That’s why Klein has updated the book in a new edition published this week to detail the ways that sexual rights have actually become “increasingly tenuous” under President Obama. Sure, abstinence-only programs have been greatly defunded, but the battle over sex education still rages on — as do assaults on reproductive rights and all manner of sex-related business, entertainment, expression and experience.

Klein points to examples like “restrictions on access to abortion, pointless expansion of sex offender registries with increasingly punitive conditions, restrictions on the availability of adult entertainment, protections for licensed medical personnel who reject their professional responsibilities, and heightened entrapment programs (often motivated by federal grants) to pursue adults in adult chat rooms engaged in fantasy age-play,” as well as unprecedented kowtowing to “religious sensitivities” that almost always relate to sex. The onslaught also became increasingly mainstream — just consider the rhetoric this year from mainstream GOP presidential candidates about banning pornography and outlawing birth control.

Klein blames part of this sexual devolution on “the lack of a coherent vision of either sexual rights or sexual health coming from the president” — but of course the real culprit, the aggressor in all this, is the religious right, which he says has “become stronger, smarter, richer, and more aggressive with regard to sexuality.” I spoke with Klein by phone at his home in Palo Alto, Calif., about our best tools of defense and whether this battle will ever end.

What’s been the single biggest change in the war on sex since the first edition of the book?

The two things that jump out to me are, number one, the attacks on sexual orientation have ramped up because sexual orientation is the one arena in which there is actually more sexual freedom now than there was five years ago. The other arena that’s really evident is the continuing and highly successful attack on reproductive rights. The fact that contraception is back on the public policy agenda is shocking, to say the least, and it represents an extraordinary victory in the war on abortion and in terms of a reconceptualization of what sexual health means. Am I just going to depress the crap out of you during this whole interview?

I know, I just felt my heart sinking. I suppose we could talk a bit about the positive changes we’ve seen.

The sexual orientation arena is really where a lot of the positivity is. One of the things that’s very heartening is that young people really have a completely different take on sexual orientation now. When Kinsey did his work in 1948, he talked about sexual orientation more as a snapshot that anything else. Through the ’80s and ’90s and the zeroes, we started to see sexual orientation more as a movie than as a snapshot, and now young people are bursting out of that movie and they’re really attacking the very categories themselves. That really is a reflection of sexuality at its most profound.

While there is a tremendous rear-guard action in the war on sex to sort of reestablish the world that never existed of simplistic sexuality, young people, they’re not defending sexuality the way it supposedly used to be. They’re saying, “I’ve got a body, other people have bodies, let’s throw all the arms and legs up in a pile and see what happens.” That’s very heartening and that’s not going to change.

As these younger generations grow up, what will happen to the war on sex?

That is the crucial question. I’ll tell you what’s been going on since the book was published for the first time and that is that America has simultaneously gone in two extremely opposite directions. On the one hand, externally, outside the bedroom, Americans are more sexually conservative than they were 10 years ago. There are more laws restricting and regulating sexual behavior today than there were 10 years ago or even 25 years ago. On the other hand, Americans’ private bedroom behavior has more variety, more experimentation, more sex toys, more non-monogamy than ever before.

So when people, especially from other countries, ask me, “Is America becoming more conservative or less conservative sexually,” I say, “Yes, it is.” When you ask me about the future, I think that those two trajectories are going to continue, that externally it’s going to get worse and in the bedroom it’s going to get more humane. Sooner or later, there’s going to be a collision of those two trends. I don’t think it’s going to be in the next three days or three years, but sooner or later those two trajectories have to reconcile themselves — but for now I see them continuing.

There is so much political benefit to scaring people about sex. There is so much political capital to be gained by insisting that, sexually, America is more dangerous today than it was 10 years ago — how endangered our children are on the Internet, how pornography destroys lives — that politicians are going to continue to respond to that opportunity.

Why do we see people supporting the attempt to restrict behaviors that they themselves engage in?

That is the question of the century. That famous sex therapist Karl Marx [laughs] used to talk about false consciousness. The bigger question is how is it that people are persuaded to support public policy that is demonstrably against their best interest. It’s not just around sexuality. You have people who are demanding to have less healthcare options. You have people demanding that they don’t have the right to do something that they don’t want to do.

In terms of sexuality, I think people are so afraid of their own sexual impulses, people feel so guilty, and people are so wigged out by the complete failure of monogamy to deliver what they desperately need emotionally that they’re open to demagoguery. When it comes to sexuality we’re looking at the Weimar Republic here, we’re looking at 1933 in Germany.

We’re looking at people who are desperately frightened and lonely and sad and upset about their own sexual impulses and they’re turning to any place they can find to comfort themselves. Ironically, the religious right and the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party and Fox media, they’re offering a kind of comfort. It’s a Pyrrhic victory because the public doesn’t walk away feeling, “Oh, I have this wonderful sexuality and this wonderful body.” No, no, no. People get to walk away with, “Phew, I dodged a bullet, here are the sexual restrictions that alleviate my guilt, lower my anxiety about my neighbor’s sexuality, that make me as a parent feel less anxious.” People walk away with their sexuality diminished but they feel less anxious about the complicated world in which they live.

What are our best weapons to fight back?

That’s a great question and there are a number of answers. The first might seem like a lame one but I really believe it: It’s to call it the “war on sex,” because we just saw a great example of not calling it the war on sex: when that Rush Limbaugh thing came up, calling Sandra Fluke a slut, immediately followed by all this anti-choice legislation, and then people saying it’s a war on women.

Calling it a war on sex takes the moral high ground away from the people who are doing it. They say the war on sex is really about protecting parents’ rights, pharmacists’ rights; they come up with all these justifications and now, of course, the war on pornography is being framed as a public health issue rather than as an issue of immorality. That’s another tremendous victory in the war on sex. Thirty-five years ago people were saying you shouldn’t look at porn because it’s immoral; now they’re saying you shouldn’t look at it because it’s bad for your health. So, my first answer is: Let’s call it what it is and take away all these justifications.

The second thing we can do is begin to own our own sexuality. This has always been a battle about who controls whose sexuality. Morality in Media wants to control your eyeballs when it comes to sex. Who controls your genitalia when it comes to sex? I think we need to be talking about who is in charge of your sexuality. We thought we dealt with this in 1970 with “Our Bodies Ourselves,” but apparently not.

The third thing is, and this sounds so square: People have to get in touch with their legislators. They have to call up their local state assembly representatives. The democratic process has trouble adjudicating issues when people are not willing to identify themselves as citizens. If the government decided to pass a law taxing Toyotas extra, every Toyota owner would call their representative and say, “Hey, I’m a Toyota owner I want you to stop.” But when the local community says, “We’re going to eliminate adult bookstores or strip clubs,” very few people are willing to say, “Excuse me, as a person who goes to strip clubs, I don’t want you to eliminate strip clubs.” As a result, the democratic process can’t function successfully.

As long as you have homes where Joe goes to strip clubs on his lunch hour and his wife doesn’t know, because if his wife knew she’d kill him, as long as you have a home like that, Joe is not going to want to go to a city council member or his county board of supervisors or his state assembly member and say, “Excuse me, I go to strip cubs, cut it out.” Joe’s going to have to say to his spouse: “Honey, don’t take this personally, but every once in a while I go to a strip cub. It’s really a lot of fun. If you want to come that’s great, if you don’t that’s OK with me, but I just want you to know that I go to strip clubs.” Believe it or not, that would be a building block toward political action on the legislative level. Because right now, people can’t go to their legislators because they’re not willing to come out.

What would you say to those who aren’t moved by the issue of sex in particular, who don’t feel that they are in jeopardy in this particular battle?

The war on sex is how the religious right and cynical politicians are using the issue of sexual regulation for undermining secular democracy. The reason the issue of sexual regulation keeps coming back up is that the religious right is erasing the line between church and state. You don’t have to care one bit about sex to care about the war on sex. You just need to care about secular democracy, free speech and the separation of church and state. If you care about any of those things, then you need to care about the war on sex, because that’s where it’s being fought.

Who understands this better than professional dominatrixes? With so many speculating this week on Roiphe’s article, I decided to hand the microphone over to women with a unique perspective on the dynamics in power and play.

Several said that Roiphe is actually on to something when she talks about submission as an escape from life’s stresses — only, this reasonable point is overwritten by her wrongheaded focus on women and the impact of feminism. Roiphe wonders whether there is “something exhausting about the relentless responsibility of a contemporary woman’s life … all that strength and independence and desire and going out into the world,” and suggests “that, for some, the more theatrical fantasies of sexual surrender offer a release, a vacation, an escape from the dreariness and hard work of equality.” What about the exhausting, relentless responsibility of contemporary people’s lives?

Many men who turn to submissive fantasies do so for precisely the sort of vacation from responsibility that Roiphe suggests women are seeking. Olivia Severine, a transsexual dominatrix living in San Francisco, says most of her clients were “very high-powered” men weighed down by responsibility. “They came to see me as a brief escape when no one was looking at them for direction or leadership,” she says. “The time with me is when they were told what to do, what to feel and how to act … and all the weight of their careers, families, lives, is lifted from them for a cherished few hours.”

Mistress Shae Flanigan, a Los Angeles dominatrix, says her clients are “CEOs, high-ranking managers, lawyers and wonderfully brilliant men from all over the business spectrum.” What they have in common is “that they come to me to create an environment where they don’t need to think,” she says. “Where they can trust me to keep them safe while I weave together an enticing, thrilling, euphoric and painful world where it is literally impossible to think.”

It isn’t that these guys wish they had less real-world power — it’s just, power is stressful, and submission provides a release. “BDSM is a hell of a lot more affordable of a vacation than the Bahamas, I promise you,” says Flanigan.

Melissa Febos, author of “Whip Smart,” a book about her time as a pro-domme, tells me, “As someone who spent nearly four years catering to the submissive fantasies of men, and who eventually had to acknowledge her own submissive fantasies, I can say with some certainty that I think all people experience anxiety about power,” she says. “Aren’t our objects of eroticization often the things we feel unreconciled about?”

Most of Febos’ clients “experienced an imbalance of power in their lives,” she says. For some it was “extreme disempowerment,” like child abuse, racism or poverty; for others, it was “an overwhelming burden of power,” related to everything from wealth to politics. (“During the Republican convention, business at the dungeon boomed,” she says.) All of that is to say that “eroticization stemming from anxiety is not gender-specific,” Febos explains — nor is it specific to the relative power one has in the real world.

“Everyone, regardless of career choice or level of importance, is saddled with the burden of making important decisions about their own lives and the lives of the people around them,” Domina Nyx of New York City points out.

While Natasha Strange, who has worked as a domme for almost 20 years, has had plenty of “men who are powerful and want to give up control for a bit,” she’s also had tons of “musicians, cab drivers, pharmacy reps, teachers and your basic blue-collar workers who are just kinky and want to feel desired for an hour or three.” Interestingly enough, she says, “The very first female client I had was a housewife and a mother of two.”

As Febos suggested, these desires can arise from disempowerment. While New York-based Maya Midnight has some high-powered clients — after all, they are the ones most capable of regularly paying for her services — she says, “I get far more clients who experience loss of power in their day-to-day lives and have fetishized it.”

Roiphe’s suggestion that women’s submission fantasies are indicative of an underlying longing for the way things used to be, pre-feminism, seems particularly questionable when compared to “race play,” which Mistress Justine Cross describes in an email as “capitalizing on themes of racism in mainstream society, i.e., degrading a submissive using racial slurs, and redeploying those themes for sexual pleasure.” It seems patently absurd to suggest that an African-American man who eroticizes racism has a deep-seated desire for the days before the civil-rights movement. Should it be different when it comes to a woman longing to play-act a “sexist” fantasy?

Often enough, the “roots,” as Midnight calls it, of submissive desires can seem rather random: “One client saw a movie when he was a teenager where a woman kicked a man in the balls and has been into ball-busting ever since,” she says. “As a child, I got told off for hitting a man in the crotch with my stuffed penguin and now I love hurting balls. Go figure.” Sometimes these desires emerge at a young age (dominatrix Cybill Troy tells me, “I have personal slaves as well as clients who showed signs of their interests as young as toddlers … a 3-year-old with a tendency to crawl into cupboards who grows up to love being caged and contained both physically and mentally, for example”); other times they only surface well into adulthood.

Some believe that S/M fantasies are like dreams in that they can be difficult to fully make sense of: “I believe that they come from creative and imaginative minds that may mix the powers of everyday rituals and roles into a more complicated and interesting puzzle than the usual vanilla missionary routine,” says Yin Q., a dominatrix turned BDSM educator.

Of course, actually visiting a dom or dominatrix is much different from reading a page-turner about an S/M relationship. “Fifty Shades of Grey” tells us what many women want to read about, but it doesn’t tell us what these women are actually doing in the bedroom. Lady Cyn Aptic of Los Angeles points out, “In many cases people’s eyes are bigger than their stomachs and they prefer the fantasy to reality.”

That fantasy has become much more mainstream as the sartorial trappings of BDSM have been adopted by some of pop music’s biggest female stars, with Rihanna and Lady Gaga devoting songs to “S&M” and liking it “rough” (as I wrote about in a piece last year headlined, “Is kink the new girl-on-girl kiss?”). “I think there’s been a trend toward making the naughty more mainstream; it’s just a modern version of the bodice ripper,” says Olivia Vexx of “Fifty Shades of Grey.” “[It's acceptable now for] a soccer mom to go buy a bodice and a whip.” Strange says, “When I started as a domme, it was near impossible to find thigh-high boots” — but now she says, “I can go to pretty much any suburban mall.” Maybe we’re finding more evidence at this cultural moment of women entertaining submission fantasies simply because it’s more acceptable.

But even in the worst-case, end-of-times scenario that Roiphe is right and “Fifty Shades of Grey” is so popular because of women’s current anxieties about equality (such as it is), that doesn’t mean that it’s “evidence of unhappiness, or an invalidation of feminism,” says Febos. In fact, she suggests that it’s “just the opposite” — it might actually be a sign of progress that millions of women are so hungrily pursuing sexual fantasies independent of men.

Contrary to Roiphe’s belief, there are plenty of feminists who are neither “perplexed,” as she puts it, by submissive desires nor find it contradictory to their politics. Febos, who considers herself a feminist and also has submissive fantasies, says, “I still live in a culture that floods my consciousness with instructions to be a passive, sexual object; that my only power rests in my sexuality as defined by men’s desire,” she says. “Mightn’t this create some anxiety in my own psyche? I think so. Have I eroticized those messages in order to locate them somewhere that won’t impede my progress as an empowered, independent woman in the rest of my life? Maybe so. But so what?”

A few years ago, for example, a charming man from Vancouver hired me every night for a week while he was in Las Vegas for a conference. By the time he went home we’d checked off every item on his wish list, and he was finally comfortable lying naked with another man. It was strangely gratifying to help a guy learn the ropes.

But nothing prepared me for Hector: Thirty-nine years old, handsome, stocky, with a full black beard. Born and raised in Argentina, he lived in Chicago and owned a seat on the stock exchange. He was successful but lonely, and so intensely left-brained that he had carefully engineered a self-improvement plan: He took a sabbatical from work to get himself together. Among other things, he needed to admit he was gay and better understand how that fit into his life. That’s where I came in.

When I first spotted him I thought, “Damn, this guy needs new pictures.” He was much better looking than he’d led me to believe, and more socially adept as well. We clicked instantly. And I don’t know where he learned how, but he kissed like the devil himself.

We had a suite at the Bellagio and spent the weekend like a couple of princes. We went to the spa on Sunday, and then stayed in our bathrobes and ordered appetizers from room service while we watched the Oscars, like two teenagers pretending to be Hollywood royalty.

We also made practical plans, mapping out the next few months on a calendar, scheduling what we’d do and where we’d go. He came back to Las Vegas twice, and we traveled together to Washington (for the cherry blossoms), Provincetown, Montreal, Miami, Hawaii and – wait for it – Paris for the French Open. This was the best gig ever.

Now, I can be what my friends kindly refer to as “an acquired taste.” I have a classic Irish temper, I talk too much, and I tend to be too clever by half. I can also be moody, needing to go off by myself for no discernible reason. So while I wasn’t concerned I’d get bored with Hector, I was a little worried he might get tired of me. But we only had one serious confrontation.

I tried a little too hard to share my love of nude beaches, for which Hawaii is especially famous. He tolerated the one we found on Maui; it was beautiful, and it wasn’t crowded. But the one on the Big Island was another story. It required a treacherous climb to get to, and was filled with too much tie-dye and the kind of bodies no one wants to see naked. Long story short: We didn’t stay very long.

We were spending a few days in Hilo, which is not a town most people recommend. The best hotels haven’t been renovated since the ’70s and there are very few sandy beaches within city limits. As we were driving back, Hector grew quiet, and I tried to fill the air with idle chatter.

“Can we not talk until we get back to the hotel, please?” he asked.

Eventually we stopped for coffee.

“I’m really angry right now,” he started, “so I have to ask you this and hope I get an honest answer.” A beat. “Was that beach the whole reason we came to Hilo?”

I’m not usually very good with confrontation, and my knee-jerk response is to raise my voice. But Hector was calm and his tone was more inquisitive than accusatory, so I tried to follow his lead. “If you knew me any better,” I answered, “I’d be really pissed off that you asked me that question. I don’t manipulate people, and I really don’t like being accused of it.”

“And if I knew you better,” he said, “I probably wouldn’t have to ask. But I do.”

I understood where Hector was coming from, especially given the number of disappointments we’d already met with in Hilo. I explained to him that I didn’t even know about the nude beach until we’d planned to come here. I wanted to come to Hilo for the botanical gardens and the waterfalls we’d seen that morning.

“OK,” he said. “Makes sense. But we’re done with nude beaches.”

It was the only time he ever pulled rank, and within a day the story was a joke between us, the mere mention of Hippie Hollow eliciting mutual groans.

The “Hippie Hollow Incident” was the most mature disagreement I have ever had – including fights with my parents, everyone I’ve ever worked for, and all of my boyfriends. The guy I lived with for four years? We’d have had two weeks of drama and a ruined vacation at the very least. Instead, Hector and I grew closer because of it.  Was this because this was ultimately a business deal and we weren’t arguing as much as negotiating? Or was it because we were especially adept at communicating with each other? Who can say?

Whatever the reasons, the rest of our time together only became more enchanted: sunset dinners on the beach in Kona, orchestra seats for “Follies” at the Kennedy Center, watching Federer’s narrow victory over Monfils from a box at the French Open. It was the kind of magic that would make even a chick-flick aficionado roll her eyes and say, “Yeah, right.” And yet there we were.

Until we weren’t.

The last time I saw Hector was in the Newark airport after we came back from Paris. We’d planned to meet up again in San Francisco for one last week before he returned to work. Instead, he canceled a few days before our meeting. His leave had gone terribly over budget, he said, and he wanted to spend time alone before heading back to work. We’d do a long weekend in the fall, after he’d readjusted to work. Sounded good to me.

I tried to arrange a rendezvous over Thanksgiving and then again over Christmas, but both times he demurred. I was on the East Coast for New Year’s and I asked him if I should stop in Chicago on my way home. He never gave me a straight answer until I pushed the issue. He said it wasn’t a good time.

So our story is unfinished. We send each other text messages several times a week, and I consider him one of my best friends. And yet, I still can’t help wondering what things would be like if we’d met under different circumstances.

Once, while walking along the Seine (you can’t make this stuff up), he told me how sad he was that our time together was drawing to a close. Half-joking, I suggested he take me away from my life of crime and make an honest man of me. He said he wished he could, and I believed him. I still believe him. But I also know that we live in a real world where people click and then discover all kinds of complications. We just happened to know the complications in advance, and then went on the honeymoon, only then to discover how much we liked each other. For now, I continue to mentor guys in the ways of love with other men. Hector has returned to work with confidence, and he has no trouble meeting guys. I encourage him to date. If I know the way Hector’s mind works he won’t even think about embarking on any kind of serious relationship – with me or anyone – until he’s had more practice. In the process he might meet the one guy who’s perfect for him, and good for him if he does.

I know nothing serious could grow between us until I retire from the skin trade. I certainly couldn’t date a hooker – I’m way too insecure for that – and I wouldn’t expect anybody else to. But I’m not planning to escort for the rest of my life. I expect I’ll leave Vegas eventually too; there’s way too much world out there for me to stay in the desert. I don’t expect anything as widescreen as a limo or flowers or being “saved” by anyone (with or without a lot of money); I gave up on that fantasy a long time ago. What’s different for me now is that I’m able to imagine somebody else – maybe Hector, maybe not – in the picture with me on whatever comes next. And that means seeing things through a whole new lens.

Now, before getting all hot and bothered, let’s look at the actual evidence that’s available: This happened before the president arrived in the country. The agents in question are not members of the presidential protective division. Officials have said that some of the agents under investigation “may merely have been attending a party and violating curfew,” according to ABC News. Still, Republican congressmen Peter King (N.Y.) and Darrell Issa (Calif.) have claimed that the incident could leave the agents vulnerable to blackmail.

Dan Emmett, a two-decade Secret Service veteran, disagrees. “I spent six years in the CIA after I left the Secret Service and am well familiar with sexual blackmail espionage,” he told ABC. “It is a tactic, but I just don’t see that here. The Secret Service is not an intelligence organization, it’s law enforcement.” He also noted that prostitution is legal in parts of Colombia and that “this is not a criminal conduct type of situation, it’s strictly personal conduct.” (That’s an important distinction — although it might not spare the agents their jobs: Paul Morrissey, the Secret Service’s assistant director, told CNN that the agency has a “zero tolerance policy on personal misconduct.”)

Rep. Peter King, who was briefed on the investigation, says a “significant number” of the agents involved brought women back to their hotel on the night in question and that the women are “presumed” to be prostitutes. But it hasn’t been confirmed. It’s alleged that one of those women refused to leave the agents’ room the next morning until she was given money, but we have no clue whether there was negotiation over her services before she came to the room, or why there was an alleged disagreement over, or delay in, payment. Based on news reports, it could be that Secret Service agents had a massive orgy with Colombian prostitutes — or that one agent had a date that ended with a disagreement over money. We just don’t know.

No matter: The American public loves a good sex scandal, especially one involving politicians or law enforcement — and with this story, we have have bit of both. We never tire of seeing authority figures felled by their sexual appetites, do we? Stories like this function as an allegory for our own repressed desires, our terror of the power of sex, and fear of losing control. I have but one question: How long before the porn parody is made?

But that hasn’t stopped conservatives from claiming that the drop is a result of, you guessed it, abstinence education and, paradoxically, an increase in abortions.

Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America expressed her outrage over the CDC analysis: “They don’t even mention the fact there’s been a tremendous increase in effectiveness and pervasiveness of abstinence education. They don’t mention the fact that teen sexual activity, by their own admission, is down.” As Think Progress noted this week, teen birth rates are actually highest in states with abstinence-only policies. Not only has it been widely documented that such programs are largely ineffective, it’s also been shown that such programs may prevent contraception use.

Now, it’s true that teens — specifically 15- and 16-year-olds — are delaying sexual activity, but the change in contraceptive use over the years has been much more profound, and there has been no significant change in sexual activity among 18- and 19-year-olds. What’s more, there was no change in sexual activity among teens, period, from 2008 on, says Laura Lindberg, senior research associate at Guttmacher, so the recent decline in teens births certainly can’t be attributed to abstinence. Also, it should be noted that abstinence can be the result of any number of social influences, not necessarily abstinence-only education. (Consider research showing that teens who receive sex education are much more likely to delay sex.)

Bill Albert, chief program officer at the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, told me that arguments like Crouse’s have a problem of “simple chronology.” The teen birth rate peaked in 1991, “some years before the federal investment in abstinence education,” he said. “So it’s clearly not responsible for declines that began in 1991.” In fact, he says, “The teen birth rate increased during the height of the federal investment in abstinence education. Those who would credit abstinence [for the decline] should also take the blame for the increases.” Albert added, “Researchers who have looked at it closely over the past several years tend to believe it is contraception that is making the difference. If the abstinence education programs are helping teens to use contraception more consistently, then we should thank them, but I don’t think that’s what they’re doing.”

Crouse isn’t the only conservative twisting the latest CDC news to fit an anti-choice agenda: In a piece titled “Credit Abstinence With Helping Reduce Teen Birth Rates,” on the anti-choice site LifeNews.com, Kristan Hawkins writes, “While the birth rate has fallen, it must be made clear that the CDC is looking at the birth rate and not the pregnancy rate in teens,” and then claims that the teen abortion rate has increased, without citing any evidence. She must have missed this headline from February: “Teen Pregnancy, Abortion Rates at Record Low” — that’s according to research from Guttmacher. In 2008, the most recent year for which data is available, the teen abortion rate was down 59 percent from its peak in 1988.

Hawkins’ next target? Why, contraception, of course. “It cannot be stated enough that 50% of women who are using some form of contraception find themselves unexpectedly pregnant.” Again, she offers no citation, but being a contraception user (i.e., you have used a condom recently) is different from using it correctly every time. According to Guttmacher, 54 percent of women who have had abortions became pregnant during a month when they used contraception — but a minority of those women used the method correctly. She adds that “contraception is not an effective means of preventing pregnancy 100% of the time” — right, just 99.9 percent of the time, in the case of oral contraceptives, when used correctly. (Abstinence, when it’s followed 100 percent of the time, really has that compelling 0.1 percent advantage.)

If anything, such data should recommend a need for better sex education and access to long-term methods of birth control.

My favorite part of her rant, though, is where she equates Plan B with abortion. This anti-science party trick just does not get old! “Most importantly, we cannot the [sic] measure the usage of abortion-causing emergency contraception (Plan B) and the role it is now playing in decreasing teen birth rates.” For the millionth time: Plan B is an emergency contraception. It prevents ovulation and fertilization, just as with all hormonal contraceptives. It does not cause abortion if the egg has already implanted, which is the medical definition of pregnancy, according to both the National Institutes of Health and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. In short: The increase she cites in Plan B use is actually yet more evidence for the argument that greater contraception use caused the decline in teen births.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, either: It happens every time the CDC releases a new report finding a continuing drop in teen pregnancy. What these reactions make clear is that no evidence — whether it’s on the benefits of making contraception widely accessible or the positive impact of comprehensive sex ed — will stop the war on sex. Where there is a scientific study providing such proof, there will be a right-winger willing to gesture vaguely in the direction of mythical evidence to the contrary. “In a way, I’m so tired of this debate,” says Albert. “Why don’t both sides declare victory and go home? If we say, ‘OK, you win,’ can we stop?”