Playboy, the men's magazine-turned-'brand management company' said this week that it was getting out of the nudity business. 'The battle has been fought and won,' Playboy's CEO, Scott Flanders, told the New York Times, though the announcement sounded more like an admission of defeat.

When it was announced that two-thirds of Cambridge colleges would include mandatory sexual consent workshops in their Freshers' Week schedules, one boy complained that it was ‘just an excuse to further emasculate male students’. The Spectator worried that explicitly stated consent in sexual encounters would ‘kill off seduction’.

I don't often find myself agreeing with the Archbishop of Canterbury. On reading his remarks about Irish Catholicism ('an institution so deeply bound into the life of a society... suddenly losing all credibility – that's not just a problem for the Church, it's a problem for everybody in Ireland'), I was transported back to my Catholic boyhood when, before a rugby game against an Anglican school, our Christian Brother teachers would warm us up with stories of Catholics being burnt at the stake by the Prots, with the coup de grace being 'and since this is a Protestant school we're playing at, don't leave any valuables in the changing room.' I can only imagine the depths of chagrin within the Church right now at having an Anglican divine dilate upon the Church's moral failings.

Now that Tiger Woods is making ready to pull the sock off the head of his driver once more, and with our concern and warm wishes going out to Sandra Bullock in her moment of heartbreak, who among us can ignore the devastating toll sexual addiction takes, not merely on the celebrities we love and admire, but on the broader society, a society reluctant to even acknowledge this serious mental health issue and the countless lives it affects, inevitably in the most damaging of ways.

There was a great huffing and puffing by the biblical-respectablists a couple of decades back when someone brought out a book for kids about a little girl living with her father and his partner, called Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin. Oh, the fuss about promoting unnatural ways. And yet all along it was as natural as penguins in a zoo. (I can't seem to get enough of penguins and their ways, lately.) A pair of male penguins in a long-term loving relationship at Bremerhaven zoo, called, I'm thrilled to say, Z and Vielpunkt, were given an egg by their keepers and have nurtured it between them to chickhood. It's four weeks old now, and doing fine. Gay partnerships are not uncommon in penguins in zoos.