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Last Friday, the United States National Security Agency (NSA) admitted that it was aware of willful violations of agency protocols on the part of its officers. According to the Wall Street Journal, “National Security Agency officers on several occasions have channeled their agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests.” The practice of using surveillance technology to acquire information relating to a relationship is known in intelligence as “LOVEINT.” Tax dollars hard at work, folks. This is definitely the kind of security we gave up our privacy for!

“CNN will continue to refer to him as Bradley Manning since he has not yet legally changed his name,” said Jake Taper on The Lead. In a later piece CNN added, “CNN’s policy is to reference Manning with masculine pronouns since he has not yet taken any steps toward gender transition through surgery or hormone replacement therapy.” The media is setting a terrible example. Here are some resources for those who understand that educating ourselves about transgender issues is a vital step in making ours a just and equal society.

Last month, the judge presiding over the challenge to Section 2257 ruled it constitutional under the First Amendment. Opponents will fight on. In the meantime, the adult industry is really pissed that no one else seems to care about complying with 2257 regulations. Gawker had a five-minute preview of the Sydney Leathers porn this week without 2257 labeling. And in a recent post on AVN, one of the industry’s go-to news sources, there’s an oblique bit of whingeing about how few blogs at the porn amplification machine that is Tumblr really bother to comply with 2257, either.

We live in a world where more and more people are communicating desire through visual imagery. Just as we see problems in the street of people who don’t understand that they’re not entitled to a person’s space or attention simply because they find that person attractive, we’re seeing a similar sense of entitlement happening over text. It’s harassing. It’s wrong. But we’re slowly making some headway in combating it. That’s progress for consent. Revenge porn, meanwhile, is an attack on consent.

Emory University is trying to understand how people negotiate rules regarding other sexual partners in their relationships.Fill out their survey to help them get a sense of the wide array of relationship agreements that exist in this country. Go on, do it. You overshare all over the internet already, so why not put in your two cents for science?

Think AVNs — with all the adult talent, porn flicks and products you’ve come to know and love — only instead of being a bystander in the destiny of the adult industry, you’re at the wheel. That’s the Sex Awards, a ceremony that will award stars, films and products based on what the fans love. Crowdsourcing is the way of the web and AVN Media, has teamed up with cable network X3Sixty and online on-demand site HotMovies to bring it to porn. Come play!

The little symbols known as emoji have now been around for almost 20 years, but they didn’t really get popular in the U.S. until apps brought them to the smartphones of the nation. When Apple made them accessible without an app on iOS5, this method of self-expression really started to take off. Of course, as with any adoption of a new language, translation errors tend to occur. Nowhere is this more obvious than in relationships, which suffer most when communication styles don’t match or when messages are not properly relayed.

I’ve encountered in most singles a commitment to neat, welcoming spaces, whether they use these to host potential lovers or maintain their homes as a private sanctuary where only their dearest and nearest can enter, but you really wouldn’t think so, based on the way most house-keeping and cleaning products market their products. Well, guess what? Just because someone loves sex doesn’t mean she doesn’t vacuum and just because Martha Stewart keeps a perfect house doesn’t mean she doesn’t sext or have one-night stands. And we have evidence.

The debate about marriage equality always comes back to the Bible. Opponents state, unequivocally, that the Bible says that marriage is only possible between one man and one woman. Scholars Hector Avalos, Robert R. Cargill and Kenneth Atkinson are baffled by the lack of accuracy in such statements. “Such appeals often reflect a lack of biblical literacy on the part of those who use that complex collection of texts as an authority to enact modern social policy,” they write in a recent editorial, laying it all out.

In June, Russia passed into law a ban on “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations among minors.” Supporters defend it, saying it doesn’t outlaw homosexuality, simply restricts the discussion of nontraditional relationships among people who are below 18 years of age, but recent brutal clashes between lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans activists and allies have already shown how desperate the situation is for anyone who identifies as LGBT. How can anyone see this position as anything other than a government sanction of homophobia? And how will it affect the 2014 Olympics?