KEY POINTS:
The silly season's most curious story was Paris Hilton's announcement that she's slept with no more than "a couple of men".
I haven't actually got around to viewing the docudrama 1 Night in Paris but presumably it establishes that her co-star Rick Salomon is one member of this exclusive club. The question is: which of the three fiances, various boyfriends, innumerable escorts and who knows how many ships that passed in the night is the other?
Perhaps Hilton was using the term 'sleep with' in the literal sense of spending seven or eight hours in close proximity to whilst stacking Zs. Or maybe, knowing that the media diligently pander to that tragic sub-stratum of society that hangs on her every word, she's decided to see how self-evidently absurd her utterances have to be before they no longer get reported and pored over.
In second place was the news that a female American school teacher accused of having sex with a teenage boy 300 times had been charged with rape.
Female-on-male rape has been likened to the Loch Ness monster in that reports of it surface from time to time but there's little in the way of concrete evidence to prove it actually exists. When you factor in the problematical technical issues, the fact that the boy wasn't held captive and the volume of sexual activity, the prosecution would seem to be banking on the jury adopting a much broader concept of what constitutes rape than has hitherto applied.
Then there was the suggestion that the US pornography industry would join the banks and car manufacturers in seeking a multi-billion-dollar bail-out from the federal Government. "People are too depressed to be sexually active," said Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt. "This is very unhealthy. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex."
Taken together, these developments might be seen as straws in the wind indicating that the tide of sexual permissiveness which has rolled in relentlessly since the 1960s has reached high water mark and may even be receding.
But just as Hilton, for whatever reason, is almost certainly being economical with the truth, it's highly likely that Flynt, who has a history of pranks and provocations, was simply trying to get a rise out of those who oppose government bailouts under any circumstances.
If so, he succeeded. "This is what happens when you start handing out free money," thundered one economist. "Everyone wants their 'fair share'."
In fact, high tide might still be some way off. Porn seems to be weathering the economic storm better than many sectors of the economy. Online sales are up and this week saw the launch of iPinkVisual, a website that enables iPhone users to access explicit videos. The circumstances in which it would be socially acceptable to avail oneself of this service are not readily apparent but you'd have to assume its backers have done their homework.
Given that sex is unlikely to be shifted from the forefront of popular culture any time soon, it was timely of Playboy magazine to produce a list of the 55 most important people in sex of the past 55 years. A cursory examination of such lists usually reveals that were jotted down on the back of an envelope over several bottles of wine but, if anything, Playboy's list errs on the side of earnestness. Sex researchers, therapists and the authors of how-to-do-it-proper manuals are heavily represented with Alfred Kinsey in first place and Alex Joy of Sex Comfort in fourth, while the inventors of the birth control pill, the worldwide web and Viagra make the top 10.
Inevitably, though, there are oddities. Monica Lewinsky is in sixth place, on the grounds that if it wasn't for her dalliance with Bill Clinton, Al Gore would have won the 2000 election and the world would've been spared George W. Bush.
Marilyn Monroe (5) and Madonna (10) seem fair enough but Bo Derek, Farrah Fawcett and Pamela Anderson? And to place novelist Vladimir Nabokov in 22nd place on the basis of his subversive comic masterpiece Lolita is to accord far too much significance to those who demanded the book be banned without having read it or, if they did, without having understood a word of it.
Anti-porn crusader Charles Keating Jr (35) declared that pornography was a communist plot, which is a bit rich coming from a man whose role in the 1980s savings and loans scandal cost the US taxpayer US$9 billion. Pranks notwithstanding, the porn merchants won't be looking for a handout. They're doing quite nicely thank you.
