed in the background as he shouted about STDs and unplanned pregnancy from the pulpit. Cause I am waiting for you, praying for you darling, wait for me too, wait for me as I wait for you. One by one we each placed a ring on our fourth finger and made vows to an apparently bi-curious Jesus who took teenage husbands and wives by the dozen that night.

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There is no shortage of professed wisdom on getting through heartbreak: There are women's magazines, advice columnists, self-help books and, of course, the cliche Sunday brunch proclamations of "you deserve better." That's not to mention the prescriptions of a Katherine Heigl movie, a tub of ice cream and some "Jagged Little Pill" karaoke. And yet, enough people still find themselves in search of post-breakup help that Elliott now does breakup coaching full-time and has clients the world over. It was recently rumored, and totally unsubstantiated, that Katy Perry paid a high-priced breakup coach to get over her ex-husband Russell Brand.

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No, this is not the plot of another hot-for-teacher flick -- although here's hoping this journal begets its own porn parody. (I can picture it now: An orgiastic "peer-review process" and dialogue along the lines of, "I'll show you some intersextionality.) According to a recent call for papers, Porn Studies is "the first dedicated, international, peer-reviewed journal to critically explore those cultural products and services designated as pornographic and their cultural, economic, historical, institutional, legal and social contexts," with an emphasis on "sexuality, gender, race, class, age and ability."

The journal's editors, Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith, are looking for papers that examine "specifically sexual and explicit media forms, their connections to wider media landscapes and their links to the broader spheres of (sex) work across historical periods and national contexts." The journal won't be published until spring of 2014 -- because peer review takes time, ya'll -- but select articles will be published online as they're ready. From the first issue, you can expect discussions of everything from obscenity trials to Australian manga to "how we think of fantasy in relation to porn," Smith told me by phone.

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This is the gender reversal of what we're used to hearing: stories about women complaining of a headache or offering a simple, "Not tonight, honey." Just this week, the Wall Street Journal published a piece ostensibly about "differing expectations about sex" in relationships in general, but which fell back on the stereotype of the frigid wife who withholds sex. The piece presented only one real-life example of such a dynamic and, despite mentioning far, far down in the piece a study on desire that found no significant gender differences, the piece ran with the headline, "He Says 'More' and She Says 'No.'"

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The health impact is clear: As Human Rights Watch reported,"Police use of condoms as evidence of prostitution has the same effect everywhere: despite millions of dollars spent on promoting and distributing condoms as an effective method of HIV prevention, groups most at risk of infection ... are afraid to carry them and therefore engage in sex without protection as a result of police harassment." What's more, "Outreach workers and businesses are unable to distribute condoms freely and without fear of harassment as well."

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This is just one scene from several YouTube videos of Stenzel, the same speaker behind a recent controversy over abstinence-only education. After Stenzel gave a lecture at George Washington High School, 17-year-old Katelyn Campbell took to the national media to complain about being subjected to the activist's "slut-shaming" message. Campbell's bravery didn't stop there: As a result of exercising her right to free speech, her principal allegedly threatened to contact Wellesley College, where she had already been accepted, to complain about her "bad character" -- so, Campbell quickly lawyered up and filed an injunction against him. (Wellesley's official Twitter account soon sent out the following tweet: "Katelyn Campbell, #Wellesley is excited to welcome you this fall" -- and the Internet rejoiced at perhaps the only bit of sunny news this week.)

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When the waiter brought us our bottle of wine we filled our glasses to the brim, mused about the end of an era, and raised a toast: “To divorce!”

After a Mediterranean feast we headed over to her apartment nearby so I could finish up some work emails, and over some more wine flipped through our old wedding album, giggling at some of the cheesy photos from the reception. Conspicuously absent from our little album, which a federal bureaucrat had paged through some years back while scrutinizing us closely, were pictures from our honeymoon, a wild Saturday night spent at the Cubbyhole, a popular lesbian bar in the West Village where, incidentally, we also first decided to get married.

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Normally it'd be the type of all-sorts-of-exploitative piece I'd barely roll my eyes at before moving along -- but it's the advice she's offering in particular that deserves a second look, if only because it's so pedestrian, and so misguided.

Her teaching? Have lots of sex with your husband.

To Dakin's credit, she acknowledges that there are "obviously other factors" to infidelity, but she argues that, as the Sun paraphrases, it most often "simply comes down to not giving their men enough sex." She also falls back on some classic gender stereotypes: "Men are sexual creatures -- unlike a lot of women, they can separate the act of sex from love," she said. (I will take a moment here to give Dakin the benefit of the doubt: It's hard to know where her advice ends and the Sun's sensationalist editorializing begins; I've contacted her but have yet to hear back.)

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A man faking it? Morgentaler, an associate clinical professor of urology at Harvard Medical School, had never heard of such a thing. After he got over the puzzle of how a man could effectively pull off such a ... sleight of semen, he got to the patient's motivation. As Morgentaler writes in his new book, "Why Men Fake It: The Totally Unexpected Truth About Men and Sex," his patient was having trouble climaxing during sex with his girlfriend, so he feigned pleasure for her benefit. He "was simply trying to do what he believed was the right thing by her."

Morgentaler came to realize that faking it was more common among men than he had realized -- and that this general sexual sentiment was, too. "That is a refrain I hear regularly from men in one form or another, yet this admirable, loving aspect of male sexuality is hidden among the detritus that passes as wisdom about what men are all about," he writes. His book -- which paints a portrait of men who feel anxious about their erections, pressured into having sex and concerned about their partner's pleasure -- is all about correcting that.

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Ah, the old "flaunt it while you've got it" rationale.

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I’d proposed to Ellie in 2009 in the town where Sappho was born. At sunset, we climbed a hill overlooking the ocean and in a very ineloquent fashion, I asked her to spend the rest of her life with me. Despite the grand romantic gesture of a proposal, when we got home from Greece, we hardly told a soul about our engagement. Partially it was because we were in a new city and nobody knew us. Partially it was because gay marriage isn’t legal in California, so announcing our engagement felt a little like playing pretend. We wanted legitimacy, and not in the form of Facebook comments. But we couldn’t have it, so we accepted our new life as betrotheds without fuss or fanfare.

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But then Deen claimed that he had actually been hired by an unnamed porn company to film a video with Abraham. He told TMZ, "I think what happened is that they were going to pass it off as a 'sex tape,'" he said. But then "somebody saw us coming out of a building together ... and people asked me what's going on ... and I have this problem where I can't really lie, so I was like, 'We're making a porno!'"

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We had our first kiss in a dark corner. Before long, we were flying down the stairs of the club and climbing into the back of a cab. Within 30 minutes we would be back at her house for hours of groping and tussling, but when I asked the cabbie to pop the trunk, she asked, “What is that big, green bag you’re carrying?” I looked at my feet and confessed.

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This is becoming an increasingly common scenario, activists say, given the proliferation of “revenge porn" and the legal system's failure to catch up with it.

A new bill in Florida is aiming to remedy that: It would make it a felony to publish online nude photos or videos of a person without their permission and along with identifying information. At the same time, activists around the country are petitioning for both state and federal laws to criminalize what they call “non-consensual porn.” A recent class action lawsuit filed by more than 20 women in Texas against revenge porn site Texxxan.com along with its host GoDaddy has only turned the heat up on the issue.

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