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• The Frisky: 7 first dates so terrible, they made the news!
• TresSugar: Why do women hate on feminism?
• How About We: 5 things movies get wrong about love
• HuffPo Women: Chris Brown’s female problem

A friend just emailed us a link to this collection of awesome (and dirty!) graffiti from Pompeii. We know it seems like it couldn’t possibly be real, but Pompeiana.org seems like a legitimate academic site. (They describe themselves as “an online resource for all things Pompeian… a place for original research by scholars in the fields of art, archaeology, architecture and classics.” And the site is packed with stuffy academic papers — seems like an awful lot of work to go to for a prank.) And besides, Pompeii is known for its phallic and erotic artifacts (and, we suppose now, its poop jokes).

Back in the ancient world, graffiti was actually taken pretty seriously as a form of writing — people would respond to each other’s witticisms, write poetry, draw pictures, etc. And, occasionally, brag about conquests or pine for loved ones or just note that they’d been by. That is, until Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79 and buried their city under 36 hours’ worth of ashes and stone. But as architects continue to excavate this lost city, more and more graffiti is being uncovered.

Below are some of our favorites, translated from the original Latin of course. We love that the compliments (“Sollemnes, you screw well!”) are as enthusiastic as the insults (“Phileros is a eunuch!”). A bit of graffiti like the following would vastly improve our public bathroom experiences…

Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!

Amplicatus, I know that Icarus is buggering you. Salvius wrote this.

I screwed the barmaid.

Floronius, privileged soldier of the 7th legion, was here. The women did not know of his presence. Only six women came to know, too few for such a stallion.

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RELATED POSTS FROM EM and LO:

• How Do Men Feel About Dirty Talk?
• Words or Phrases You Should Avoid During Sex
• How to Talk Dirty Without Being Dirty
• The 10 Worst Things You Can Say In Bed

We’re taking it a bit easy this week to celebrate the fourth, and we hope you are, too. No posts today, and just two posts a day for the rest of the week. (Please tell us you do notice that we typically bring you three posts a day!!) We’ll return to our regularly scheduled program on Monday. Until then, go do something nice and American like having sex in the back of a pick-up truck.

Or maybe we should say “great music to make love to” (if we actually used that terminology). It definitely works for making out to. Not frantic rip-off-each-others’-clothes sessions, but more deliberate, sensual interludes that last longer than an hour, the kind earnest teenagers in love engage in. Patrick Watson, the Montreal-based band (fronted by singer-songwriter Patrick Watson, natch), create songs that are ethereal, haunting, and heady — with upright pianos, weepy violins and saws, quirky percussion, guitars occasionally strummed with toothbrushes… And the live versions are even more hypnotic and ultimately climactic than the excellent studio versions. They’re currently on tour in the States through July promoting their fourth album, Adventures in Your Own Backyard. I (Lo) saw them this past weekend at MassMoCA’s cabaret (as part of the museum’s “Oh, Canada” exhibition this summer)

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• College Candy: How to turn down a date.
• The Frisky: “Should I be more scarred by my date rape?“
• Your Tango: A roundup of dating sites — which is best for you? (gay sites included!)
• How About We: 50 places to make out at before you die.
• TresSugar: The evolution of TV dating shows.
• TomFoolery: 007 signs he doesn’t want a relationship (or is a spy).

Where reason fails, satire sometimes works — hence the sudden trend of tongue-in-cheek proposed sex laws, like the “personhood of semen” bill. And where satire fails — will a sex strike work? That’s the hope of a group called Liberal Ladies Who Lunch (love it!). They are proposing a national sex strike from April 28 until May 5 — tagline, “If our reproductive choices are denied, so are yours.”

Now, clearly this is a symbolic gesture more than anything else — after all, a week without sex sounds more like a long-term relationship than a sex strike to us. As compared to, say, the ancient Greek play Lysistrata, wherein the women of Greece go on an actual sex strike to end the decades-long Peloponnesian War. Meaning, they wouldn’t have sex until the war was over, whether that took a week or another decade. Or take Colombia, where in 2006 the girlfriends of gang members in one of the country’s most violent cities, Pereira (it had a murder rate at the time of 97 per 100,000 people), went on strike until their men gave up their weapons. As a result, in 2010, Pereira’s murder rate dropped by 26.5 percent, the steepest decline in the country.

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We’re not sure which is the most pervasive stereotype about librarians — that she wears her hair in a bun, wears glasses, and likes to shush people, or that she is secretly a sex fiend who likes to shake out her bun and whip off her glasses. Either way, male librarians are decidedly absent. And not just male librarians, but young male librarians. Young, male librarians who are not opposed to showing a little skin. This oversight bothered Megan Perez — a young, male former librarian who is not opposed to showing a little skin. Enter “The Men of the Stacks” calendar for 2012!

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• Ben & Jerry’s best flavor ever: Schweddy Balls!
• A little baldy on little baldies: Moby wants to make a porno with average-sized willies.
• Study shows testosterone drops when men become dads.
• Young women have orgasms during intercourse less than half the time as men.
• Read the rest of this post on SUNfiltered