Long time reader, first time writer, etc. What the hell is this? I was (I swear!) reading an innocuous NYT article, about an Opus Dei school in Washington D.C. where Santorum (the person) sent two of sons. They mentioned the word cilice. A few clicks on Google brought to that site. Questions for a sex columnist:

1. Made by Italian Nuns?

2. Is Rick Santorum wearing some (or all) of this stuff DURING the debates?

3. Is the point of a 3-link full-waist cilice over a 1-link cilice that it gets you "closer to God" (read: off) quicker, or is it just a size-queen thing?

4. Could the proprietors and nuns really think all of their sales are due to abstinent Numenarys?

5. Is this a brave new world of abstinent sex toys?

These Opus Dei guys party a little too hard for my tastes. I am more pleased at my lapsed Catholicism today after discovering it.

Maybe All Sales Owed2 Catholic Higher-ups

My response after the jump...

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1. Gotta keep those girls occupied and out of trouble.

2. Why should debate viewers be the only ones who suffer?

3. Some people are pain pigs, MASOCH. The more it hurts, the more those people like it. And while not all those people are debate viewers, all debate viewers are those people.

4. They can pretend to think that, they most likely do pretend to think that, and odds are good they'll go on pretending to think that. But their website resembles nothing so much as a high-end online SM sex shop. I imagine the good Catholics who run that site are like the owner of, say, a bridle shop in, say, Manhattan who sells more riding crops to New Yorkers than there are riders or horses on the entire East Coast. He can tell himself that his customers are all dedicated riders, if it makes him feel better, but he's not fooling anyone—not even himself.

5. Who says Catholics abstain?

And, finally, the guy who wrote up Opus Dei's school for the NYT seems to have been permanently assigned to the kinky Catholic beat—check out this recent piece of his. And anyone who's interested in reading more about Opus Dei should start here.