-Everything you wanted to know about sex you must figure out for yourself-

This is what I do when I have too much time on my hands. I read materials across the ideological spectrum, and create causes that maintain my interest for approximately 20 minutes, or long enough to embarrass myself in the form of a letter to the editor. Like this one, which I sent to a student editor plunging into the sex-advice business:

Since I’ve enjoyed your columns in the past, I’m willing to grant you some leeway for your eager entry into the glutted sex-advice business.

This said, Melissa, please tell me you plan to cover other happenings, as well.
Give us the stories about rarities. Tell us the story of an autistic harpist. Tell us how the woman living under the highway with no front teeth survives the winter. But above all, do not waste your time on the paper fielding the endlessly repetitive body of questions resembling an endlessly repetitive Girls-gone-wild infomercial loop.

Your very first installment proves how unimaginative this feature will become; we’ve read all these questions before. So have your contributors, I would guess, but it doesn’t stop them from offering gossip so old it dies before it flows from their pens. How many different ways can you answer these questions, Melissa?

Dan Savage and the Advice Goddess are clever enough to use anecdotes about themselves to spruce up the canned advice, and I’m certain you are, too. I’ll even confess to some anticipation of reading the smug asides (often the only original words in the column) and evaluate the truth and the fiction in your own shared experiences.

Thankfully, you stop just short of claiming to offer a public service, something I’ve heard plenty of insecure sex gurus claim with the puffed up self-importance of a middle-aged suit leering at a twenty-year old coffee-slinger. If you had pretended this was more than entertainment, it would have been the deal breaker.

Eisenhower-era prudes may be in power, but anyone who truly believes adults require this sort of common sense instruction – then or now – ought to have their head, and not their genitals, examined. Lust makes people commit a lot of nonsensical acts, but they do so with full knowledge of right and wrong, healthy and unhealthy, hideous and kinky. It is only the exhibitionist in them that shares their story with you.

As harmless entertainment, this column is appropriate Opinions page material. If you’ll deign to take on other subjects every now and then, I will even taste your confections in future issues. You promise that no question will gross you out, I promise you cannot faze me with answer. As long as this is your format, it can only be sugar you offer us, not spice.

But in the end, we do not need you to entertain us for us to appreciate you; your readers love you just the way you are.

--> While it was never published, my letter did get an e-mail response. After some consultation with friends, some false starts, and much handwringing, I wrote a response to the response. I promise it will be the last unless something dramatic happens.
Enjoy life.