John Mayer, Playa (Photo via Splash)

An article by iVillage/AskMen.com, from their "Inside the Men's Locker Room" series (gag us with a jock strap), attempts to explain why men love casual relationships "and why you might too!" Except that the advice is about as reflective of real-life as Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner. Let's break it down:
1. According to the dudes in the locker room, "Casual sex-only flings never end up [in a nasty split]; you may break up, but you do so with a wan 'oh well' grin rather than a 'God, I hate you' glare." Riiiiiight. Show us a booty caller who's never broken a heart and we'll show you our unicorn...

Sex and the City is a movie! It's coming out so soon! It's so exciting! You're going to have to explain to me why it's so exciting, because I truly don't understand, though I wish I did--it's everything I like in my fluffy television: pretty ladies, fancy clothes, and storylines about love and doing it a lot. There's a lot of doing it--which is right and reasonable, considering that anything else would be false advertising and everyone knows that that is an extremely rude thing to do.

I've seen two and one half episodes of the show, and this is perhaps an unfair stretch of evidence upon which to base my completely un-objective and totally biased opinion, but it strikes me as a bad show, and a shallow show that tries to hit hard at the Universal Experience of Women and just mostly reduces everything to a sad joke, never quite goes far enough, always pulls back from the truly interesting and the risqué. Wouldn't a show about sex, in Manhattan, want to be totally risqué? I mean, the episode about threesomes--that could have been kind of hot, it could have been a little dirty, it could have been heartbreaking and also totally fascinating. Except in the end, ha ha, Charlotte's man only wanted to screw around with another woman! There goes that relationship, ha ha! And it's an easy punch line that just makes me really irritated.

Maybe I'm asking too much from a throwaway HBO show. No, I know I am. Maybe I am knee-jerk reacting against all the crazy hype and the howling. I do that sometimes. Maybe I'm the wrong demographic--it could be that I don't understand these women because I am not the right age--and frankly, I can't tell if I am too old or too young. Sometimes, I feel too old, because these ladies are doing retarded teenager things like stalking the boy they like at church, tee hee, or giving in to his creepy manipulations to have a threesome, or getting mad that someone they dumped found someone else so they call him and make him come running back.

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Dr. Kate,

I'm a 48-year-old woman and I have a new boyfriend. Recently we started having sex, and I haven't been with a man in quite a while. It really hurt, and he couldn't fully penetrate me. I even bled a little. What can I do to help my situation? I don't want this to happen all the time.

Back in the Saddle

Dear Back,

Becoming sexually active again after a long sex break is similar to actual first-time sex. Pain during sex can be chronic--vulvodynia is a big problem for many women--or situational. It certainly is not made up, and not something you have to live with. So some things that might help:

• Make sure you get enough foreplay so you're really aroused before intercourse (you want to have plenty of blood flowing to your vagina to make penetration easier).

• He can insert a finger in your vagina first, so you can judge how you're doing arousal-wise before actually having intercourse.

In honor of the last week of Orgasm Month, we advise one O-less gal on how to make the earth move:

Dear Em and Lo,

I am a sophomore in college, and I've been with the same spectacular guy since I was 14. After years together (no on-and-off nonsense) I still have the major hots for him, and I think he is the most attractive piece of ass on earth.

We didn't have sex until our third year together, and we were both virgins. At that point though, the relationship was long-distance, so we didn't have sex more than 10 times per year, though we started phone sex very early in our relationship. I'm talking like 15 years old. What can I say? We were precocious. And very, very horny...

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We can't believe that we forgot to include Tiny Fey and Amy Poehler when we did a Funny Ladies edition of Who Would You Do last year. Since then, there's been a lot of chatter about whether or not women are funny, so we figured it was a good time to revisit the topic. Plus, we'd much rather think about Baby Mama than that other movie starring a bunch of ladies that's about to open that we refuse to address just yet. So, let's put the women of SNL up against each other in a head-to-head contest...who would you do?

Tina Fey. Pros: She's totally nailed that sexy librarian thing. She was the first female head writer of SNL...hello dom! She's responsible for "Mom Jeans" and "Bitch Is the New Black" on SNL. Cons: Wouldn't you just feel like the biggest loser ever waking up next to her?

Amy Poehler. Pros: She might bring along hubby Will Arnett. She looks like a cheerleader but has a potty mouth (yay, dirty talk!) and is a self-proclaimed feminist. She once lamented on SNL, "Ladies, what's up with all the deforestation going on down there? You need hair down there! There was a time when a lady garden was as big as a slice of New York pizza!" Love her. Cons: Like Juno McDuff, she's just a bit too aint-I-cute-and-funny.