I was a Craigslist call girl. James was my first. I had gotten the idea from a friend. “There are ads,” she said, “placed by men, looking for” -- she raised an eyebrow -- “company.”

That night I got online. It was just as she’d described: SWM seeks non pro, GFE, a little fun. FS. DATY. BBBJ. A lady that speaks GREEK, possibly, a road of possibilities, a chance encounter, no strings attached. For 200 roses, 300 reasons, a generous donation, a happy ending. You can start any day that you like.

On the now-shuttered adult services section of Craigslist -- to the left and below where you’d rent an apartment or sell a couch -- you could find ads, written in their own coded language, from men and women and everything in between, all of them after one thing: the simple exchange of money for sex.

Continue Reading...

It’s one of several photos on the website Occupy Valentine’s Day, which applies the ethos of the anti-Wall Street movement to the consumerism of cupid’s holiday -- and it’s just the latest attempt at creating an alternative celebration. “I think we need a new and different type of analysis around relationships,” says Samhita Mukhopadhyay, the site's creator and author of "Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life." “This is not about being anti-love, but instead anti the unfair structures that force us to love a certain way.”

Continue Reading...

St. Jordan had an idea of why: Unlike the ladies who were sent right in, she's a transsexual woman.

After the night was over, having lost in the Best Transsexual Performer category, St. Jordan took to the Web to protest her treatment. Her story inspired Kelly Pierce, a female trans performer who didn't attend the ceremony, to write a lengthy blog post titled "AVN's Inequality & Segregation Needs to Stop!" Soon, industry blogs and message boards picked up on the controversy.

Continue Reading...

That’s because the episode ends -- spoiler alert! -- with the revelation that the characters aren’t asexual after all.

When the show’s cantankerous lead, Dr. Gregory House, learns that his colleague has a female patient who identifies as asexual, and is married to an “asexual” man, he bets him $100 that he can find “a medical reason why she doesn’t want to have sex.” Through his signature unethical approach, House manages to run some tests on the husband under the guise of administering a flu shot. He finds that the man has a pituitary tumor that's killing his sex drive. Then comes the ultimate reveal: The wife -- or “giant pool of algae,” as House calls her -- is just pretending to be asexual to make her husband happy.

Continue Reading...

When we first started seeing each other, she was married, I was married and we were both having affairs with other people. She told me in very exquisite detail about many -- if not all -- of her sexual adventures (many of them extramarital with married men). She went into great detail about how affairs started, when, where, the type of sex performed (oral/anal) with each man. Her sexual experience was far greater than mine.

I have asked her in recent months to recount what she told me 25 years ago about her sexual experiences. Not only will she not discuss it and gets angry about it, she now claims that she never did any of those things. Well, of course, I have some proof that she did many.

My question is why can't I stop obsessing over her past sexual conquests (and that's what they were -- she seduced primarily married men), and why is she now denying and refusing to discuss her past?

I feel for your wife, man. You're interrogating her about her sexual past after a quarter-century of marriage. There should be a statute of limitations on such things.

Continue Reading...

Blank mentions her personal story at the beginning of her provocative new history of heterosexuality, "Straight," as a way of illustrating just how artificial our notions of "straightness" really are. In her book, Blank, a writer and historian who has written extensively about sexuality and culture, looks at the ways in which social trends and the rise of psychiatry conspired to create this new category in the late 19th and early 20th century. Along the way, she examines the changing definition of marriage, which evolved from a businesslike agreement into a romantic union centered around love, and how social Darwinist ideas shaped the divisions between gay and straight. With her eye-opening book, Blank tactfully deconstructs a facet of modern sexuality that most of us take for granted.

Continue Reading...

When I got home, I told my husband all about it.

My marriage is open. It’s also happy and stable. After I shared our mountain adventures, he filled me in on the highlights of his weekend: a small triumph at work, some quality time with his girlfriend, a successful home repair. We curled up at the end of the night, watched some old "Dr. Who" episodes and went to sleep in each other’s arms.

I never thought I’d have anything in common with Newt Gingrich. But if the claims that he once asked his ex-wife, Marianne, for an open marriage are true, then we might be more alike than I thought. Unlike that alleged scenario, however (which began with an affair), my husband's and my open marriage has been based on openness and honesty from day one.

Continue Reading...

Most of the fault for this misallocation of our moral indignation lies, of course, in the unruly sexuality of fourth-century Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo. Like Newt Gingrich, Augustine’s sexual desires stood in the way of his ambition -- in his case, for a career in the church. Although, like Gingrich, Augustine finally suppressed sufficiently to embrace the requisite behavior, in his struggles he left behind the wicked legacy that conflates sexual desire with moral failure. As time went by, the church agreed that sex was OK as long as you confined it to one lifelong heterosexual reproductive marriage. The monogamous marriage really took off as a moral model when Martin Luther founded the Protestant wing that Gingrich the Catholic now eschews. Like Gingrich, Martin Luther had his eye on a nun long before he nailed the theses.

Continue Reading...

The men gathered around were rapt. Who could blame them? This was at least as good as any porn movie. And it involved a real man with huge muscles and tattoos. But Rachael sighed and walked by me in a huff, slid open the screen door leading to the living room and shut it loudly behind her. A sinking feeling pierced the haze of my high. Jason and Mandy showed no signs of letting up, so I headed inside to find Rachael.

Continue Reading...

News today that Newt Gingrich allegedly asked his second wife, Marianne, for an open marriage, after his indiscretions were revealed, has been interpreted by many critics as further proof of his lack of moral character. (Marianne Gingrich will tell ABC's "Nightline" tonight that Newt "was asking to have an open marriage and I refused.") Cheating on a sick wife and asking her to accept his mistress into their marriage? C'mon!

However, some experts on negotiated non-monogamy see it differently. "We're hearing that there was actually an attempt at an open negotiation," says Tristan Taormino, author of "Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships." "In a way, he gave her an opportunity to consent to it or not."

Continue Reading...

There was no nudity, and certainly no nookie, during the webcast stunt, but it nonetheless got the pair on CNN and earned invaluable advertising for "Sexperiment: 7 Days to Lasting Intimacy With Your Spouse." It's the second Christian "sex advice" book to be lavished with attention this month for allegedly being edgy and oh so sexy. "Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together," written by pastor Mark Driscoll of Seattle's Mars Hill Church and wife Grace Driscoll, similarly sings the praises of sex as a form of communion with God.

But having actually read these books, I can tell you they are not the wild sex manuals the media frenzy suggests -- in fact, they are treatises against homosexuality, pornography and premarital sex. None of this is exactly surprising, but amid the sexy buzz surrounding these books, it's important to underscore just how sexually stunted they are.

Continue Reading...

According to the ordinance, adult film production companies will pay an additional fee with their permit applications to cover an as-of-yet undetermined method of enforcement. Currently, condoms are used in the mainstream gay adult film industry (which includes only gay male films), while the heterosexual industry (which includes both lesbian and straight films) has used mandatory STI testing as a health and safety precaution since the early 2000s. Until May of 2011, the Adult Industry Medical Center, founded by retired performer Dr. Sharon Mitchell, ran the nationwide STI testing service and database that certified heterosexual performers as STI-free previous to their working on any production.

Continue Reading...

Then the bidding began.

This scene from a BDSM “slave auction" -- before a predominantly white audience -- makes for one of the most viscerally challenging passages in "Techniques of Pleasure," Weiss' book-length investigation of San Francisco's kink community, although there are other examples, ranging from father-daughter incest to Nazi guard-prisoner scenarios. These encounters aren't described in much detail -- instead, they're used as passing evidence of the depths of politically incorrect play that she observed, or heard about, during the three years spent observing this world.

Continue Reading...

His body language, tone and diminishing use of "sweetheart" -- not to mention the "oooh" of the crowd -- made me hear it as a blow-job joke, but I didn't exactly trust my interpretation, seeing I hear sexual double-entendres everywhere. Some cleaner-minded commentators have picked up on it too, though: XX Factor's Torie Bosch called it an "oral sex joke" that was "flagrantly demeaning, even misogynistic." Slate's David Weigel, who was present at the event, writes, "I can honestly say that the fellatial joke didn't occur to me at all … it sounded like the 'something' was just the Occupy movement, as in 'you're gonna go down.'" In this case, it seems hindsight was … X-rated: Weigel ends his blog post with, "But now that I think about it ... ."

Continue Reading...

In his new book, "Sex, Bombs and Burgers," Nowak argues that porn, fast food and the military have completely reshaped modern technology and our relationship to it. He points to inventions like powderized food, which emerged out of the Second World War effort and made restaurant chains like McDonald's and Dairy Queen possible. He shows how outsourced phone sex lines have helped bring wealth to poor countries, like Guyana. And he explains how pornography helped drive both the home entertainment industry and modern Web technology, like video chat. An entertaining and well-research read, filled with surprising facts, "Sex, Bombs and Burgers" offers a provocative alternate history of 20th-century progress.

Continue Reading...

Rick Santorum, who has compared gay sex to bestiality, outdid himself in an interview that resurfaced this week in which he suggested that states should have a right to outlaw birth control since contraceptives are "a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be." The other Rick, former Texas Gov. Perry, has been an outspoken opponent of gays in the military and the "sin" of homosexuality. Recent dropout Michele Bachmann seemed a messenger from a previous era, what with her belief that homosexuality is "personal enslavement" and her pledge to ban pornography.

Continue Reading...

Santorum’s sexual policy clock, however, does not stop turning back in 2003 when the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws or 1973 when the Supreme Court protected abortion. Santorum would turn it all the way back to 1964, when birth control was criminal in many states. Actually, Santorum’s sexual policy prescriptions start in the fourth century, when the Catholic theologian Augustine of Hippo confronted his unruly dick. After years of Gingriching around with every female in sight, Augustine came to Jesus. Despite his newfound commitment to disciplined, godly behavior, he just couldn’t keep the good man down. But he decided that at least he could justify, if not control, his irrepressible sexual desires by confining them to the otherwise consecrated ends of monogamous marriage and the reproduction and rearing of children. The only acceptable sex is marital reproductive sex. All the rest of the Catholic teaching on sex is commentary.

Continue Reading...

Some are just hoping to break a dry spell. "Margaret," 35, tells me, "I spent almost all of 2011 trying to emotionally recover from a devastating and generally ill-advised hookup with a friend," she says. "I know, it sounds overblown, but trust me, it was a huge mess. I haven't so much as made out with anyone since 2010!" She devoted the past year to her mental health through therapy, meditation and distancing herself from this "toxic" friend-turned-hookup. Now her plan of attack is to get physically healthy, occasionally dress up all sexy-like and generally, as she puts it, do some "woo woo 'putting myself out there' type of stuff." Surprisingly, I didn't come across anyone who was already having sex and simply wanted more of it -- but I did find countless articles and blogs encouraging married folks -- OK, married women -- to resolve to get busy more often.

Continue Reading...

You might expect that this talk of sexsexsex all the time would change my own relationship to the act in a profound way -- at least, I did. I figured it might lead to carnal fatigue -- after writing about it all day, would I really want to go home and do it? But sex as a topic can be broad and indefinite; conversations about things like the politics of sex education and philandering congressmen tend to melt away when you're in the heat of the moment.

Continue Reading...

As is often the case with reports on the latest wild-and-crazy teen sex trend, this was all total and complete BS. The original research inspiring these proclamations had been distorted and exaggerated beyond recognition. But if you’re interested in the real story behind these salacious reports, you’re in the right place. (If you want to be titillated by tales of teenage orgies, you’ll have to look elsewhere -- sorry.)

Continue Reading...