Have you ever wondered about the paternity implications for a man who has oral sex performed on him by a woman who proceeds to save the end result and uses it to inseminate herself without the man's knowledge? Well, Sherry Colb has. In an article entitled "When Oral Sex Results in Pregnancy", Colb describes the plight of a man who found himself in just such a situation and had an $800 per month child support bill to prove it. It is a fascinating look at what, if anything, mitigates a man's paternal responsibilities for his genetic offspring.

Colb's piece is one of 25 wide-ranging essays, memoirs and works of journalism that have been collected by Mitzi Szereto into a volume called The World's Best Sex Writing 2005. Szereto is the author of Erotic Fairy Tales and a series of erotic novels written under the nom de plume M.S. Valentine. Her compendium runs the gamut in terms of subject matter and tone, juxtaposing Katha Pollitt's even-handed essay on the passing of Andrea Dworkin with Dave Barry's meditation on the mating habits of fruit flies.

If there's one unifying trait for the 25 samples in this book, it's that they rarely appeal to the prurient interest. The one real exception to this is "The Holy Fuck", a paean to anal sex written by former ballerina Toni Bentley that mixes ecstasy with a healthy dose of over-the-top blasphemy. Szereto's real mission with this book is, however, to delve into the cultural aspects of sexuality and how it affects people's lives outside of the bedroom.

Ben Ehrenreich has a fascinating piece about sex offender registries and how hard it is to get off one if you've been put there by mistake. Sarah Klein writes about the highly questionable (and expensive), yet increasingly popular, phenomenon of vaginal cosmetic surgery, and Christine Aziz writes about a French doctor who specializes in repairing some of the damage done by female circumcision.

One of the more important articles in the book is a reprint of "The Invention of Patient Zero" from New York magazine. David France outlines the case against the existence a new form of super-AIDS that had public health officials preparing for the worst in New York City and elsewhere. In the process, France offers an insider's view into the turbulent and combative worlds of AIDS research and AIDS advocacy.

By far the longest piece in The World's Best Sex Writing 2005 is "Violence in the Garden" by the pseudonymous Polly Peachum. It's the bizarre manifesto of a "life-style submissive", or full-time slave, who paradoxically views her extreme submission as the ultimate in personal freedom. Her master, who dictates every aspect of her life from the sexual to the mundane, pulls off the unimaginable by being a civil-rights worker who also owns a slave.

While some readers may well relate to "Violence in the Garden", others will be put off - not simply by the extremity of Peachum's kink, but by the flip and condescending way in which she paints those who don't "get it" as sexists and prudes. Despite this defensiveness, there are still moments of pathos. She claims that she became a submissive in spite of her background rather than because of it. When we learn about her physically abusive father and her rape at the age of 14, however, the specter of self-delusion on a grand scale raises its head.

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the cultural side of sexuality. Amongst the 25 pieces are nuggets of wisdom and plenty of surprises for the curious.