News hasn't been this salacious since the Starr Report. And camera crews still have to dispatch to spring break hot spots to capture the bouncing B-roll of oiled and bronzed female flesh so news pundits can opine on America's moral decline.

Family values conservatives are spinning the current chaos to pin the blame on sexual health education and to push for more abstinence-only programming, already a $1.5 billion social engineering boondoggle that mandates the expected sexual standard for children (up to 29 years old!) be within marriage. Never mind that most of us at some point explore our sexuality outside of marriage - even chastity champions like Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), a longtime patron of prostitutes. Never mind that real life proves that a wedding ring doesn't protect you from disease and despair, even if you're not a political wife. Never mind that the United States leads the free world in rates of HIV, other STDs, teen births and unwanted pregnancies -- purity pushers don't want to send our kids any mixed messages. "Our challenge is that the government wants to talk about preventing the spread of STDs and HIV without talking about sex," says sexuality educator Deb Levine.

In our sex-saturated consumer culture, abstinence-only-unless-married is a mixed message. How can we talk about sex in a way that makes sense to us, and to our relationships? What is healthy sexuality? And how can we teach it in such a toxic environment of extremes?

"We sell and promote sex with everything from soap to cars, but it's still for the most part a closeted discussion. It is most absent in a meaningful way in curricula geared toward our most vulnerable sexually active populations," says Lennie Green, who at John Hopkins University facilitates communication among groups of young African American men who have sex with men -- a community the CDC reports to have experienced a spike in HIV infections.

"We seem to have this Sunday morning church mentality when we discuss sexuality, but when we review societal practices there's a major dichotomy in our rhetoric and what we actually do," says Green. "The weakest link has been ‘family values.' They strike out against subcultures they find amoral, and crusade to establish law and order in bed. Even in the face of disease we hang onto old archaic beliefs that sex will not happen until marriage. Our public health record has been trashing that theory for decades."

"The biggest challenge is to be open on the subject of sex," says Kylee Darcy, a freshman at UC Berkeley and winner of the Fresh Focus Sex Ed Video Contest. "In spite of all the sexy messages out there, communication about sex is still shrouded with taboo. It's pretty ridiculous to think that an abstinence program is going to be able to outweigh the hundreds of sexual suggestions I get everyday from TV, the Internet, magazines, billboards, music, fashion, etc. Sex is something everyone, whether they want to do it or not, needs to be clear about. And the only thing that can create clarity is communication."

Darcy's animated video, showcased in January at Sex::Tech: Focus on Youth, the first STD/HIV prevention conference focusing on youth and technology, illustrated pop culture's sexed-up messages crushing the scale against abstinence-only messages. "The abstinence-only program is not productive, but sex ed that just addresses the physical act of sex and contraception is also outdated," Darcy continues. "Yes, students need to know about contraception and disease, but sex ed should be as much about the interpersonal as the physical. Good sex ed can help create rapport between young people and their parents as well as young people and their partners."

If speaking honestly about sex in person can be daunting, then the "perceived anonymity" of technology and new media can free youth to ask questions they might find uncomfortable, says Deb Levine, founder and executive director of the Internet Sexuality Information Services (ISIS). "Our culture promotes shame and embarrassment about explicit discussions of sex, sexuality and sexual health," she says. "We interviewed young men and women to find out how they wanted to receive sensitive information, and mobile phones were unanimously considered to be an acceptable and private way to talk about sexual issues." So ISIS engages in strategic collaborations to promote sexual health via cell phone, PDAs and the Internet.

"Overall, when people are asking about communication-building skills, they're wanting to know how to talk about sex without shame, how to talk to partners candidly without stepping too hard on insecurities or sensitivities, how to feel assertive in talking about it all," says Heather Corrina, founder and editor of Scarleteen.com, an independent online sexuality education resource and community for young adults that takes a feminist, inclusive and often humorous approach to answering sensitive questions. "For the girls particularly, lack of assertiveness is always a big area of need, and not just with birth control, but overall with negotiating sex and relationships. A lot of what would help is for adults to not just prepare kids to say ‘yes' or ‘no,' but prepare them for the fact that all of this communication and negotiation tends to be a lot less black and white than that, and a lot more nuanced," says Corrina, a passionate workhorse who runs Scarleteen -- which serves up to 30,000 users a day -- solely on donations.

Approximately a third of the content in the model sexuality education guidelines by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States focuses on relationship and communication skills, says Monica Rodriguez, SIECUS's Vice President for Education and Training. "The ultimate goal of sexuality education programs is to help young people grow up to be sexually healthy adults. We need to move beyond just giving information -- young people need to be given opportunities to practice skills in decision-making and communicating decisions to a partner," she says.

Fueling the myth that sexual health education causes promiscuity is blood sport in traditionalists' sex-driven culture war. "In our abstinence-only world today, people sometimes confuse providing sexual education with promoting sexual activity for young people," says Deb Levine. Debra Hauser, executive vice president for Advocates for Youth, agrees. "Even enlightened educators fear that parents and administrators will react negatively to a curriculum that promotes healthy sexuality -- that the perception will be that they are condoning or promoting sex," says Hauser, whose group lobbies for the stalled REAL Act to provide unprecedented funding for sex ed that goes beyond today's disease-prevention model. "The perception of many is that [sex ed] needs a heavy-handed message that teaches sex is likely to lead to negative outcomes. Thirty years of public health research shows that teaching young people about healthy sexuality does not promote sex." And since talking sex beyond bananas and virginity pledges is essential to facilitating healthy identities and relationships, sexuality educators and advocacy organizations like SIECUS make easy targets. To show that sex ed undermines parents and corrupts childhood innocence, culture warriors cherry-pick from sexual health programs to find scary words like "masturbation" and "pleasure."

"I am always interested in the way teachers are so afraid of discussing anything that might be pleasurable," says sex educator McCaffree. "Youth will want to know why people even have sex if there is no pleasure. They are very concrete early on, and it doesn't make sense to approach with all the negatives. Helping them see why and how people enjoy their sexuality is important...When a program only deals with teen pregnancy, STIs, rape and those topics, pleasure is replaced with fear-based negatives." McCaffree cites the United Church of Christ/Unitarian Universalist sex ed curriculum, Our Whole Lives, as a program that understands the importance of teaching about pleasure and the diverse reasons why individuals and couples are sexual. Rather than pretending our sex-soaked society doesn't affect young people, "Our Whole Lives is the antidote to an overly sexualized society," says Ann Hanson, Minister for Sexuality Education and Justice, UCC. OWL's "program assumptions" include the tenets that "sexuality includes more than sexual behavior" and "people engage in healthy sexual behavior for a variety of reason, including to express love, to experience intimacy and connection with another, to share pleasure, to bring new life into the world, and to experience fun and relaxation." "OWL doesn't focus only on the negatives of sex, but encourages exploration of all aspects of sexuality," says McCaffree. "When you include everything, pleasure can be more readily seen."

Such modern ambiguity conjures apocalyptic nightmares for the moral absolutists who distort the sexual health conversation we need to lead responsible, joyful lives. Talking about sex and sexuality doesn't do anything to young people's "innocence," McCaffree reminds us. "What makes any aspect of sex or sexuality so awful that innocence is removed?" Indeed, courageous souls are working against the tide of America's sexual schizophrenia to help young people communicate openly about their sexual wants and needs. But can we really talk grownup sex today amid the culture warmongering and commercial chatter of the next media sex scandal?

A former altar boy from Ohio, the admittedly "vanilla" Alexander writes with self-deprecating wit and a willingness to engage in America's sometimes uncomfortable sexual conversation. His earnest questions, both personal and cultural, are what make his gonzo travelogue both so entertaining and so essential to current debates surrounding sexual health services, education and civil rights.

Originally a popular six-part online series of the same name, America Unzipped refers to the millions of average Americans unzipping themselves from religious, societal and familial restraints by carving out formerly forbidden sexual paths. Recruited a few years ago as MSNBC's Sexploration columnist despite no formal expertise, Alexander was caught off guard by kinky questions from otherwise "normal" readers (such as, "I hear Paris Hilton is into fisting, how do you do it?"). Sensing a "mainstreaming of perversion," Alexander set off on a quest to answer the burning question: "Who are these people?" What are they seeking and why? Are they happy? And regarding today's enflamed culture war rhetoric: are they really such a threat?

The author's traverse across America's sexual landscape also meant to make sense of the public dissonance in our nation's cohabitating hypersexual culture and moral crusade: "the way we seem ever more lusty even while we are supposed to be ever more puritanical." You know, how Jenna Jameson and Pat Robertson both can be household names while each spawning humongous moneymaking industries.

The meat of his book, however, centers on the private dissonance of the folks he meets while immersed as employee or trusted guest in America's various, mostly well-lit nether regions. Catholic, conservative Republican, military, Midwest churchgoer, married with kids, sheriff, school board member, nurse or small town firefighter - the uniting truth of the countless feasting on life's vast and varied sexual menu is that public perception and private reality rarely meet.

I totally got off on Alexander's first five pit stops, which include touring a sex retailer empire founded by an Ivy Leaguer who talks about love, intimacy and permission-giving and funds global family planning charities; participating in a marriage seminar by a once-fallen preacher named Joe Beam on hot Christian sex; working as a "romance consultant" turned "lubrication specialist" at an adult supercenter (his first sale was a Clone-a-Willy kit), and then as the only male Passion Party consultant selling sexual aids to raucous women of the Heartland (including daughter, mom and grandma); and exploring the no-holds-barred virtual world of reality porn, online sex chats and cams, and off-ramp hookups to make your fantasies real. Fantasy - escaping into the sexual realm apart from daily drudgery - is apparently serious business.

The question of taboo drives Alexander's final three sex tours, in which the author gets up close at a BDSM porn site with the Antioch-educated feminist queer performance artist who likes ropes and electro torture and hangs with sexuality hipsters eager to shock. He attends a fetish convention where he meets a divorced female Southern Baptist spankee who believes in the biblical order of man as head of the household, and later at a bondage seminar meets Sir Arthur, a huge Bill O'Reilly fan, who really hates it "when all the gays are out marching." Finally the author tugs on black PVC pants to attend a sex club party at the Wet Spot, sees a university dean of libraries named Paradox light naked women on fire, and fights his urge to free a naked sub looking up at him from her cage "like a puppy in the pound."

Adding a modern dimension to the adage "different strokes for different folks," America Unzipped underscores what renowned researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey proved 60 years ago in what is still the largest and most diverse body of sexual case studies: there is no such thing as "normal" when it comes to sexual expression. There is no scientific or moral basis for the significant public policy that dictates a mythical sexual norm so universally violated. There certainly is no way to peg political or religious affiliation, occupation, patriotism, social standing, or family and community commitment to what people do behind closed doors.

In demonstrating the often radical disconnect between Americans' public and private positions on sex, America Unzipped obliterates the binary storylines that drive public debate in our media-conglomerated tabloid age: conservative vs. liberal, traditionalists vs. modernists, Heartland vs. Hollywood, Puritans vs. perverts, straight vs. queer, Godly vs. sinful. The character-driven book upends the worn stereotypes about female sexuality, gender, looks and aging, and dismantles myths entitling marriage, monogamy and family values.

Alexander succeeds in his quest to learn who the sexual explorers reading his column are: they're "not an extraordinary group of especially perverted people. Their questions are American questions, their curiosity part of the country's conversation." He answers the happiness question with more ambivalence but strong support for those "seeking one's own sexual place" in our impoverished culture.

He also offers that the moral crusaders have lost out to the sexual explorers. But Alexander diminishes the poisonous fallout of the culture war. Sexual deviance may now live on Main Street, USA, but theocons occupy the highest reaches of global power, thanks mostly to rallying against sexual deviance. Advocates of sexual health and justice continue to be attacked and marginalized as the abstinence-only-unless-married industry taps millions more in federal funding.

Alexander concludes that sexual moralizers and experimenters need each other and even feed off of the same outcast state of perceived oppression. Maybe. But many of the "perverts" he paints often cling to the same worldview as the moralizers. As long as they can still get their kink on (pleasure maybe heightened by taboo), most don't care about the mounting causalities in the theocons' well-funded, politically potent, sex-obsessed culture war. These are casualties Alexander is well aware of, having penned an award-winning feature for Glamour magazine that outlines the frightening reproductive health and rights damage wielded by purity politics. The power of culture warriors to harm women, youth, ethnic and sexual minorities, the poor and disenfranchised through fear-mongering and misinformation knows no bounds.

Perhaps burned out at the end of his cross-country sex adventure, Alexander says without quite knowing why, "I think we live in a very sick culture." I'd argue that sexually, we're a childish culture, one that can't move beyond our consumer-based reality or marital ideal, beyond smut or sanctimony.

True moral bankruptcy as a nation lies in our legislating against other sexual and gender minorities while winking at the more disturbing goings on in our neighbors' marital homes. It's time we stand up for sexual health education, services and civil rights so everyone can pleasure with dignity -- or without, as we choose.

Culture war general Pat Robertson has said that our society "has gone too far toward sexual freedom." Well, freedom requires grownups -- even if they sometimes escape to the Wet Spot's play space or aftercare.