In this particular scenario, I was being introduced to Philip Roth, my mother’s favorite writer, whom I had heard her refer to as “the literary lion.” And while I’ve never been particularly starstruck, I flipped when I found out Roth was going to be there. Next thing I know, a mutual friend takes me by the hand, drags me over to Roth, and introduces me to him in this fashion: “Philip. Zis is Periel, she is a grrrreat writer.”

I could not imagine anything more humiliating in the entire world. I wanted to curl up in a hole and die. Adding insult to injury, a friend of Roth’s who was lingering around us, nodded toward Roth and said to me, “So you like him, huh?”

In attempt to salvage whatever miserly bit of self-respect I had left, I said, “Well, I don’t know him, so I can’t like him, but I do like his work.”

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The controversy inspired Maria Bustillos at the Awl to write a defense of Hoinsky with a great big nod of sympathy to all the "shy fellows" out there. I disagree with her contention that Hoinsky's advice is harmless -- but we do agree on one thing: There is nothing wrong with wanting to attract women -- whether it's for a one-night stand or a long-term relationship. The problem arises when the advice is sexist, demeaning or hostile.

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I stiffened and silently debated whether or not to tell him my secret.

“You don’t like horror?” he asked, his smile wilting in my silence.

I remembered reading that you should never talk about mental health issues on the first date. “I get really scared,” I said, which was easier than telling him the real story: I watched my mother die when I was a kid, and now I live my life avoiding things that trigger that memory and the severe anxiety that comes with it.

“That’s cute,” he said, but he raised a brow and gave me that look: You’re a 30-something woman. Grow up. 

So I decided to go with him. I told myself it was just a movie. But I spent the entire film looking away from the screen, darting my eyes from ceiling to floor and wincing every time I heard that shrill, piercing scream that reminded me of my mother’s.

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That said, allow me to express my general cynicism going into this. I tend to think that Birchbox, as with most things, is a capitalist invention that helps fuel consumer insecurity and delusion about the potential for the right product to make them finally love themselves. (I have also considered subscribing.) In the same way, Birchbox-for-sex products hold the promise of fixing your sex life, which, if it's really in ruins, can probably only be improved by things that money can't easily buy.

But the novelty and surprise of a monthly mailing service does seem well-suited to "spicing things up in the bedroom," as they say. So I will proceed under the assumption that none of us are expecting to magically gain self-esteem or fix an emotionally dead marriage with any of these products. Deal? Deal.

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Thing is, this isn’t just relevant to people whose work intersects with sex. Jeffrey J. Douglas of the Free Speech Coalition tells me that because this law is overly broad, "every person who engages in 'sexting' images" violates it. Which is to say: EVERYONE AND THEIR MOM IS BREAKING THE LAW. Of course, 2257 is rarely, if ever, used to target people outside of the porn industry -- but that doesn’t change the fact that the law itself might permit it, he says. "Whenever the government is allowed to engage in systematic violations of the Fourth Amendment" -- which protects against unwarranted searches -- "everyone is at risk,” says Douglas.

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Turns out the editors of the much-ridiculed magazine were often asking themselves the same questions as the general public: Who reads this?

Those "tickle gizzard" fans -- "the wankership," as she puts it -- would flood her desk with letters. "Frequently, the handwriting on the envelopes [was] what one might call 'serial killer,'" she writes. "Just as frequently, it was heart-inflected in the manner of a giddy teenager. Sometimes the pages were tacky or crumby with substances better not wondered about." The mail was "totally creepy, a little bit heartwarming, and super tragic," she says. "Always, it made me need to immediately wash my hands." Among those were the often bizarre submissions from everyday men who wanted to appear in the magazine. She remembers one that read, "'I would like to pose in your prestigious magazine as a lumberjack and beside a nest of hornets."

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We went out for dinner, out for drinks, out for more drinks and then dancing in a warehouse where they gave us drinks for free (my ex-boyfriend is much better looking than me). The night was amazing. And after we got back to the hotel at about 3 a.m., we had drunk sex and a drunk talk where he admitted he missed me. Mission accomplished! I might have spent two weeks’ salary on one night of fun, but what I got in return was the ultimate satisfaction. I was officially “the one that got away.” He thinks I’m AWESOME.

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My voice rose, along with a sense of dread. “For a threesome?”

“No, for you — to sleep with,” he said. “I could watch. From the closet. He wouldn’t know I was there.”

I fought a swell of revulsion. Jack wanted me to sleep with other men? And he wanted to watch? It defied the laws of romance.

Jack and I met online four months earlier (although his name isn’t really Jack). He was cute, with blue eyes and dark stubble. Feeling lonely after having recently moved 3,000 miles from Brooklyn to San Francisco, I ignored my initial anxiety about his age (39 to my 29). He was an accomplished artist and musician and, being a sucker for tortured creative types, I invited myself over to his place at the end of our first date, where we finished off a bottle of cheap Cabernet before having hazy sex that I could barely remember the next day.

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This is a book for every woman who has ever felt like a man for being sexual.

It is largely a sexual autobiography, but also self-conscious proof-positive that women are capable of being just as desirous as men. She writes poetically about having her partner ejaculate on her: “I love this. The sudden wet coolness on me. The smell: summer rain on cement. Fresh, open windows.” Of her lover's swollen member, she says, "It is beautiful. It unnerves me, in its gorgeous attentiveness." It would be a daringly personal work for any woman to write, but perhaps especially so for Angel, a Cambridge-educated academic and feminist who has researched female sexual dysfunction.

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Just contrast that scene with Michael Douglas' recent proud profession about going down.

Sure, the mafia may have a stricter definition of masculinity than the rest of society. It's also true that there are counter pop cultural examples from the late '90s; take Big Pun's rapping about his "thick tongue, known to make a chick come." But that "Sopranos" episode nonetheless expressed a widespread cultural attitude that has diminished tremendously in the last 15 years -- and how! But also, seriously, how?

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In accessible and entertaining prose, "What Do Women Want?" details everything from individual women's fantasies to the search for a "female Viagra." More important, though, it represents a complete paradigm shift. The book, which grew from a much-discussed New York Times Magazine cover story in 2009, reveals how gender stereotypes have shaped scientific research and blinded researchers to evidence of female lust and sexual initiation throughout the animal kingdom, including among humans. It reveals how society's repression of female sexuality has reshaped women's desires and sex lives.

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Jeff was speechless. August was married to Dana, also a friend (their names have been changed, of course). Did she know what her husband was doing behind her back?

After gently declining the invitation and hanging up, Jeff told me about their conversation. “August made me promise not to tell you, but I didn’t think it was right to keep it from you,” he said.

I wanted to close my eyes and pretend this was not happening.

Our couples friendship with August and Dana had been going so well. The night before the phone call that changed everything, the four of us feasted on Chinese soup dumplings in the San Gabriel neighborhood of Los Angeles and laughed so hard that tears dribbled down our cheeks. A month before that, we toasted our friendship over glasses of almond champagne in Temecula. August was so enthusiastic about going on the road trip, he’d spent hours drawing a cartoonish itinerary that included caricatures of us and multicolored illustrations of the wineries we’d visit. A month before that, they came over for an elaborate high tea that included silly hats, homemade scones and petits fours, and fake English accents. We saw August and Dana often, cooked meals for each other, and had long, meaningful conversations. Finally, I thought we’d found our people in L.A.

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Per the usual, researchers had college students fill out a questionnaire -- this one concerning how often they engaged in over 100 different behaviors. All of the activities could be categorized, thanks to a previous study, as being generally perceived of as typically male or female. Here's an interesting twist: Half of the participants were hooked up to a polygraph machine, and told as much. The machine didn't actually work, but they didn't know that -- the point was to make them feel pressured to tell the truth. What researchers found was that regardless of whether they were hooked up to the lie detector, men and women readily admitted to behaviors that didn't conform to gender norms. For example, men openly reported engaging in supposedly non-masculine behaviors like writing poetry.

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In a letter to the Guardian, representatives from the organizations UK Feminista and Object argue that "retailers are exposing staff and, in some cases, customers to publications whose handling and display may breach equality legislation" and "amount to sex discrimination and sexual harassment." As a result, they are calling on retailers "to urgently heed the call to Lose the Lads' Mags" with the warning that if they don't comply they might be vulnerable to legal action by aggrieved employees and customers.

They make these claims based on the Equality Act of 2010, a piece of legislation aimed at protecting equal access to employment. Specifically, they argue that the act of selling such magazines falls under the law's definition of sexual harassment as "unwanted conduct ... of a sexual nature” that violates an employee's "dignity" or "of creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment." They argue that this applies to customers as well.

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When it was clear he would live, he underwent surgery for his fractured skull, eye sockets and nose, after which he was weaned from a medical coma. For months, all I did was hope and pray. It wasn’t until he was in rehabilitation that I allowed myself to think about how intimacy would work. But now, I felt like a virgin at 33.

Once, when his eyes were still glued shut and he had yet to speak, I slid into the hospital bed with him. He shared a room with a man flown in from Alaska who had hit his head on a cast iron wood-burning stove. The guy was doing surprisingly well, which made me feel depressed. Miles moaned and thrashed underneath wrist restraints; meanwhile Alaska flipped through channels and barked at the nurse for Oxycotin.

There was a vinyl green curtain separating their beds. When Miles had been in intensive care, I had laid my chest across his, pleading for him to come back to me whole. But here I could lie horizontally along him. On an afternoon when he was calm, I asked him to “scoot over.” He didn’t respond. I knew he wasn’t sleeping, but he wasn’t awake.

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Alright, I hear you. But there is only so much of the Internet -- even the pornographic Tumblr Internet -- that one woman can cover, so I called in some expert help from porn stars, journalists and sexperts. The result is a wildly eclectic bunch of blogs featuring everything from porn superstar Stoya to the indifferent cats of amateur porn. There is something in here for everyone -- even if you don't consider yourself a pornophile.

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Art or Porn: You Decide

Because of its "unique twist," sexpert Emily Morse (she of Bravo TV fame) suggests this Tumblr. "You get to look at beautifully composed photographs that can also be considered pornographic," says Morse. "The photographs titillate and tell a story. It's up to you to decide whether you're enjoying porn or art."

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This shocking revelation comes courtesy of Markus Frind, founder of the immensely popular dating site Plenty of Fish, who explained his reason for shutting down the site's casual sex section by announcing that of the site's 3.3 million daily U.K. users, there are only 6,041 "women" looking for a no-strings hookup -- and, even still, many of them are actually men. He told users that the "Intimate Encounters" section "can be summed up as a bunch of horny men talking to a bunch of horny men pretending to be women." Of course, I'm kidding about this being surprising news. Isn't it, like, Rule No. 1 of the Internet?

Speaking of, why is that the case? Why do men pretend to be women online?

In the 2004 academic article titled “Do Boys (and Girls) Just Wanna Have Fun?” psychologist John Suler lays out a handful of theories. First is the hypothesis of feminine exploration: “Due to the pressure of cultural stereotypes, it may be difficult for some men to explore within themselves what society labels as ‘feminine’ characteristics” and the “anonymity of cyberspace” allows them to “express their ‘feminine’ side which they feel they must otherwise hide.”

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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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