It’s hard not to pay attention to all the Rihanna news that has been circulating lately. I’ve read it in the newspapers, in the tabloids, on the gossip sites, I’ve talked about it with my friends and even my professors, and still it’s hard to wrap my head around. It’s difficult to see anyone going through a hard time, but when it’s someone you have grown to admire and respect, it becomes that much more difficult.

There have been a number of issues that have been bothering me in the last few weeks that have followed the Chris Brown/Rihanna incident. It bothers me that her picture was released and splashed all over the place, it bothers me that Chris Brown showed little remorse after the alleged attack, and it bothered me that Rihanna went back to her attacker. But most of all, it bothered me that people are now turning on Rihanna and blaming her for what happened.

In a survey conducted by the Boston Public Health Commission, it was found that almost half of all teens surveyed (age 12 to 19) think that Rihanna is to blame for the assault. Of the 200 who were polled, 46% said that Rihanna was responsible, 52% said the media was treating Chris Brown unfairly, and 44% said fighting was a normal part of any relationship.

Rihanna’s police report said that  Chris brown tried to force her out of the car, and when that didn’t work he shoved her head into the car door. He then repeatedly punched her in the head while continuing to drive until he pulled over, threatened to kill her, threw her cell phone into the street and put her into a headlock until she began to lose consciousness.

Is that a normal part of any relationship? I feel like as more people begin to see this as “normal” behavior, the more acceptible it will become.

I will never understand why Rihanna went back to Chris Brown. It is one aspect of abusive relationships that will never make sense to me. It is hard for me to imagine someone who is as incredibly talented, beautiful and successful as Rihanna is, to not be able to see all the good things she deserves.

What I do know is that Rihanna should not be blamed for what happened. She should not be blamed for “destroying Chris Brown’s Career” as a significant portion of the surveyed teens suggested. She could not have done anything so terrible that anyone do that to her. I think its really important to realize this because as violence becomes more normalized as a form of punishment within a relationship, the more common its going to become.

Now, I’m sure many things are running through your head right now as possible justifications for this statistic. I think we can all atest to the fact that most college hookups don’t exactly rock your world for a variety of reasons, (alcohol involved, inexperience, someone you don’t know extremely well, yada yada) so when you put it in perspective, it seems to make sense.

Apparently the survey was done by a professor at Stanford University. It questioned 4,000 students about their most recent hook-ups, which ranged from kissing to manual sex to oral sex to intercourse. The results showed that 44 percent of men had reached orgasm compared to 19 percent of women. More specifically, 70 percent of men climaxed during intercourse without oral sex beforehand, but only half the amount of females could do the same.

Why might this be? The article gave a number of suggestions such as women tend to not speak up or are scared to talk about what they desire, women don’t masturbate as much as men (that opens a whole separate can of worms), and that women are more worried about their partner’s satisfaction than their own.

Moral of the story: Although this was a small and selective survey, it brings up interesting points about the nature of most college girls’ sex lives. Don’t be scared to speak your mind and fight for what you want, even if that translates to the bedroom. Let’s reverse this finding.

UT – Austin surveyed 52 men who were asked to test the scent of 18 worn t-shirts worn by women in various phases of their menstrual cycle. Almost all of the guys in the experiment, 1 guy was gay – so his doesn’t really count, found the shirts worn during the girl’s period to be the most enticing.

Sadly, this is when a woman is least fertile…therefore, least likely to get pregnant.

But, when Aunt Flow comes over to stay no one is really excited to jump into bed anyway…

So, other than all those religious fundementalists who think womens’ ovulation is dirty and unnatural, every other man thinks it is when we are at our sexiest.

The question is, how eager are WE to have sex during our period?

Researchers in Berkeley, California recently surveyed more than 900 middle school and high school students for a study in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

When presumably asked what constitutes keeping one’s virginity, “70 percent of kids 12 to 16 believe they’re virgins even if they’ve had oral sex – and 16 percent believe anal sex doesn’t count either.”

Look, once you start engaging in sexual activity, your virgin status goes hazy. Sure, you might not have done it, but if you’ve done everything under the sun except it, your technical virginity basically becomes a moot point. If you’re sexually experienced, you’re sexually experienced.

The “I’m still a virgin!” declaration after engaging in other sexual activities seems to be rooted in our society’s desperate fear of being labeled. Teenagers (especially girls) ultimately want to be “good”, but their hormones are pulling them in a completely different direction.

Doing everything except the big “penis into the vagina” thing allows someone to explore their sexuality while still remaining pure in the eyes of society.

Sex is a big thing. I don’t want to deny that. But the more pressure we put on teenagers about it, the more they’re going to do anything to make up excuses.

First it was oral sex—which can still give you diseases and in my opinion is more intimate than intercourse. Now it’s anal sex, which defies logic, since there’s still penetration involved (and seems a whole lot more “difficult” than traditional sex).

I’m no Sex Ed teacher (although it doesn’t seem so hard to be one these days, considering my junior high Sex Ed instructor was our chorus teacher, who looked like she hadn’t had any for at least half a century), but it seems calming down our whole “losing your virginity is HUGE” speech is the best way to help teenagers understand the sexual experience as a whole.

There’s a lot more to being sexually active than traditional copulation, and letting someone in your backdoor because you’re afraid to open the front one is no way begin a healthy, confident sex life.

How do you know when you spend too much time online?

When you forego sex for Google.

A survey polling 1,011 Americans showed that most of us can’t stay away from the internet for more than a few days without feeling anxious and “cut off” from the rest of world, while 20% of us are spending less time getting it on because we’re logged on.

“Cell phones won out over television in a question asking which device people couldn’t go without but the Internet trumped all, regarded as the most necessary” the survey claims, going on to say that most of feel like “something important” is missing if we’re not able to check email or surf the web.

I’d like to say that I’m not part of this trend, but if I did, I’d be lying.

Although I can’t see myself giving up sex for more time on Facebook, I fully acknowledge that if I go too long without having access to a computer, I start to get nervous. What if today’s the day I get something really important in my inbox? I think. What if someone sends me a message and I only have an hour to reply?

Ridiculous as those thoughts are, the longer I’m away from my email, the more I think them. It’s amazing how fast we can become dependant on something (after all, most of us were alive before the internet became a way of life), and it’s a little scary to think about what would happen if the whole thing just disappeared one day.

In fact, I don’t want to think about it at all!

I need to calm myself down! I need to watch someone annoying do something random on YouTube! I need to watch this guy.

…ah, much better. Now, what was I saying?

During a meeting last Monday for infectious disease scientists, “researchers who spy on people in public bathrooms” (double creepy!) released a study that showed men have issues when it comes to washing their hands after using public toilets.

“One-third of men didn’t bother to wash after using the bathroom, compared with 12 percent of women” the researchers claimed, basing their findings on over 6,000 people in four big cities.

A spokesman from a co-sponsor of the survey, the Soap and Detergent Association (seriously?), urged men to “step up to the sink”, after holding their weewees at a urinal or taking a dump.

Because women are forced to frequent stalls all the time, we’re probably a lot more likely to realize just how dirty a public bathroom can get—although holding one’s penis and then shaking a stranger’s hand screams ‘unsanitary!’ just as loudly.

So, what is it? Is pee just considered not as dirty to men? Do they simply not care about poo contamination?

Are men really just really f*cking gross most of the time?

…whatever the case, I’m gonna go buy me some Purell and think twice before going into any communial dorm bathroom.

Courtesy of Cosmo’s leading lady Kate White and some unknown marketing company that have polled 1,001 women on the meaning of their lives, we now have classifications about what type of 20-something we are!

Because thank God, I was wondering where I fit in to the world.

Are you a “Go for it Girl” that knows what she wants and won’t settle for less? Are you a “Restless Explorer”, someone who is just “indecisive” aka reformed slacker?

Are you a “Pleasure Seeker” that thinks girls just want to have fun? Or are you a “Housewife Hopeful” that just wants to pop out well-mannered babies?

Oh, the choices! The decisions! I just can’t decide!

I guess I would be a self-proclaimed “Go for it Girl” although right now my face could grease a cookie sheet and these sweatpants I’ve been wearing for three days (I took them off for a date—natch) have egg yolk on them from my splooging egg sandwich this morning.

But I sorted my boyfriend’s laundry and started the dishwasher so doesn’t that mean I go for it? And later I’m planning on getting laid so doesn’t that mean I REALLY go for IT?

Uh, I think so.

And as Ann Curry so wonderfully pointed out, it’s the superwoman syndrome of our predecessors, that first class of feminist “Go for it Girls” that have turned 31% of us into little Anne Hathaway spawns from The Devil Wears Prada.

But remember what she did in the end? She tossed her sidekick into the fountain and told Anna Wintour Miranda Priestly to f*ck herself.

And then she wrote a tell-all “fiction book” turned movie and made millions.

I guess that sort of going for it isn’t that bad. As long as you aren’t a housewife hopeful, a Paris Hilton pleasure seeker or a slacker restless explorer.

So go for it, 20-something!

Just don’t fit into the other lame—I mean undesirable—sixty nine percent.

You know… a guy who sleeps around is a super cool badass, whereas a girl that opens her legs up to all passersby is a dirty slut.

So it should never come as a surprise when surveys get released, such as a recent one released by our own federal government, which claim that men, on average, have at least three more sexual partners over the course of their lifetime than do women.

But according to a recent New York Times article, there’s just one not so minor problem with such surveys. Their results suggest logical impossibilities! According to Cal-Berkley professor David Gale (no, not the same David Gale who was portrayed by Kevin Spacey in 2003, although that’d be pretty ironic), mathematical logic dictates that men and women have to have around the same number of partners, and oddly enough, most sex survey researchers agree with him.

So what gives?

The article gives two possible explanations. One theory has an extraordinary amount of men soliciting prostitutes and regularly schtupping girls in foreign countries, but based solely on conversations that I’ve had on the subject, I’m not sure I buy into this one.

For one, as much as most guys want to give off the impression that they have a nice sized number, I don’t know too many guys that want to own up to the fact that they have to solicit prostitutes in order to procure said number.

Furthermore, at least among people I know, girls are FAR more likely to come home from European vacation with a steamy story about some beautiful Spanish stallion giving her a night to remember than are guys able to seduce some hot Italian 20-something.

The other, far more believable explanation is that both men and women regularly lie about their number of partners, with men embellishing their number while women act like some of their sexcapades simply never occurred. Now this one makes sense.

Because of the double standard, many women carry this undying belief that they need to maintain the perception that they’ve only been with a few guys, lest they be branded with a big Scarlet “S(lut).” Guys, on the other hand, worry that they’ll be branded with a big Scarlet “D(ork)” if they aren’t banging girls left and right.

So is that it?

Have we reached the point in our society that when it comes to sex, everyone’s simply a liar?

It certainly seems like this is the case. What’s that say about us? For my part, as I’ve said before, perhaps this is a sign that we really need to release ourselves from worrying so much about our own past and the pasts of people we come into contact with. If having any sort of sex at all causes us to lie about it, it seems the choices we’re left with are either to stop having sex, which obviously isn’t going to happen, or to just get over it this stupid obsession we have with the Number.

The question is, are we really up to the task?