But this past year was different: I waited to have sex for the first time since my first time. (It counts even though it was my partner who insisted on it, right?) I suppose you could say that I'm marginally less cynical about sexual resolutions this year and, as a result, I figured I would make some. This way, on December 31, 2013, I'll be able to see just how far I've come, so to speak, or at least be able to measure how horribly I've failed my "li'l Naomi." (I also appropriately re-christened my vagina this year.)

With the weighty authority of an online sex columnist with a bachelor's degree in English, I hereby recommend that you maybe possibly consider some of these resolutions for yourselves.

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“Do you even need me to come home anymore?” he asked.

As a sex writer, I have a lot of toys, and this wasn’t the first time I’d bought the so-called Cadillac of vibrators, an extremely powerful plug-in electrical massager that's been my go-to sex toy for over a decade. I already had one at my apartment in Brooklyn, but I wanted one for the long stretches of time I spent at his place, and the toy is way too large and unwieldy to cart back and forth.

"It’s just a vibrator,” I told him. “Of course I need and want you.” That seemed obvious to me, but it wasn't as clear to him. As I probed further, I discovered I had tripped into sensitive territory. Owning one Hitachi Magic Wand was all right, but apparently two was overload, even for a boyfriend who once worked in marketing for a sex toy company.

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I also had the added pressure that comes with being black. That all black men have huge penises is the one stereotype we don’t riot in the streets over. I couldn’t be responsible for bringing shame to the race by walking around with a sub-nine-inch penis. What would my ancestors think? I could only hope that Marcus Garvey wasn’t looking down from the heavens shaking his head in disgust at my lack of girth.

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At 13, I had no idea what my thick hips had to do with birth, but I was terrified by the prospect of having to care for (another) someone else. I was the loud one who drew my father’s ire — and his fists — away from my brother. I was my mother’s “little hero”: the one who powdered her black eyes and told her she was still pretty, the one who swallowed her secrets so she could shimmer in the eyes of her fellow PTA members. She taught me to draw and to drive, to bake lasagna that would make men lick their plates and to fill up with Crystal Light and water so I wouldn’t be too hungry, wouldn’t eat too much of my own food.

She’d been, in her words, “flat as a board” until plumping up while carrying me; then, she said, she “looked like a spark plug.” Her body was as soft as her will; she yielded to buttered biscuits and apologies whispered in the dark. When I was a teenager, both of our bodies embarrassed me equally. I remember the sight of us in one fitting room mirror: Her hips, narrow; her belly puckered by a Caesarean scar. My hips mocked hers with their abundance.

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For the past two weeks, we had been corresponding on Grindr, the gay hook-up app, and, for whatever reason, he really, really wanted to meet up. Day after day, he would send me photos of himself flexing in different parts of his living room and ask me to come over to his place after work. As a skinny 25-year-old, this surprised me, not only because I was incompetent at using Grindr, but because guys who looked like Ariel rarely went for guys who looked like me.

When I finally showed up at his Brooklyn apartment, located on a still-gentrifying block above the flashing lights of a liquor store, I half-expected a candid camera prank or a violent beating. But when he let me into his apartment, he was already half naked, showing off perfectly shaped pecs, giant biceps and a six-pack that tapered cartoonishly down to his waist. I felt like I had just wandered into a porn film.

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Speaking at Princeton University, Scalia was asked by a gay student why he equates laws banning sodomy with those barring bestiality and murder.

"I don't think it's necessary, but I think it's effective," Scalia said, adding that legislative bodies can ban what they believe to be immoral.

Scalia has been giving speeches around the country to promote his new book, "Reading Law," and his lecture at Princeton comes just days after the court agreed to take on two cases that challenge the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman.

Some in the audience who had come to hear Scalia speak about his book applauded but more of those who attended the lecture clapped at freshman Duncan Hosie's question.

"It's a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the 'reduction to the absurd,'" Scalia told Hosie of San Francisco during the question-and-answer period. "If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?"

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She was 76, I was 32. I had recently started dating the man I would soon marry. When I told Andy that if I had breast cancer, I would feel the way Mary did — that I would be fine with having a mastectomy, I just wouldn’t want to die — he replied “But I like your breasts. You’d try to keep them for me, right?”

The night after my grandmother’s mastectomy, Andy took my nipples into his mouth before we made love in a grand, unusual gesture. “I shouldn’t ignore your breasts,” he whispered. As if he were nervous that they might be gone someday.

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When I read those words, a chat conversation between my then-husband and another man, it felt for just a moment like all the oxygen had been sucked from the room. I remember putting my hand on my chest, gasping for air, as the world I thought I knew shattered around me.

He was surprisingly conciliatory and accommodating in the divorce negotiations. In the Deep South state we lived in at the time, within 30 days it was final. Our eight-year marriage was over before the indentation from my wedding ring had even faded from my finger.

Because I couldn’t bear the thought of enduring other people’s pity — or ridicule — and because I had two very small children to raise, I made the decision to pack up and move two states away. We’d get a brand-new start, my children and me, away from anyone who knew that we’d once been a different, complete family.

While unpacking my desk in our new home, I came across the transcript of the chat that had brought down my marriage. As I quickly scanned the now-familiar words, something new jumped out at me. The “jailer” made reference to my ex-husband’s website. Website? I googled his screen name.

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My girlfriend didn’t look too excited. “There are weight limits,” she said. “There’s a lot of things I’ll never do with you, you know. Like hang gliding or zip lining. We’re never going to jump out of a plane together, and I can’t ride a donkey to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.”

I’ll take a pass on falling out of the sky like human confetti or riding a fragrant donkey on a hot August day.What does bother me is when my girlfriend feels excluded or like she’s holding us back from an experience because of her weight.

“First of all, don’t say never,” I told her. “But if we don’t, that’s fine by me.”

Just to avoid an uncomfortable situation, I called ahead to ask if there were weight limits on tube rentals. The woman on the phone sounded confused at first, but when I clarified, she offered some southern-accented sympathy.

“Oh, hon,” she said, “we’ve had some pretty large people come and float with us. We’re all getting bigger, you know.” I thanked her for the consolation.

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Before I gave thought to beauty, I delighted in my body. I was a strong, brown, passionate child, with lots and lots of words. I talked fast, and I moved faster – through the woods around our Cape Cod home, up trees, into the ocean’s crashing surf. I also felt a lot, finely tuned to the swells of my own heart, as well as others’ wants and hurts. I sensed a deep well at my center, and sometimes it bubbled over. I’d read or think or feel myself into a brimming state, then lie with my back to the ground, body vibrating, heart thudding, mind foaming, fearing I might combust – suffer a supernova of brain and heart, annihilate myself. I also fell down a lot. I banged into walls and trees, and tumbled up and down stairs almost daily. The refrain of my childhood was “slow down, Melissa!” and my nickname “Crash,” but I always got right up — skinned knees, purpled thighs, stinging palms — and brushed myself off, kept going.

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Just ... not originally.

The shots are found on the Instagram account Antidates, which carries the explanatory tag line, "actual responses to dating ads. they never had a chance." It's one of several sites that have popped up with the express purpose of making fun of tactless online daters -- and the vast majority happen to be men attempting to court women. (This is no doubt in large part because men are more often the initiators on online dating sites, and there is something inherently awkward about initiating contact with a person you've only met virtually.) It isn't just absurd self-portraits -- most of the sites focus on outrageous come-ons, off-putting self-descriptions and horrific misspellings.

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The relationship ended after just over a year, not terribly long by relationship standards. Except that it never really ended – not for me, anyway. We went separate ways, to be sure, severing all ties. But I continued to wonder what had become of him, and I filled in the blanks with the only resource available to me: my imagination. This was before Facebook, even before the Internet, and so I envisioned him doing it all – working hard, reading good books, grappling with life’s inevitable sorrows, and, yes, dating women whose faces and breasts were nicer than mine.

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All through my 20s and 30s, I navigated relationships with men -- sexual, marital and otherwise, looking for (and not finding) the right match. But it is difficult -- perhaps impossible -- to talk about that search without addressing my relationships with my legs and the men who created them. For some reason, I have yet to meet a female prosthetist.

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Earlier this week, the king of the now-defunct revenge-porn site "Is Anyone Up?" announced that he would be returning with a new site, HunterMoore.tv, featuring his tried-and-true formula of jilted lovers sending in naked photos of their exes, along with links to their social media profiles and Moore's unique brand of body-snarking. Only, in an interview with the New York Observer's Beta Beat, he claimed that he was also going to introduce a mapping feature "so you can stalk people." That inspired a flurry of media attention: Moore was back, and more villainous than ever! There was a barely concealed puritanical glee in even the disapproving chatter about this brave new world of punishment-porn, and a gruesome awe at just how far he was willing to take this Web-smut version of the "Saw" franchise.

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Earlier this year, two and half years into a long-distance relationship and after over a year of serious job searching, I finally found a job that allowed me to move 8,000 miles across the world to join my boyfriend. About five weeks later, he finally said what had been pretty obvious since I arrived -- he was no longer interested in me or our relationship. He refused to explain or seek counseling, saying  the "feeling was gone." While breaking up, things were said and done, or not said or done by both of us and we are out of contact, permanently, I suspect.

I moved out and things are generally going OK. Life here is much more costly on a solo budget and I sometimes feel lonely being so far from anyone I really know or who shares my language/culture. So, I've reframed this as a one- or two-year adventure and this helps me feel more positive when I miss my friends and family back home. I can still get angry that he pulled the rug out from under me so my first impression at the new job was of a distracted person with personal issues. Or that the great new chapter opened with being pushed away and left alone. But, I've turned things around at work and I recognize I am better off without him.

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I’m still not sure how he meant it. Was I too inept? Too cool? Or was it just an awkward response to an awkward situation? My father couldn’t swallow small talk, no matter how small and harmless, and that day he was choking down a lot of it.

Whatever the case, this dubious declaration would hang over my head for a dozen years. Until I was 40, I was no closer to matrimony than the day I was born.

To be fair, a few things were working against me — mostly myself. For example, I used to have animals in my apartment. Not pets, unwanted wildlife: bats, rats, squirrels. One place had so many bats that the supervisor’s 3-year-old boy would run up and down the halls, naked, trying to catch them with a butterfly net. One afternoon I came home to find an obese squirrel squatting on my dining-room table, scarfing a nut. He didn’t move when I approached, and it dawned on me that he had probably been here before, gotten comfortable, maybe ordered cable, and I shivered with primordial panic: Whose place was this, theirs or mine? I was living that close to the line.

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I am writing to you for advice because I need it and from reading your column over time I have found you to be compassionate and perceptive and wise.

I would like advice on how to conduct myself. And I don't want advice on how to conduct myself.

I am almost 24 years old. A year ago I moved to a new city to be with a young man I'd been dating for four years. We were long-distance all through college and loved each other a lot. We lived together all last year and broke up three months ago.

It was pleasant and comfortable but not the life I wanted. He and I grew up a lot during our relationship but our lifestyles remained quite different. I ended it because I felt the differences lay in personalities rather than habit, unlikely to change. It ceased to be what I wanted.

Newly single, I have made many new friends and am finally starting to feel like a part of a community in a city that still feels new.

Only now, it's begun to feel small. I plunged into dating gleefully, enjoying the attention and novelty.

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I had come very close to sending Jane a Facebook message informing her that I could not, in actual fact, go through with this. I comforted myself with the thought that I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to do.

After all, what’s the harm of getting to know new people over a drink?

They were already seated when I arrived. Jane flagged me down with a sheepish wave. True to her Facebook photos, she was effortlessly beautiful. True to his photos, her boyfriend was boyishly cute. Vaguely preppy. Deeply non-threatening.

The couple looked as puppy-nervous as I felt. They had been together for years, they told me, and were head-over-heels in love.

“We just could not believe that a cute single girl like you would send us a message like that!” said Jane.

“It was the funniest moment of life,” agreed Boyishly Cute Non-Threatening Boyfriend over his seafood linguine.

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Now, a new study claims to have debunked this truism, which is known as the "damaged goods hypothesis."

Some performers were amused by the news. "As a happy, healthy female porn performer, my reaction is: thanks, science, thanks so much for proving I am real," says writer and porn performer Lorelei Lee in an email.

On a similar note, porn actress Dylan Ryan tells me, "It's about time that research catches up to the realities for a great many women who perform in porn," she says in an email. "It's important to me as a performer that the conversation evolve and develop to make space for the (as in any community and population) diversity of experiences, personalities and lifestyles of porn performers."

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Wheeler, now a professor at Binghamton University, found this curious. In her new book, "How Sex Became a Civil Liberty," she writes, "At the end of the 20th century, these students equated criticizing pornography and exercising control over their private space with advocating censorship, eliding, in the process, critical distinctions between private conduct and state action." Just a few decades earlier it was unthinkable that sexual rights could be protected by the Constitution. But here her students were conflating "personal opinions, private relationships, and civil liberties," she says.

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