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In the past month or so, we've read a report detailing an alarming rise in teen pregnancy. We've read a report insinuating that a majority of young British women think some rape victims are asking for it. And we've seen Apple pulling most of the "sexy" novelty swimsuit and lingerie and topless and shaky-boob applications from the iPhone App Store.

Taken individually, these announcements don't seem like much more than the idiosyncratic moral status quo — just more evidence that the English-speaking world remains confused and terrified by its own sexuality, and unwilling to discuss the topic in any realistic context.

But three's a trend, the cynical journalists say, and against the backdrop of fierce ongoing battles over such progressive cultural goals as legalized gay marriage, I sense a larger movement behind these recent newsbits. In fact, I sense nothing less than the creeping encroachment of a New Puritanism.

(Forgive me; I cannot remember if there has already been a New Puritanism. Rather than go with something unwieldy like "The New New Puritanism" or contemporary yet kind of fake-sounding like "Dong Fatigue," I'm sticking with a term that has the ring of a classic.)

It won't be long before we see various strident parents' groups getting national press for suing YouTube. Calls for wholly unenforceable website ratings and restrictions. City council meetings over what's appropriate dress for public areas. Exotic dancer arrests en masse.

A whole new and formidable attempt to repress sexual expression is coming.

And, while I firmly believe "abstinence-only education" is idiotic and that anybody who wants to should be able to walk around naked and hammered without being violated, I'm kind of looking forward to it.

I'm sick of listening to my male 35-year-old friends detail their exploits like 18-year-olds. I'm sick of listening to my female 35-year-old friends detail their exploits like 18-year-old males. I'm sick of porn that resembles little more than a sadistic gynecological examination, carried out on a sofa I'm pretty sure I slept on once after a rock show on South Beach. I'm sick of being made to feel weird because I'm just not that into anal.

When we claimed the right to put our DVDs of Bossy Asian HR Reps right out on the living-room shelf next to Citizen Kane and The Mummy Returns, we gave something up in return. We lost much of the mystique, the intimacy, the private discovery of raucous, enthusiastic ugly-bumping. Some might say the sacrifice was worth pulling the covers off of a basic human need, but I wonder.

In a perfect world, we'd have it all. Our teenagers would face their biological urges responsibly. Our fratty thugs would drive their insensate dates home, and pass them into the arms of a loving (not that way) role model. And we would have reasonable conversations about our sexuality in appropriate company, in appropriate context.

But it's not a perfect world. And until it is, or at least until you're asked, please, shut up about who you did, and how you did them. And what you'd like to do to that person over there. And how the person who looks better than you ever will in that outfit totally deserves to be assaulted. And how that other one was somehow both punished for promiscuity and blessed with a miracle at the same time. That doesn't make any fucking sense.

Oh, and will somebody please make a porn film with at least a cheeseball patina of narrative, that's neither a parody of a regular film nor five minutes in what could be my neighbor's kitchen? I could totally rub one out to that.

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