K-Fed wants to lose his K-Fat.

Oops…looks like even Robert Pattinson isn’t always the best boyfriend.

Kristen Dunst and Jimmy Fallon have a dirty, dirty secret.

This star’s husband only married her to get a Green Card. Rough life.

Polygamy in pop culture. Just as creepy as you think.

Kristen Stewart was immortalized. In Vans.

Is your guy an as*hole? There’s an app for that!

The most depressing thing you’ll read all year.

Meet the fashion minimalists.

Another TLC family hits a speed bump.

Would you wear a sandwich sandal? (I can’t believe I just said that.)

Need a new sports bra? We’ve got 8 you’ll love.

Wait…this painter is blind?!

Justin Bieber is pissing off his fans.

Get a sneak peak at Lauren Conrad’s new book.

Polygamy: because 4 wives is better for ratings than 19 kids.

As I was channel surfing the other day, I paused on TLC to watch an old episode of What Not To Wear. After countless “Umm… no”s, a few “I wish Clinton wasn’t gay”s, and too many moments in the painful-to-watch but wildly-entertaining 360° mirror, the show went to commercial. And before I had a chance to flip back to Teen Mom, across my screen flashed an ad for TLC’s newest reality show: Sister Wives, a show that rethinks “love, marriage, and reality family.”

Yes— if you just clicked on that link, what you saw was correct. TLC (what was formally known as The Learning Channel) will be teaching Americans all about a topic we are just dying to sink our teeth into: Polygamy. Dubbed by many as the real Big Love, the show follows Cody, his 3 wives, 13 kids, and newest fiancé as they all prepare for Cody’s fourth wedding.

Yeah, let that one marinate for a second.
And let us all come together with one big “WTF, TLC?!?”

I’ll be honest, I didn’t think it was possible for TLC to get any more messed up. Growing up, I used to watch A Wedding Story and A Baby Story, tears filling my eyes as I saw how a baby was born or what it took to pull off the perfect wedding. Nowadays, though, I legitimately cannot remember the last time TLC taught me much of anything….besides what it looks like for a happy marriage to go up in (Ed Hardy) flames or when a little person gets a DUI.

Which makes me wonder: what those TLC people are smoking goes on in the TLC boardroom? How do they come up with their stellar frightening TV line up? I don’t know for sure, but I have a feeling there are brownies (yeah, that kind), bean bag chairs and conversations that sound a little like this:

19 Kids and Counting – A small-town family that doesn’t believe in birth control but does believe in a general lack of attention for each individual kid. Every day is like a field trip!

“So, Jon and Kate split up. We’re sorta screwed….”
“Yeah, and the two older girls totally hit their awkward stage.”
“OMG, I know! We can’t sit around and risk the same fate for the other 6. We need a new show. A new family. But we gotta think bigger.”
“We could do a show about fat people.”
“Oh, good call. Get on that. But we need another show with lots of kids. And Less Ed Hardy.”
“Yeah, that one blew up in our faces, right? They seemed so…Christian. We need God-fearing people.”
“Uh, I just saw something on YouTube about a family with, like, 16 kids. All with “J” names.”
[Entire team gets on Google.]
“JEDEDIAH? SOMEONE GET THIS DUGGAR FAMILY ON THE HORN.”

I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant. A show about women who are pregnant….and don’t know it.

“Dude, remember Rescue 911? And it had all those sweet dramatizations? We need one of those shows.”
“Totally. But it needs to have babies in it. Or little people.”
“Truth. That’s pretty much what we do. OK, how about this? Women having babies.”
“Uh, we did that. It was called ‘A Baby Story.’ Let’s take it up a notch…. I’ve got it! Women having babies in toilets!”
“YES! And in cars.”
“Two words: gold mine.”

Toddlers & Tiaras – Outrageous parents forcing their children to spray tan, tease their hair and tap dance….all before the ripe age of 6.

“OK, team, the big guys up stairs are telling me we have to stop stealing show ideas from The Food Network. What ideas do you have for me today?”
“Does that mean we can’t do another cupcake show?”
“Right. And don’t pitch me ‘Steel Chef’ again either.”
“Alright. So, I was flipping back and forth between the Westminster Dog Show and Rugrats this weekend.”
[Team laughs.]
“Ha. I know. I was totally blazing. Anyways, I was really getting into both of them and I was all, ‘you know what would be better than this? PUTTING THEM TOGETHER.’”
“Yeah, little girls in eyeshadow and press-on nails are HOT.”
[Silence.]
“OK, so that was creepy, but there is an untapped market of creepy old men out there. This could be huge.”

The Little Chocalatiers - It’s a show about little people…who make chocolate.

“So, we need a new food reality show.”
“Another one? We already have ten and you know they are just watered down and annoying versions of Food Network shows….”
“Not like this one. Get this: we can do a show about monkeys that make chocolate while training to go into space. The anti-gravity chamber makes it way more delicious and gives the chocolate a lighter flavor, and then…”[Receives awkward stares. Composes himself.]
“OK, fine. How about little people who make chocolate?”
“Can we dip them in chocolate for the promos?”
“Of course!”
[Table erupts in cheers.]

Can we handle an open relationship?

My boyfriend and I have been talking about an open relationship. The distance between us (Boston to LA) is starting to get really hard and our relationship is suffering because of it. But we love each other and neither of us is ready to give up. We’ve tried everything to make this work and now we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with any suitable alternative to our current situation.

Since I decided against dropping out of school to become a porn star in LA (sorry to all my male readers), it looks like our best option at this point is an open relationship. We’d get what we needed when we were apart (attention, orgasms…) but still have each other when we were finally back together. Theoretically, I’ve never really believed that monogamy is human nature, or that being with multiple people means caring less about each one of them. So in an ideal world, an open relationship would eliminate our loneliness without affecting our love for each other.

Sounds pretty perfect. If only I were totally convinced that’s how things would actually play out in the real world…

Let’s break this down.

Ideal World: We remain completely in love, and anyone else is just a casual fling.
Real World: He meets a new girl and wants to pursue a relationship.

Ideal World: We are able to have casual sex with other people without any repercussions to our relationship.
Real World: One of us can’t handle the jealousy and it’s too late (and we’re too far away) to fix it.

Ideal World: There are no STDs!
Real World: He picks up gonorrhea from one of his ladies and gives it to me the next time we’re together.

Ideal World: Our families don’t find out, or are incredibly open-minded and support our decision.
Real World: His mom will forever think of me as “that ho who was sleeping around on her son.”

Ideal World: I meet tons of boys, but he’s too busy with work to meet any girls.
Real World: He’s on dates every Friday night while I’m at home making love to Ben and Jerry.

I’m stuck.
What do you guys think?  Ever been in an open relationship? Did it work?

Share your stories below. Please. I need them.

It’s back-to-school time, and I’ve been spending some time lately thinking about what college means for our sex lives. College is our time to explore anything that interests us to find out what we really like and what type of people we want to become. We explore different majors, career paths, friendships, relationships, and sexualities. College is the first time in our lives most of us can really embrace our sexuality, explore it, and figure out how to truly enjoy it.

I go to a women’s college, so my first year was filled with questions from friends back home asking if I’d become a lesbian. My answer: so what if I had? And why did they care?

Despite the freedom we gain in college from adults, we are still constrained by our peers’ expectations of us, which can make it difficult to remain true to ourselves and create a healthy personal (and sexual) identity.

Here are some tips I hope you girls (and guys) can keep in mind while exploring sex in college.

It’s OK to be a virgin.
This had to come first because I think a lot of students are under the impression that there aren’t any virgins left in college, or that it’s weird to be a virgin in college. It’s completely normal to be a virgin in college and you should never feel pressured to “lose it” just to fit in.

There are more than three sexualities.
Most people think of sexuality in three categories: gay, straight, or bi. Most people, however, don’t fit neatly into these three categories. I prefer to see sexuality as a spectrum, ranging from completely heterosexual to completely homosexual, with the majority of people falling somewhere in between. Wherever you fall on the spectrum, or even if you don’t know where you fall on the spectrum, you are NORMAL. Don’t ever change yourself to fit someone else’s expectations of you.

Casual sex can be HARD.
Casual sex may seem like the norm in college, but don’t let that trick you into thinking it’s an easy solution to your sexual frustrations. Casual sex can be great if you’re horny and not looking for any type of attachment, but it can also result in a lot of painful feelings if one person cares more than the other. Make sure you know what you’re getting into before you have sex with anyone, be aware that you might get hurt, and USE PROTECTION no matter what.

Monogamy isn’t a golden standard.
Our society tends to regard monogamy as the natural result of romantic relationships, and this isn’t necessarily true. Some people are happy in monogamous relationships, some aren’t. Many college students explore open relationships or multiple relationships. Find out what type of relationship makes you happiest and pursue it.

Katherin Heigl is all about the polygamy, baby

What guys really think of oral (or at least what this dude thinks)

Speaking of oral, watch out for freaking throat cancer!

What? No more random play on Facebook?!

Naomi Campbell is drunk and disorderly. Business as usual

Blueberry-Lime Margaritas. Oh yes

The economy f*cking sucks. But we’re still shopping like maniacs

Watch out, Dr. Drew. Tom Cruise will let his aliens loose on your ass

No one wants to wear Perez’s stuff.  Where are all those emo tweens when you need ‘em?

On April 3rd, an unidentified 16-year old girl called Texas police officials to report that her 50-year old husband had raped and abused her. She led authorities to a 1700-acre property called the Yearning for Zion ranch that housed hundreds of polygamist Mormons.

Monday’s raid of the compound yielded some 416 children and 136 women in what Texas officials are calling the “largest child-welfare operation in Texas’ history”. The women were dressed in homemade pioneer era clothing and many of them were pregnant.

It’s important to point out here that this particular sect of Mormonism is not indicative of Mormonism as a whole. It is a deviant sect, a radically fundamentalist sect that is reinforcing stereotypes Mormons and even more functional polygamists have long been trying to discourage. Warren Jeffs,the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the man who built the compound, hasn’t been making things easy.

The raid in El Dorado is only the latest in a long line of cult-like practices in Jeffs-lead churches around the United States. Jeffs himself is currently serving a 10 year prison sentence in a Utah jail for two counts of rape as an accomplice, but accusations of sexual abuse and illegal imprisonment has followed his church for years.

Every case of this abuse in itself is horrific, but this last case seems to be particularly so because of the unheard of amount of underage women involved. The associated press notes that in court documents filed by the state of Texas, these young girls were married to older men the moment they reached puberty.

An investigative supervisor for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services writes that

“investigators determined that there is a widespread pattern and practice of the [ranch] in which young, minor female residents are conditioned to expect and accept sexual activity with adult men at the ranch upon being spiritually married to them.”

Most of the young women are now wards of the state, and in addition to having to come to terms with what amounts to continued sexual abuse, they will also have to learn how to acclimate themselves in a society so tremendously different than the one in which they’ve grown up, where they were totally separated from the outside world.

Within every religious denomination, there are going to be splinter sects that range in their degree of radicalism, but it seems as though Mormonism, at least in the eyes of the media, is defined more by its extremists than it’s mainstreamists. At least more than, say, the Seventh-Day Adventists seem to be defined by the Branch Davidians at Waco or even more than the Southern Baptists and evangelicals seem to be defined by the hate speech and bigotry of Pat Robertson and Ted Haggard, respectively.

That being said, I do wonder what it is about this religion that seems to inspire so many harmfully deviant splinter sects. It could be that, as I mentioned before, the media just seems to single out Mormonism and there really isn’t an inordinate amount of these cultish compounds sprinkled around the country or it could be that this religion fosters a mindset and a culture of subjugation?