Jezebel posted the most adorably bizarre video of a penis doing its best Teletubbie impersonation (NSFW). I immediately reposted onto my Facebook because, you know, sharing is caring. And I care enough to subject my friends to my strange sense of humor.

While I get that not everyone finds a penis playing peek-a-boo with its own foreskin as funny as I do I did not anticipate the response left by a male friend:

Surgically altering babies should be outlawed. That is an adult decision. Otherwise it’s mutilation. Period.

The issue of circumcision is always one I avoid. I do not have a penis and will not have children so I get to steer clear of this hot-button sexual values issue. But, as I repeatedly read his comment, I realized what was bothering me about it: I prefer a foreskin-free penis.

Typing that sentence makes me wince. Who am I to have a preference for cut cock? Is it shallow? Destructive to men? I try to rationalize my desire via the freedom of personal choice.

Then I realize that this choice is not as personal as I would like to believe. I live in a culture that regularly circumcises boy babies. Nearly every penis I have seen up close has been sans-foreskin. The penis in its given state looks as alien to me as the unmodified female form looks to so many guys raised in a Maxim world.

Sex education is boring. I say this as someone teaching in high schools and I will say it again: the way we teach sex is boring and outdated. Sex education needs a makeover if it is going to remain relevant and effective.

I spent yesterday at a high school giving a talk about safer sex. Perhaps it was the sunshine or the leftover Halloween candy, but the kids were on one rowdy ride yesterday. Nothing could calm them down, not even the verbal castigation thrown down by a school director. There was only one moment when they paused and payed attention: during a video explaining viruses. I watched them with great fascination as they became focused on the information.

The school directors talked to me later and apologized for the students' behavior but I was grateful for the insight. I don't think we can use simple lectures to compete with the multimedia onslaught defining the new generations. One of my undergraduate professors was onto something when he divided his class between documentaries, online articles, academic journals and dynamic lectures. Simply stating a fact or idea will not make it stick, not when our minds are constantly processing high volumes of information presented in much prettier packages.

I want to mak sex education shinier. I want to use available media to explain complicated ideas about sex and create songs to make facts stick. Whatever we are doing to promote safer sex and sexual literacy is working but it needs to work...

Is there such a thing as a sex addict? In a culture of plenty we tend to pathologize our access to excess and any pleasure seeking behavior can be an addiction. Shopping addiction, gambling addiction, food addiction: all seemingly innocuous behaviors that can be considered an addiction if taken beyond the blurred line of social acceptability.         

Addiction is real. I have seen loved ones battle with drug addictions all the way to their graves. The successful ones went through hell while their bodies went through the painful process of adapting to a drug-free state. It seems disrespectful to the severity of addiction to lump compulsive pleasure-seeking activity into the same category.

Proponents of sexual addiction recovery insist that because sex activates reward centers in the brain, addiction is real and serious enough to require intervention. Some invoke models of psychological dependency while others argue that sexual addiction is part of compulsive behavior. The addict or compulsive person is powerless to stop the behaviors on their own.

Treatments for sexual addiction center on support groups and other therapeutic measures. The most prevalent self-help group is Sex Addicts Anonymous, a self-help program modeled directly from the 12-steps used in Alcoholics anonymous and...

A pharmacy in London launched a calculator that uses the six degrees of separation concept to determine your number of indirect sex partners. The idea is that every time you sleep with one person you sleep with all of their previous sex partners. I get the idea but the execution is a low-grade scare tactic rooted in false assumptions about sexual risk.

Risk of contraction is not about a number pinned to your slutty lapel. Risk of contraction is about specific behaviors. Did you use a condom every time? Was lube involved? Were there visible sores? Were you having oral, vaginal or anal sex? Did your partners use protection? These are questions that can help determine your risk, not the number of sexual partners.

I know, we like nominal figures to figure out where we lay on the sexual totem pole. A number is comforting, easy to understand but ultimately misleading. Think about BMIs or simply weight. The numbers say something but they don’t paint the whole picture.

The heart of the calculator is in the right place but the underlying assumption is that fear will motivate people to use condoms and get tested. The fear of slut shaming is an easily accessible tool. I looked around at comments from people who calculated their indirect sexual partners and one concept popped up repeatedly: EEEWW! DIRTY!!

We make the immediate mental leap from indirect sex partners...

            The current ACORN scandal says more about our assumptions of sex work and class than it says about the organization itself. Consider the whom and how of those breaking the story: two white, middle-class conservative students, both with a marked disdain for the organization, decided to expose the criminal mentality of ACORN by seeking advice on the financial side of prostitution. James O’Keefe, the man who posed as a pimp in the videos, even appeared on Fox’s Morning News show wearing a “pimp” costume while discussing his expose.  

            Aside from the questionable journalism ethics, which James Rainey discusses in the LA Times, there is something insidious about the way these activists decided to expose what they called a “thug mentality” in ACORN. I try to picture how this scenario would play out if activists were trying to expose criminal compliance in organizations for the wealthy, but any conservative figures have been ousting themselves so...