Dear Sasha,

I'm a 21-year-old female and regularly masturbated to porn as a teen. Now I am bored with a lot of it and find I need more shock value to get aroused.

I'm concerned about this, because for the first time I watched bestiality. I think it is wrong, and I would never consider doing it, but I watched it nonetheless because it had that sexual "shock value." Is there something wrong with me? Is this common, and what can I do?

Help

If a volcano kills civilians in Indonesia, it's news. When the government does the killing, sadly, it's just business as usual, especially if an American president tacitly endorses the killing, as President Barack Obama just did with his visit to Indonesia.

In his Massey Lectures entitled The Malaise of Modernity (outside Canada, The Ethics of Authenticity) McGill political philosopher Charles Taylor asks us to reflect on the importance of "authenticity" to social practice. Drawing on Aristotle, Taylor characterizes authentic human relationships as constituting the best about human existence.

In everything we do authentic experience matters: in what we eat, the way we live, love, enjoy, and take pleasure; and how we work, and interact with each other. Taylor suggests we find our true self in recognizing and being recognized by others. The philosopher (and four time Montreal area NDP candidate in the 1960s) wants us to take politics seriously as a social practice.

For those considering issue triage -- picking five or six issues to focus on -- in the fight to rid the country of the current government, one area that is critical to the outcome is exposing the Harper government's construction of the national security state.

I am referring here to the commitment of the Harper government to implementing policies that increase the importance of a war-fighting military in Canadian society, its preoccupation with tough-on-crime legislation, its blank cheque for security operations like the one "protecting" the G20 Summit in June and its continued efforts to convince Canadians that they face the constant risk of terrorist attack.