May 19th is Armed Services Day (also called Armed Forces Day but I'll mention both since it's not clear who is winning that pr battle). Growing up in a big Canadian city my relationship to the military was simple. I didn't know anyone who was in the military. And the story is that my grandfather enlisted prior to the Second World War but never made it out of basic training because he had flat feet. The regiment that he was scheduled to be with did go to Europe and none of the service members in that regiment made it home alive. If not for his flat feet, none of us would have been born.

If you don't know anyone who has served in the military, and especially if you don't know anyone who has been deployed to a war zone, it's easy to think about service in black and white terms. I've met many who believe that the best way to support the troops is to question nothing and offer nationalistic platitudes till the cows come home. And I've met people who aren't able to see service members as humans deserving of the same rights and justice as the rest of us. There aren't a lot of folks in the middle.

Which is too bad since I bet a lot of service members would put themselves there. And I wonder, based on my very limited experience, how well equipped those of us who haven't served in the military are to offer the kind of support service members actually need. I worry that we aren't very well equipped at all. That we are failing.

Which brings me to an Armed Services Day promotion I came across. Some online pharmacy that specializes in "lifestyle drugs" (read: drugs for sexual functioning like Viagra, Cialis, Levitra) is recognizing the "service and sacrifice" of service members past and present by offering them $15 off their order of sex drugs on May 19th.

The truth is that service members are often un- and underemployed, and $15 off is $15 off, so it's hard to say "this is terrible and shouldn't happen". But it feels right to say "this is terrible". Service members get so little support with post-combat sexual health issues and the rates of sexual assault and suicide are so high, that I think it's fair to say this kind of shameless drug marketing simply doesn't have a place in any thoughtful consideration of what we might want to be thinking about on May 19th. And even though some might benefit from the discount, I have a hard time thinking of it as support in any meaningful way.

An article in the Times last week raised the complicated issue of talking with children about pornography. It was nice to see it there since it's been a reality for parents for years. Companies that make Internet connected technology (mobile devices, tablets, and old school computers) are increasingly marketing the devices as something suitable for young children. And plenty of parents agree.

But along with the free access to thousands of hours of kid friendly videos (thanks YouTube) and cool apps that turn classic kid's books into animated worlds of wonder, comes access to unwanted and inappropriate sexually explicit material, and pornography.

Filters don't do the job. And the always filter out plenty of important, age approriate, sex education material. The kind of material that can make it easier for parents and children to navigate sex education together.

The article describes several parents and their approach to the topic, ranging in degrees of openness to talking, and willingness to acknowledge that while pornography isn't appropriate material for children, sexuality and sexual health are topics that can and should be talked about. Some of the framing is off. Like the idea that teaching about sex is a series of discrete conversations, and all parents have to do now is add porn to the list.

But more than the article, I appreciated the accompanying piece which they call an "interactive feature" (I'm not sure what to call it, not exactly journalism, not exactly educational material, but the Times is producing more and more of it in an effort to get readers to stay on their pages).

In this feature the writer provides a more detailed description of each parent's response to the situation they found themselves in, and then they asked the two sexuality professionals who were quoted in the article to weigh in on the parents responses.

Something that stuck with me had to do with how we explain to children that pornography isn't appropriate for them. Saying "it's for adults" might be enough for some kids, but many, certainly older, kids will want to know more. Embedded in the answer is the assumption that you get to an age when you can comprehend the material and then it's "appropriate" or "safe" for you to see it? But what age is that?

I don't have an answer but I'm pretty sure it isn't a chronological age at all. I think it might be something along the lines of what Marty Klein (one of the professionals who is quoted in the article) calls "pornography literacy". The idea that what is most harmful about legal pornography is not what it depicts, but what we do with it in the absence of decent sex education and media literacy skills. It's an interesting question and one I'm glad the Times is raising.

NYTimes.com: When Children See Internet Pornography

For Parents: How to Talk With Your Kids About Pornography

For Educators: BISH Training - Working With Young People Around Porn

One can never know for sure what statistics about our online searching habits mean. Does the trending of a search term related to a celebrity illness or breakup "tell" us something about how much we care about that celebrity, or our health, or fidelity? Are we what we search for?

I think about this every time I look at the statistics for the Sexuality site on About.com. Millions of people visit the site, often finding me because they entered some term into a search engine. And based on a non-scientific sampling, it's my impression that far more people are interested in how to masturbate than in how to have sex with some one else.

What does this mean? And considering the gender stereotype that all boys/men know how to masturbate, how come masturbation techniques for men are at least as popular as those for women?

I don't have answers to any of these questions, but I like thinking about them and talking to people to hear their take. And also, it does my heart good to know that people are curious about feeling pleasure, and producing that pleasure on their own.

If you don't have a lot of plans for this second weekend of National Masturbation Month, I thought I'd offer some suggestions by way of my most popular masturbation tips. Maybe it's time for a date with yourself?

Read More - Masturbation Tips and Techniques

In 1994 when President Bill Clinton fired Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders for answering yes to a question about whether masturbation was an appropriate topic to be addressed in sexual health education, many of us shook our heads. Not that we couldn't believe he fired her for it. Most of us were dismayed (or depressed) by the level of hypocrisy that would make it a forgone conclusion that she'd lose her job for suggesting that the most common sexual behavior on the planet be at least mentioned when we teach about sexuality.

The following year in a collaborative move that is hard to imagine today, three feminist sex shops got together to simultaneously celebrate Dr. Elders forthrightness, raise the topic of masturbation in public, and raise their own profiles. And so National Masturbation Month and the Masturbate-a-Thon were born.

It's been 17 years, and the longest running Masturbate-a-Thon (brought to you by the Center for Sex and Culture) is scheduled for May 27th, while a Canadian contingent (from the worker co-operative Come As You Are) will be raising funds all month.

If you haven't heard of it before, a masturbate-a-thon is a fundraiser where people commit to heroic sessions of self-pleasure, and ask others to pledge them. Sometimes it's by the minute, other times it's by the orgasm. But however you do it, it's a whole lot of fun, and always for a good cause.

I'll be highlighting my own odes to solo sex all this month, and after reading an article about a college student who is pledging to abstain from masturbation for a month (because she feels she's doing it too much), I thought I'd start with a question that I get whenever I'm on a college campus: how much masturbation is too much masturbation. Read on, and if you aren't sure how to celebrate the month, later in the week I'll be offering tips in that direction.

Read More: How Much Masturbation Is Too Much?