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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But it's no Human Sexuality textbook: De Botton, author of the bestseller "How Proust Can Change Your Life," is more concerned with big ideas than hard evidence. For example, he writes, "The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence."

This seems intuitively true and wise, doesn't it? But desire is not so easily explained. It requires great temerity to make such grand, un-footnoted generalizations given that sex researchers continue to devote their lives to finding empirical evidence to answer such big questions, and such research is often highly nuanced and not easily summarized.

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Infidelity, sex tapes and scandal -- oh my!

You would think it was 1998 from our shock at the power of sex to take down powerful men. But no, it's 2012, and we still find ourselves shaking our heads at the thought that David Petraeus could risk his position as head of the CIA by carrying on an extramarital affair with his biographer, that a team of Secret Service agents could put their jobs on the line for a Colombian prostitute or that Chinese politicians could be captured in flagrante at a sex party or fall for a so-called "honey trap." We're astounded that Kristen Stewart could possibly desire more than Edward Cullen himself or that 76-year-old Fred Willard could be arrested at an adult theater. And when our upstanding neighbors are revealed to be clients of the "Zumba prostitute," we still clasp our pearls.

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Welcome to San Francisco porn studio Kink.com's new sex-ed classes for adults. Forget the sober diagrams and condom-clad bananas of your high school days; these classes feature real, live naked people having real, live sex. Instead of a sterile classroom, these workshops take place on elaborately designed porn sets (without cameras present). The class subjects range from oral sex to dirty talk, but this week I happened to attend a "g-spot and female ejaculation" class led by adult performer and director Madison Young. Our set: an ornate Edwardian living room filled with oriental rugs, red velvet curtains and dark wood paneling.

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In a court motion, the defense claims that the state law against bestiality deprives 32-year-old Carlos Romero of his "personal liberty and autonomy when it comes to private intimate activities."

But it's actually not quite as crazy a move as it might seem. The lawyers aren't arguing that Romero necessarily has a right to sex with donkeys, or any other farm animals for that matter. They're specifically targeting the language of Florida's anti-bestiality law, which does not require proof that an animal has been harmed or "of the sexual activity being non-consensual," or even of penetrative sexual contact.

The attorneys write, "Therefore, the only possible rational basis for the statute is a moral objection to sexual acts considered deviant or downright 'disgusting.'" And that, they argue, is unconstitutional: "The personal morals of the majority, whether based on religion or traditions, cannot be used as a reason to deprive a person of their personal liberties."

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The key here is epi-marks, which control how genes are expressed, and they just might explain the evolutionary stumper of why, if homosexuality is hereditary, it hasn't been eliminated from the gene pool.

As a press release explains in almost comprehensible terms, the study finds "sex-specific epi-marks, which normally do not pass between generations and are thus 'erased,' can lead to homosexuality when they escape erasure and are transmitted from father to daughter or mother to son."

U.S. News translates that: "A lesbian will almost always get the trait from her father, while a gay man will get the trait from his mother."

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For those of you who are visiting the World Wide Web for the first time ever, a GIF is a static or animated, looped image that's been compressed for quick loading. The rest of you have probably come across your fair share of GIFs showing dramatic reactions, catly shenanigans, dancing politicians or Ryan Gosling doing any number of things. Most GIFs are meant for laughs, but, increasingly, they're being designed to tickle a different bone.

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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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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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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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This popular conception of young men is the subject of Smiler's new book, "Challenging Casanova: Beyond the Stereotype of the Promiscuous Young Male." This stereotype "tells us that guys are primarily interested in sex, not relationships," he writes. "This contributes to the notion that guys are emotional clods who are incapable of connecting with their partners because, hey, they're just guys, and guys are only interested in sex. " The result is the belief that "guys shouldn't be expected to achieve any type of 'real' emotional intimacy with their partners."

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So, every year Salon comes up with a list to counter People magazine’s “sexiest men” issue — a group of guys who are more than just beefcakes.

[Cracks up]

This time around we’ve chosen you as our No. 1 “sexiest man.”

Well ... thank you. I appreciate that.

How does it feel?

A little strange. I don’t think I’ve thought of being chosen as a “sexiest man” before.

Those shirtless photos for Out magazine, I’ve seen them circulated online by men and women alike. What’s it like suddenly becoming not only a sex symbol, but a sexuality-spanning sex symbol?

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That’s how Long ended up writing his new book about the evolution of copulation, which is cheekily titled, "The Dawn of the Deed: The Prehistoric Origins of Sex." From sharks that mate while doing a headstand on the ocean floor to ducks with enormous corkscrew penises, he humorously details the how and why of that funny little act we call sex. At times, the book is a bit heavy on autobiography of his paleontological finds, but that’s more than made up for by copious entertaining anecdotes about things like fruit bat fellatio and necrophilic snakes. Also, two words: T-rex sex.

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This was my introduction to the world of computer-generated X-rated fare via Renderotica, the leading purveyor of such content, and goblins are only the start of it. There are zombies, aliens, demons, werewolves, vampires -- virtually every ghoulish character found at your local Halloween emporium -- and, folks, they are butt-naked and boning. Most often, these are interspecies pairings between a female human and a male otherworldly beast of some sort (or beasts, plural). It isn't all action shots, though: There are pinups of virtual girls, ranging from the tame (i.e., bikini poses) to the bizarre (i.e., a woman rendered with a vagina for a mouth).

And there's more! The site also sells tools for making your own virtual porn, including special packs of designer "naughty bits" (e.g., the "Hot Beef Injection" download for $12), fetish gear, sex toys, positions and, yes, even artfully constructed pubic hair.

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But, dude. It's just not true.

Contrary to the headlines, the study in question looked specifically at teenagers' self-made sexual content that was posted online. Researchers from Britain's Internet Watch Foundation found that 88 percent of the "self-generated, sexually explicit online images and videos of young people" encountered by researchers "had been taken from their original location and uploaded onto other websites," which are referred to as "parasite websites." That's very different from saying that 88 percent of private, self-made porn unwittingly ends up online. As IWF notes in a press release, "a parasite website is defined as a website created for the purpose of displaying sexual content ... which have apparently been taken/harvested from the website to which they were originally uploaded" -- typically a social networking or webcam site.

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I was researching a popular "jailbait" message board this week when I discovered a thread filled with webcam screengrabs and videos of what looked to be pubescent girls in various states of undress and sexual activity. I've come across "barely legal" porn before, but this was different: These girls looked like they weren't a day over 13. The intimate webcam context lent an additional believability to it: It was easy to imagine someone convincing each of these seemingly underage girls via video chat to take off their clothes, all the while recording the action to later distribute far and wide or even to use as a bribe to get future "shows" out of them.

That is what so-called "cappers" do -- and they are what brought me to the jailbait message board in the first place, and ultimately to the FBI. They screen-capture live webcam chats -- which can involve anywhere from two to several hundred people -- while pressuring girls and young women to strip down. It starts with "show your stomach!" and quickly progresses from there like an online game of Truth or Dare. Sometimes all they get is a quick bra flash; other times they get a full-on "bate" (when a girl masturbates on camera). In the capper community, the latter would be called a "win."

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Some dedicated buyers-of-sex, or "hobbyists," as they call themselves, regularly take to specialized message boards for everything from reviewing escorts' various talents to debating presidential politics. As the names of 21 alleged clients of Alexis Wright, the accused instructor, are circulated, the Zumba case has become a hot topic.

Unsurprisingly, hobbyists seem chiefly concerned with the issue of law enforcement naming and shaming johns, an increasingly popular approach. "I think the world needs to evolve a little," says "flyboyfromca" on the Erotic Review, the so-called Yelp for prostitution. "As a member of the community, I support our right to spend time with the people we choose, and I support a woman's choice to do what she wants with her time."

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