Forget Sex and the City: the real story seems to be happening in the suburbs. Witness Desperate Housewives. But perhaps we have desperate Jewish girls, as well. Or is that the real story?

As everyone remembers, Monica Lewinsky was a Jewish girl from Beverly Hills who got a position as an intern in the White House. It appears that she misunderstood what the word "position" meant.

At the height of the scandal, it seemed to me that our country had come a long way because no one was making an anti-Semitic generalization out of Monica's behavior. But I was focusing on the wrong issue back then. It wasn't that Monica was Jewish, but perhaps that Jewish girls were Monicas.

Everyone was rightly talking about Bill. What he did wrong - and wrong he surely did. But what about Monica? Had she been doing this kind of thing back in Beverly Hills or was this an entirely new extracurricular activity for her? Can we generalize to Jewish girls in Weston or Westfield or Westwood from what Monica was doing in the West Wing?

These questions came to mind recently when a woman in her seventies began sharing her concern with me about the custom in her granddaughter's prep school - Jewish girls were giving Jewish boys blowjobs as bar mitzvah presents! (Presumably because they've already got everything else.)

I couldn't believe my ears. But then she told me that this practice is so rampant that the Reform Jewish movement has taken it on as a national policy concern. I checked that piece of information out on Google, and sure enough there is an article to that effect dated November 19, 2005. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, President of the Union for Reform Judaism, addressed 4,200 people in Houston for its biennial convention and explicitly talked about oral sex and hooking up. Bravo, Rabbi Yoffie. For him the issue was that girls are "defining their worth by how they please boys." The degradation of girls flies in the face of the Reform Movement's dedication to the equality of women, he said.

To explore the topic further, I asked one of my (nice Jewish) male students at Brandeis (from another part of the country) if he had heard of girls doing this while he was in high school. He told me that this is particularly a "middle school thing" and it is common. Further, he didn't think it was so bad - using the same line as Clinton. "It's not sex," he said. In other words, the kids want to have intercourse ("real sex"), but feel they shouldn't. So instead, they have oral sex, which isn't sex. He also said that the girls who do it are not stigmatized; usually the boy and girl like each other. "It's safer than sex," he went on to say. He did not see it as a problem.

Never one to lose an opportunity, at a recent bat mitzvah I asked the rabbi if he had heard about this topic. He told me his youth group leaders are complaining that this behavior exists and that his synagogue will soon be introducing a curriculum to deal with it.

I'm not sure exactly what the curriculum will entail, but I would like to offer one suggestion. Talk to the kids. Find out what sex means to them; find out what is realistic. Find out if they see it as sex; if the girls feel they are degraded. Find out if the boys are pressuring the girls. Sexual drives and urges are present in young people and since the kids are not about to get married either in high school or shortly thereafter, they need to figure out how to cope. There aren't too many Jewish models of young people to emulate - think about Philip Roth's Portnoy or Woody Allen. I just read Billy Crystal's 700 Sundays and numerous other Jewish-boys-growing-up books. Sexual fantasies, exploits, doubts and adventures crowd out other topics. It's not just the videos and movies and songs - it's in our "fine literature" as well. Sex is ubiquitous.

In the meantime, I'd like to share a true story that probably sheds some light on this matter. During the time that Monica was getting her blue dress soiled, my 11-year old niece (from suburbia, but another state) visited our house. I went to turn off the TV which was broadcasting yet another story on the topic. She said I didn't need to do that because she knew what oral sex was. "Oh really," I replied, "What is it?" "It's when you talk while you're doing it."

That may, in fact, be the level of understanding of what sexual relations are all about among our tween-age Jews today. So, let's start talking.

This piece appears courtesy of Jewcy's partnership with 614, magazine of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.

"I know this girl, and she'd be perfect for you," I said to a single man-friend, "except, she has a cat." Normally, I'd never include such information, but I've wised up and realize today's man, as eager as he might seem to settle down, is still full of excuses not to.

"What do you mean she'd be perfect for me? If she owns a cat, that's impossible. Even if she were willing to send the cat back where it came from, like Hades, the fact that she took it in to begin with, says enough." That she has a big heart and loves to cuddle? "It says she's not for me, or any other normal guy. A guy who admits to liking cats is just not right in the head."

"Robert De Niro, in that Ben Stiller movie, you know Focker."

"'Meet the Parents,' and let me stop you there. That was a line in a movie. He was paid to say that crap about cats making you work for their affections, that dogs are easy. The truth is, cats are stuck up and have a sense of entitlement, and the people who like them are worse. And I don't believe those people who say they love both. If they have a cat and dog in their house, it's always because the spouse forced them into the cat. It's like those people who like cilantro. It's just one of those things. Either you love it, or you hate it. There's no middle ground."

"Forget it then. I don't know what I was thinking. I bet she takes baths, too." I knew this would really set him off.

"I bet she has incense in her house, and one of those holders for it, like mini skis."

"And she listens to Sade on repeat and puts too many pillows on the bed. And she's into needlepoint. I get it."

"She better have incense. Cat litter and all."

"Seriously, you really don't want to meet her just because she has a cat?!"

"You just don't get it, do you? It's because you're a chick. Women with cats are their own kind of crazy. It's like you half-Jews. Yeah, yeah, I know, you were raised Jewish, can read Hebrew. But you know what? Every single halvesy I know is nuts, but they're all good in bed, so you can put the knife down."

"Oh, are we?"

"It's just my experience, but I always know when a chick's Jewish in bed. She always swallows."

"Come on..."

"It's true. Jewish women hate to clean."

"..."

You're either a bath person or a shower person. That, I get. But always swallow, always spit, I'm not buying it. Besides, I'm technically half-Jewish, which acording to his logic means I don't mind some light housework. The point is, you might do either. I shower out of necessity, even though I might favor a bath. I'm not much of a bath girl, but I love the idea of soaps, of soaking the dead skin off, rolling it from beneath my nails as I scrape it off. Push back cuticles and grate all your calluses off. The big ideas come in the bath.

The night after the conversation with my friend, I took a bath. I didn't light a candle or play music, but liquid soap was invited. I watched the runnels of cloudy water, streams, really. They looked like a village, the kind you see from up above, or in a video game, where you'll soon need to pick your best players and armor to fight a Cyclopes.  Then the water looked like ocean cream, and the peak of my breast poking out was an iceberg, the great mass of me underneath the water, unforeseeable. It's nice to sometimes see yourself that way, as a ringer. When I dried off, I dialed my friend. "I didn't mention that she's quite stacked." I expected that he'd say, "Why didn't you say so in the first place?" Instead he replied, "It's like I told you, it doesn't matter how much she's got going for her. It's too much to handle a woman with two pussies."

Then I took a shower.

Stephanie Klein, author of Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

Come on, you know what this guy's thinking: A meydl of the perfect height I am going to ask Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the legendary 79-year-old sex therapist who stands no taller than Frodo Baggins or Yoda the Muppet (four feet, seven inches), if she is the perfect Blowjob Height.

Before I harass the near-octogenarian about whether she can perform oral sex while standing, however, I listen to her November 7 speech at the Museum of the City of New York on the Jewish Daily Forward's "Bintel Brief" column. Forward Web editor Daniel Treiman explains in his introduction that the Brief was the first newspaper advice column, started in 1906 to address the questions of the immigrant Jewish community. Typical questions included how to get a get (Jewish divorce decree), how religious spouses could share a home with nonreligious spouses, and sometimes whether others in the community would adopt babies that poorer families could not support.

The Brief was the Craig's List of its day, and illiterate Jews would often pay professionals to write letters for them. The Forward revived the column as the "Bintel Brief Blog" this year, with Dr. Ruth as the inaugural poster. Yes, Dr. Ruth is Jewish-her parents were "killed by the Nazis" and then she fought in the Israeli war of independence as a sharpshooter. "I was a sniper," she tells the audience. "Watch out!"

When the Forward announced Dr. Ruth's guest blogging, "There were so many comments of delight and excitement, itching to hear what she has to say," Treiman says. (When I think of GILFy Dr. Ruth, I feel delighted, excited and itchy too.)

Dr. Ruth says that the Brief paved the way for American advice columnists and celebrity therapists. "Bintel Brief replaced uncles and aunts and grandparents who would have given that advice," she says in her thick, luscious German accent. "People like myself couldn't do these comments-on TV, on radio-if not for our ‘grandparents.'" The Brief writers were "not trained psychologists, not trained social workers," but "trusted friends" who doled out wisdom to "poor Jews, not educated, like we see on Fiddler on the Roof, whose primary goal was to survive."

She believes that modern society is lacking the kind of community that the Brief fostered.

"With Bintel Brief, people didn't feel alone," Dr. Ruth says. "I see the danger [today] because we don't live anymore like people on the Lower East Side. People don't know their neighbors or talk to others on the subway. But don't start a sexual relationship on the subway! Please, at home!"

After her speech, the audience asks questions. She acknowledges the "tremendous issue of intermarriage," but dismisses it because when young Jews go to college, "We shouldn't be so surprised that they meet other people." Orthodoxy can be an aphrodisiac because waiting a week after menstruation to have sex "can mean a fantastic sexual experience after." Even some Hasidim come to her for advice because "[i]n the Jewish tradition we should not spill the seed in vain, so there are ways to discuss premature ejaculation," Dr. Ruth says with a laugh. "The sages in the Jewish tradition, sex was not considered a sin-it was considered a mitzvah. That permits someone like me to speak about orgasm and erection." (Oh, you naughty girl.)

I want to ask my question-about Dr. Ruth's physical stature-but I chicken out during the Q&A. She races out of the room like a munchkin on PCP to get to another event, but I follow her outside to her car. I haven't shaved in a week, and I look (and feel) incredibly creepy stalking her like this. But I must know.

"Dr. Ruth," I say, "I've always wanted to ask you something. A short woman and a tall man, when she's--"

"It's OK," Dr. Ruth says without any hesitation, clearly answering the question for the billionth time. She ducks into her sedan and vanishes into the Manhattan night.

It's as if cancer developed a marketing strategy:

A virus contracted through oral sex is the cause of some throat cancers, say US scientists.

HPV infection was found to be a much stronger risk factor than tobacco or alcohol use, the Johns Hopkins University study of 300 people found.