We recently ran a post on EMandLO.com about television shows with hot sex scenes, but if we’re being honest, the stuff that really floats our boats is the hilarious, cringe-worthy stuff that just seems a lot more realistic — after all, sex is often awkward, full of miscommunication, with some head bonking and disappointment, maybe tears. Which is why we loved, loved, LOVED last night’s episode of “New Girl” on Fox. We’ll admit, we were pretty eh about the pilot — it was close, but no cigar. So we never scheduled a second date with the show. But a friend encouraged us to give it another chance last night and we are so glad we did — because we can’t remember the last time we laughed so hard, especially not from of a television show (we’re talking tears and stomach pain). Not to get your hopes up, but it’s one of the best sex scenes we’ve ever seen on TV* — it should win an Emmy. We liked it so much, we went online so we could watch the earlier “penis” episode (officially titled “Naked”), which also did not disappoint. Oh, if only the same could be said for sex.

Now “New Girl” is fictitious comedy, and so the laughter last night’s scene elicited came freely, without any hesitation or guilt. It was truly joyous to guffaw at the characters on the screen. Not so with the giggles you’ll get watching TLC’s The Virgin Diaries — and that’s just the promo. These are real people, adults who’ve waited a looooooooong time to get it on. And so watching the car crash that is a bride and groom kissing (anyone!) for the first time ever is excruciatingly painful, not just because they look like, as Jimmy Kimmel described it (at minute 11 of his monologue), a mama bird regurgitating chewed up food into her baby’s mouth, but because you really feel bad about laughing about them. Not bad enough, of course, to not mention it on your blog the next day.

*Here’s the set up of the New Girl roleplaying scene: Jess recently broke up with her boyfriend of six years, so she hasn’t had sex with anyone else in a really long time. With a new guy on the scene, she’s afraid she’s out of the loop on sex trends and techniques, so she buys some lingerie, watches 5 straight hours of porn, and gets terrible advice from her male roommates about roleplaying. For some reason, the clip ends before the scene does (premature cessation!), so if you want to watch how the hookup ends, you’ll have to wait until next week to catch “Bad in Bed” online here (though unlike saving sex until marriage, it’s worth the wait).

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The Discovery Channel is in the middle of airing a series called Curiosity. Current and upcoming episodes include “What Sank the Titanic” and “Is There a Parallel Universe?” Not sure how we missed the last one, “Why Is Sex Fun?” hosted by Maggie Gyllenhaal. We couldn’t find any upcoming airings listed in our Tivo, but you can find plenty of clips online, both on theDiscovery Channel website and on YouTube. The show takes a scientific look at the salacious, with a great bit on how the clitoris is not just a little external nubbin, but a great network of ennervated tissue that runs deep throughout the genitals (something you don’t see that often on mainstream TV or in scientific discussions for that matter). You’ll also see an orgasm in the brain, intercourse on an ultrasound and the first vibrators ever made on display at New York’s Museum of Sex. (We’re guessing this last bit is why Gyllenhaal hosted: her new movie out this fall, HYSTERIA, is a period rom-com about the invention of the vibrator in Victorian times. That’s what marketing nerds call synergy. Check out the new trailer here.)

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We’re two of those poor HBO-less saps who have to wait until the following Wednesday to get the free podcast of the previous Friday night’s episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher.” And so we only just discovered his final “New Rule” from last week: “Republicans have to stop thinking up intricate, psychological explanations for why liberals don’t like Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann. Let me save you all some time. Are you ready? Because they’re crazy people.” Now, Bill Maher is not exactly what we’d call a feminist icon, and he’s pretty selective about which sexism he shuns — he’s definitely not down with the systemic misogyny of religions like Islam which allow women to be stoned for exposing an ankle and which consider rape not a crime but a punishment, but he loves to talk about stereotypical dumb blondes with big tits and nagging sexless ball-and-chain wives. It’s tough, because otherwise his political views are very compelling. So when he delivers a smart, spot-on New Rule like last week’s — in which he explains how Palin and Bachmann aren’t dumb because they have boobs but because they are boobs, and how inherently sexist the Bible is — we can forgive him the pig that he his.

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Its title may be tired, but the documentary LET’S TALK ABOUT SEX is as relevant and necessary as ever in a country that’s schizo about sex, with teens paying the price in crazy rates of pregnancy and STDs. A winner of the Youth Award at the Mostra de Ciencia e Cinema Festival and an official selection of the Provincetown International Film Festival, the documentary (watch the trailer) airs tomorrow night (Sat, April 9) at 10pm on The Learning Channel (TLC). It may be the first show on that channel that’s actually educational and enlightening (hello? Cake Boss? Say Yes to the Dress? I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant?!?).

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ActivistResource.org apprised us of a 2009 documentary being screened in our neck of the woods (Hudson Valley) tonight called Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter, so we checked out the trailer. It’s the story of one woman’s quest to save her young daughter from the horrors of the African tradition of female genital cutting. In her native Mali, up to 85% of women and girls undergo clitoral excision, which can result in lifelong pain, infection, infertility and even death. After watching the trailer, you’ll think “This is crazy! How can people still think this is a good idea? Thank goodness I live in a Westernized country.” But then we’d point you to this report on the increase in labiaplasty by Hungry Beast (a television show in Australia where they can show a lot more — warning: this is NSFW). After seeing a young woman get her nerve-rich inner labia hacked off by choice, you’ll reconsider your Western superiority.

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There seems to be Mormonism and polygamy in the air lately (at least for us), so we wanted to spread the love to you and you and you and…:

• Escape — Just finished this crazy page-turner of a memoir from Carolyn Jessop, one of the few women to escape The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints or FLDS (of Warren Jeffs infamy) with her 8 kids (and 8 is a low number for this radical polygamist sect). She recounts how the cult basically imprisons women as sex/baby-making slaves — you’ll boggle over how something like this could exist in America in the 21st century. Katherine Heigl is slated to make the movie version of the book (which, we hate to admit, we’re morbidly excited about).
• Sister Wives — This TLC TV series is in the middle of its second season. With only 4 sister wives (who seem allowed to express their opinion) and their mere 16 kids, the Browns look like the Cleavers compared to the FLDS clans. Still, we really wish the show would delve a little deeper into the religious justification for the double standard of multiple wives but not multiple husbands (in Season 1, when his first wife of 20 years asked him to imagine her taking another husband, husband Kody admitted the thought sickened him — hmmm, funny how that works).
• The Book of Mormon — Everyone’s raving about this new Broadway musical by the dudes behind South Park, including Jon Stewart, who said it’s “so fucking good it makes me angry.” Think Urinetown and Jerry Springer: The Musical rather than Wicked or Brigadoon.

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At least, that’s what Ling’s new show on OWN (Oprah’s new tv network) should be called, instead of “Our America with Lisa Ling.” After all, four of the first five episodes focus on matters of sexuality: There’s “Pray the Gay Away,” “Transgendered Lives,” “The State of Sex Offenders,” and tonight at 10pm “Online Brides” (all re-air several times over the next week). The first three (which we’ve seen) all take a very personal and intimate look at how these issues are affecting real people — it’s fascinating stuff, all shot very cinematically. The only drawback is how each episode is framed with a series of rhetorical questions posed by Ling’s stiff narration — a voice that mistakes monotone for gravitas…

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Somehow in the post-holidays hangover, we missed the fact that Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi — a.k.a. the Jersey Shore star with a pouf — made her debut as a novelist earlier this month, with A Shore Thing. Yep, she’s the one who once admitted she’d only read two books, Twilight and Dear John. (Which might explain why Snooki’s novel contains both a Bella and an Edward — not exactly the most common names overheard on a Jersey boardwalk.) We’re too busy reading George Eliot right now to actually read her entire snook, as we like to call it, but we have been enjoying reading the following brief excerpts out loud while lounging around in our silk pajamas and feeding each other grapes. Just in case you were expecting Hemingway, the cover helpfully explains that the novel is about “a girl [named Gia] looking for love on the boardwalk (one full of big hair, dark tans, and fights galore).”

• “Gia danced around a little, shaking her peaches for show. She shook it hard. Too hard. In the middle of a shimmy, her stomach cramped. A fart slipped out. A loud one. And stinky.”
• “He had an okay body. Not fat at all. And naturally toned abs. She could pour a shot of tequila down his belly and slurp it out of his navel without getting splashed in the face.”
• “Only several months old, her boobs were virgin territory. She was eager for Tony to touch them, curious if it’d feel sexy, despite a slight post surgical loss of sensation.”
• “Any juicehead will get some nut shrinkage. And bacne. They fly into a ‘roid rage, it is a ‘road’ ‘roid rage.”
• “I love food. I love drinking, boys, dancing until my feet swell. I love my family, my friends, my job, my boss. And I love my body, especially the badonk.”
• “Yum. Johnny Hulk tasted like fresh gorilla.”

Read more excerpts at SUNfiltered

If you’re a fan of the first two episodes of AMC’s new conspiracy thriller series, Rubicon, what you probably like is what makes it different from your typical television drama: its slow pace, its subtlety, its intelligence, its lack of glitzy pizazz, even its muted colors. Well, that’s why we like it. And it’s why there was one element of the second episode that was so out of sync with this vibe we just couldn’t get past it: the assistant’s cleavage.

In the first episode, actress Jessica Collins plays a nice, sweet-looking, demurely dressed (consistently so in several outfits) character poised to be the main character’s love interest. Even her name — “Maggie Young” — is nice and sweet and demure-sounding. And in the first episode, she was styled to reflect this — not a hint of cleavage or skin anywhere. Which for television is refreshing; it’s actually reality-based. Most business offices — especially those filled with uber-smart nerds working on top intelligence secrets for the government, one imagines — aren’t filled with a lot of sexily dressed vixens; it’s just not professional.

So it was with great disappointment that we were bombarded with the over-the-top cleavage Ms. Young was suddenly sporting in episode two (which must have been created by the most high-tech push-up bra available and perhaps a little duct tape, for Jessica Collins is not what you’d call buxom). It was so incredibly distracting because it was so out of character for the assistant — and the office — we were introduced to in episode one.

So here’s our theory: The producers, after signing off on the pilot, were like “Great, let’s green light this project, but we’ve got to sex it up, get a little more skin in there. We don’t have too many female characters to work with, but how about the assistant — let’s tart her up a bit.” Buy why? Why, oh why?! Can’t we have a smart and subtle show without being force-fed a standardized quota of female sexual objectification that does nothing to further the plot? It’s so pandering, but to whom? Would hetero men really be inclined to cancel their Season Pass to this cool new show simply because it lacked any daring decolletage? It’s like the bullshit sexist theory that people won’t pay to see movies with female characters with names who talk to each other about stuff other than men.

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