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But then the Supreme Court ruled the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional and dismissed a Proposition 8 appeal, clearing the way for same-sex marriage in California.

Bell is far from the first straight person to boycott the institution in the name of marriage equality. Back in 2003, the Village Voice ran a piece about the trend of doing just that among progressive heterosexual couples. The National Marriage Boycott has gotten more than 15,000 signatures from gays and straights alike who have pledged to wait to marry until "full federal marriage equality" is achieved. Shortly after Bell's announcement, a straight couple that had "always said we wouldn't marry while our queer friends couldn't" took to MetaFilter to ask whether they should marry now, given the SCOTUS news.

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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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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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It seems to be the year of female Internet vigilantes taking on male misbehavior. Just last week, as Salon's Anna North reported, a woman outed on Facebook a stranger she allegedly overheard boasting about his marital infidelities. Naturally, the post went viral. A couple of months ago, Adria Richards tweeted a photo of men at a tech conference who she claimed were making sexually inappropriate jokes. It too blew up online, and one of the men was fired.

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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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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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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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"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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Christopher and I had hiked four miles through the mossy Point Reyes forest to a dramatic cliff overlooking the ocean. We sat in the dirt, which was pockmarked with mouse holes and accented with ice plant in electric-pink bloom. Turquoise waves churned below and a seagull took stomach-turning dives as we read each other letters we had written moments before alongside a shady creek. These notes -- our individual expressions of why we wanted to make this commitment -- said the same things with different words. We cried, hugged and then took turns asking, "Will you marry me?" We both said yes and, hands shaking, slipped engagement rings on each other's fingers.

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In case you missed these viral videos, a recap: On Tuesday's "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon," the host challenged "The Office's" Krasinski to a lip-sync off. They went back and forth, taking turns performing songs of their choice -- notably, songs by high-pitched women for maximum laugh factor -- and ended with the grand finale of Krasinski pretending to sing "I'll Make Love to You" by Boyz II Men and waving Fallon onto the stage for an intimate embrace. This morning, several publications ran coverage of the skit with the apparently hilarious screenshot of the two faux-crooning with their faces inches apart. (For the record, Salon posted the video, but ran with a different still.)

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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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