My wife and I had a baby 7 weeks ago. The only intimacy since the birth has been a hand job that was obviously a chore for her — she did it while we watched TV. Anyway, this morning she caught me masturbating in the shower. All she said was, "So, taking a shower?" I was 90 percent to orgasm and stroking myself hard, so I couldn't play it off like I was washing my genitals. I'm sure she appreciates my need for release, but does she think less of me or find me disgusting? I don't know if I should discuss this with her or let it pass.

J.M., Phoenix, Arizona

I'm a sucker for The Playboy Adviser. For the 99% of you who get 99% of your porn, soft or otherwise, from the Internet, the Playboy Adviser is the advice column that's graced the opening pages of every Playboy magazine for the last 40 or so years.

I've written about Playboy before, dismissed it as an anachronism, but for some reason I mechanically renew my subscription every year. I think it's mostly rank sentimentality.

I've still got these strong memories of being about 9 years old, waiting until my mother went downstairs to do the laundry, and furtively pulling out a weathered Playboy from the bottom of my older brother's comic book stack and being mystified by that particular centerfold's bush of angry red pubic hair.

I can also remember my friends and I finding a few copies in a trash bin and, lacking a place to hide them from our parents, burying them — totally oblivious to the irony — next to the convent at St. Robert's Catholic Church. For weeks, we'd periodically return with a small shovel to dig up some cellulose skin while Barry, a Catholic, muttered the Act of Contrition under his breath.

Most of all, I remember how I felt when I opened up an issue. It was secret and it was dirty. I'd feel a dizzying flush of Testosterone that simultaneously cleared and fogged my head while warming my little loins.

So yeah, I feel sentimental towards the mag. It's even influenced the way I regard the passage of time. I don't classify it in decades, months, or years. Instead, I categorize history as pre trimmed-bush and post trimmed- bush; months are just a seemingly endless, bouncing conga line of naked coed Playmates of the Month who all aspire to be either actresses or veterinary assistants and who, God bless 'em, all find rudeness and bad breath to be turn-offs.

Anyhow, I never paid much attention to the Adviser column when I was a kid, but now it's the second thing I look at when the new issue hits my mailbox.

Strangely, the questions aren't all about sex. Mixed in are questions about the merits of GH, the best way to work abs, whether people once used to use blocks of wood as pillows, and, ironically, how to best destroy a hard drive.

You'd think if a person had a hard drive, he was also connected to the Internet and could use that-there Google instead of writing a letter to a print magazine and waiting three months for the answer. In fact, it's hard to imagine relying on the Playboy Adviser to answer any non sex-related question when the Internet is a much more logical, much more expedient choice.

The most mind-boggling thing that leaps out at you while reading the sex questions, though, is the testicularity, or lack thereof, evident in most of the letter writers.

Take the one I opened this column up with, for example. The man's wife takes care of the hell-spawn but doesn't have sex with her husband. She might as well be a nanny, except I'm told Swedish nannies occasionally have sex with the man of the house.

Rather than raise a stink about it, the poor bastard takes to whacking off in the shower, the drain serving as a scummy substitute for all of his wife's now-sequestered orifices.

She catches him and the only thing on his mind is whether she'll think less of him or find him disgusting.

The Adviser suggests he try giving her a massage, which may, if he's lucky, lead to some sort of quid pro quo sex.

I don't know if I'm more freaked out by the question or the answer.

If I could take over hubby's body for a minute I'd tell his wife this: "Listen Giver of Life, it isn't your fault and sure isn't my fault that your her-mones have turned your vagina into a dry, arid, and generally inhospitable place, a vaginal Iraq if you will, but this isn't going to work.

"You suckle the baby, right? Well, suckle on this once in awhile. That, or spread those selfish legs. You can even pretend you're giving birth all over again, but this time you'll be filled with a hot, nimble, mercurial life form that, unsure of his willingness to enter this strange new world, keeps ducking in and out the hole with slick, amazing speed.

"I don't even care if you read O Magazine while I'm doing the nasty, as long as I have one, an O that is. I've got the madness, you see, and I can't think of anything else but coming and I need desperately for the quiet to return so I can do taxes or tie my shoes or think about something else for at least a few hours."

But never mind all that, the man actually was worried his wife would find him disgusting when she caught him masturbating!

Masturbation is Nature's pressure release valve. When we see something tasty in a butt-twitching skirt, we have a limited number of choices. We can either approach said thing in a skirt and attempt to spark up some phony baloney conversation with the hopes of bedding it in a week to a month; we can rub up against its leg and hope we finish before the police come; or we can duck behind the shrubbery and tear one off.

But this woman's poor bastard of a husband has it maddeningly worse. One of the main reasons he got married in the first place was to have access to sex virtually any time he needs it, but wifey isn't living up to the deal. Of course he's going to masturbate and the fact he thinks you might think he's disgusting is, well, disgusting!

If he had any balls at all, he would have splooged what must have been a Mentos-in-a-liter-of-Pepsi load right on the glass door of the shower with impertinence and then, before it oozed away, used his finger to write " WHY ISN'T THIS YOUR ASS?" in the milky glaze.

Personally, I've got no use for either the husband or wife.

But that letter was just one of many that exhibit some strange new spineless breed of man:

My fiancé just graduated from college and moved in with me. She went home to visit her parents for the weekend. As I was shuffling through our bedroom closet I knocked over some of her boxes and noticed a few DVDs. Only one would play, but it showed my fiancée's hot college roommate blowing her boyfriend. I had just started jerking off when another girl appeared in the frame. The camera went out of focus as this girl began sucking him, then the camera went back in a close-up of the head of his cock and both girl's mouths. Just before the film ended, the second girl grabbed his cock and licked the tip. As she did, I could see a ring on her finger. I freeze-framed, and it's the same ring I bought my girlfriend for our engagement. Should I ask if it's her? I don't want to lose her.

S.A. Akron, Ohio

The Advisor tells him, "many guys would love such an adventurous partner, you just need her to be an honest one."

That's a decent answer, but I'm more freaked out by the last line of his letter:

Should I ask it if it's her? I don't want to lose her?

Never mind that during their engagement, during the height of their supposed love, during the one brief period when they only have eyes for each other and no one else, she's giving a tag-team hummer to her roommate's boyfriend and recording it so she could relive the illicit thrill every time her sadsack finance/husband left the house to go antiquing.

Nah, he doesn't regard this as a possible trouble sign and that maybe, just maybe he deserves an explanation of some sort. Instead, this hamster is worried that she'll be offended either by his intrusion into her privacy or the fact that he could possibly think that was her in the video (as if there could be any other explanation)!

He'd rather silently swallow the image of her swallowing for the duration of their marriage rather than muster up the courage to just ask her whether this was a one-time thing or if blowing guys and recording it on DVDs is her hobby. No, he's worried she'll get indignant and leave.

What a loser.

Then there's L.F. from Dayton, a woman, who writes in to complain that her husband admonished her for using a vibrator. "He would feel like less of a man if a battery did his job for him," she explains, so she hides one in her tampon box.

B.H. from Denton, Texas, says her 28-year-old boyfriend talks to his mother several times a day and that she buys most of his clothes, including his underwear. Should she be concerned?

D.H. from Boston writes about his girlfriend who keeps on making excuses before they have sex. She invites him up for "two minutes." They'll start hooking up but after a few minutes, they'll stop. "Your two minutes are up, you need to go home now, " she'll say. He wants to know what his next move should be.

M.H. from Denver asked a girl for her cellphone number. He's called several times and only gets her voicemail. He wants to know if he should keep calling.

Arrrgghhhh!

L.F. from Dayton, your husband is an insecure little prick who's no doubt sporting an insecure little prick if he somehow feels inadequate over the notion that something that vibrates a couple of hundred times a second might stimulate the 80,000 nerve endings on her clit better than you can.

Hey L.F., the next time he needs to paint the house, tell him not to use the electric sander to prep it; tell him to use a piece of sandpaper instead because doing otherwise would make him less of a man.

Dump him!

B.H. from Dayton, your mother-loving boyfriend is a wussie version of Oedipus, not Oedipus Rex but Oedipus Wex, and don't be surprised when the wittle wascal has a tantrum when you won't put your hair in curlers, dress up in support hose and Montgomery Ward bargain bin underwear, and perfume your body with a little Lemon Pledge before hitting the sack.

Dump him!

D.H. from Boston, your girlfriend is a classic cock-tease who takes great pleasure in tormenting you. As a child, she no doubt tore the wings off flies, or, probably more accurately, teased their little fly dicks with tweezers till they were just about to pop and then smashed them with a rolled-up copy of Bitch magazine.

The next time she does that, whack off mightily on the family heirloom quilt woven by her great, great, great, grandmother to commemorate the Battle of Gettysburg and leave, never to return.

You got it, dump her!

And M.H. from Denver with the cell phone problems, just how delusional are you, anyway? You've called her a dozen times and she won't return your calls. Oh, it's definitely not you. Don't think for a second that she was maybe too drunk to think of a fake number when you asked. Don't think for a second that she maybe doesn't want to ever speak to you again, let alone go out with you.

Sure, she's no doubt been kidnapped by, I don't know, the Verizon Mob, and despite their claims to the contrary, the poor girl can't hear you now.

Oh yeah, when she finally escapes their clutches, she'll remember you as the only one who stuck by her, kept calling again and again despite not getting any callbacks and you'll be richly rewarded with a sloppy blowjob, which she'll no doubt record and put in her closet so that her fiancée can find it, after which he'll have no sexual recourse but to whack off in the shower, where he'll be caught by his mother who'll find him disgusting and won't buy him any more underwear, that tossed the dog, that worried the cat, that killed the rat, that ate the malt, that lay in the house that Jack built!!!

Again, my rant isn't against the women portrayed in some of these letters. Instead, I'm disgusted with the men, the men who've turned into chicks; not today's chicks but yesterday's chicks, the ones that were delicate, quaking, insecure little things that wait for their phone to ring, but alas, never does.

Even the Advisor's answers are sometimes more reminiscent of... I was going to say Cosmo, but Cosmo's far too progressive... how about Glamour?

It's weird, I tell you. Women busted through the glass ceiling in most venues, but rather then sharing their new digs with men as equals, they found, much to their puzzlement, that a lot of men simply preferred to switch places with them.