Sex and status disclosure in the age of Grindr and undetectable HIV-levels.

How Cosmo, with 64 international editions and a readership that would make it the world’s 16th largest country, conquered the globe.

A survey of sex on a Saturday night in New York City.

The author interviews her mother about life as a secretary at Playboy in 1960s New York City.

A profile of Doc Johnson, “the Procter & Gamble of sex toys.”

On the Boston mobster’s exes.

I am gay. I am Mormon. I am married to a woman. I am happy every single day. My life is filled with joy. I have a wonderful sex life. And I’ve been married for ten years, and plan to be married for decades more to come to the woman of my dreams.

A former sex worker interviews a longtime John on how it feels to pay for it.

A profile of Fleshlight inventor Steve Shubin.

The anatomy of a sex abuse scandal at a Christian school in Oklahoma.

Ostensibly straight black men who have sex with other men.

A summer as a whorehouse Madame.

How one company is rethinking the business of sex toys.

On having sex with your high school girlfriend – and paying the price for years to come.

Iran’s sex-obsessed old guard reacts to a state where “the majority of the population is young.… Young people by nature are horny. Because they are horny, they like to watch satellite channels where there are films or programs they can jerk off to.… We have to do something about satellite television to keep society free from this horny jerk-off situation.”

How a scandal involving sex, money and a Wiccan coven brought down yogi John Friend.

A profile Hunter Moore,  the founder of the controversial revenge-porn site Is Anyone Up.

Eight women remember their first times having sex.

How the former U.N. weapon’s inspector and “loudest and most credible skeptic of the Bush administration’s contention that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction” ended up embroiled in an Internet sex scandal involving underage girls.

The 34-year-old virgin father-of-15 at the forefront of the controversial DIY sperm donation movement.

A history.

 The explosion of publishing created a much more democratic and permanent network of public communication than had ever existed before. The mass proliferation of newspapers and magazines, and a new-found fascination with the boundaries of the private and the public, combined to produce the first age of sexual celebrity.

In a dark echo of Rear Window, a wheelchair-bound hacker seizes control of hundreds of webcams, most of them aimed at young women’s beds.

The dissolution of Brooklyn softcore skin-mag Jacques and the marriage of the couple that created it.

How Viennese psychologist Ernest Dichter transformed advertising:

What makes soap interesting? Why choose one brand over another? Dichter’s first contract was with the Compton Advertising Agency, to help them sell Ivory soap. Market research typically involved asking shoppers questions like “Why do you use this brand of soap?” Or, more provocatively, “Why don’t you use this brand of soap?” Regarding such lines of inquiry as useless, Dichter instead conducted a hundred so-called “depth interviews”, or open-ended conversations, about his subjects’ most recent scrubbing experiences. The approach was not unlike therapy, with Dichter mining the responses for encoded, unconscious motives and desires. In the case of soap, he found that bathing was a ritual that afforded rare moments of personal indulgence, particularly before a romantic date (“You never can tell,” explained one woman). He discerned an erotic element to bathing, observing that “one of the few occasions when the puritanical American [is] allowed to caress himself or herself [is] while applying soap.” As for why customers picked a particular brand, Dichter concluded that it wasn’t exactly the smell or price or look or feel of the soap, but all that and something else besides—that is, the gestalt or “personality” of the soap.

A profile of a porn star on trial.