You buy purportedly educational items, such as the tiny, Cracker Jack-box-toy-sized "Exotic sexual artistry FROM AROUND THE WORLD!" booklet which illustrates a dozen sexual positions and their countries of origin.

You scoop up your cache of Lovemaking Aids and escort your quarry back to your moldy studio apartment, where intense pleasures and scorching intimacy erupt as you snap on a glow-in-the-dark Casper the Friendly Ghost condom atop which you've applied on a pink studded tickler, with "intimate gel" rubbed on one of your nips and "love drops" on the other, and a smiley face daubed on your tummy in strawberry-flavored edible neon body paints. You both giggle at the bawdy cleverness of the "pecker stretcher" joke while doing the "wheelbarrow position" as instructed by the tiny booklet, and she doesn't even realize you've been fantasizing about the hairy-lapped, Farrah-feathered chippie whose scratch-off panties you just rubbed away with a nickel.

Sound like fun? Haven't you always wanted a glow-in-the-dark cock and an ass that tastes like vanilla and ginseng?

"Haven't you always wanted a glow-in-the-dark cock and an ass that tastes like vanilla and ginseng?"

I wanted to sample these forbidden pleasures for myself, so I blew a roll of quarters. I should note that the cellophane wrapping is way too tight on most of these packages, and one risks losing one's erection in the process of opening a novelty item intended to augment said erection. As part of my research, I employed the services of my trusty female assistant, who says the ribbed rubber and luminous studded tickler did nothing to intensify her pleasure. The prolong crème mildly deadened my penile sensations, but nothing major. We couldn't bring ourselves to use the banana-flavored condom, but I tasted it, and it tasted sweet and banana-y, and this doesn't make me a fag, I swear. The flavored neon body paints had the texture and taste of strawberry cake frosting, which is pleasant, although hardly aphrodisiacal. The only item which seemed to help were the flavored body drops, which seemed to contain some Ben-Gay-style heat-enhancing compound that for some reason actually got the blood flowing in all the right places. But overall, the most noticeable effect these novelties had on our lovemaking was that we were both laughing during sex.

And then I wondered about the people who don't find this stuff silly. What about the losers who are so socially retarded that they learn about sex from a beat-up steel machine in a germ-pit public bathroom? What about the social cripples and terminally homely? What about the sexual untouchables?

God bless them.

God bless the people who can just have sex without attaching meaning to it, who are aroused at the very mention of sex, who find all dirty jokes funny, no matter how cheesy. God bless the people who are just idiotic, ugly, and drunk enough to enjoy these items at face value.

I wish I was like that. It'd be a relief to be an animal.

Sex has meaning, but its meaning is biological rather than personal. People who have sex shouldn't write about it, and people who write about sex shouldn't have it.