Libido malfunction

From Janet Jackson's pathetic Nipplegate to Bill O'Reilly's thrusting falafel, 2004 was a year of monumentally bad sex.

By Rebecca Traister

Dec. 17, 2004 | When it came to sex, this year blew, and not in a suggestive way.

It's been four full years now without a good pair of bedroom eyes in the White House, and we're beginning to feel the chill. It's not that we're not trying to find something to get lathered up about. This year, we've been treated to exposed breasts and on-camera blow jobs, read porn star confessionals and paeans to anal sex, even goaded harlot laureate Paris Hilton into further ludicrous behavior by making her a pseudo TV star.

This kind of overstimulation has left us rubbed raw and thoroughly desensitized. There is no eroticism here, only some really ugly nipple rings.

And a looming image of Bill O'Reilly soaping up a loofah mitt.

Yup, 2004 has been the year of Bad Sex. Really, really, really bad sex.

But is a year unexamined a year worth living? No. So below, broken into arbitrary categories, is a rundown of some of the anticlimactic moments in the giant wardrobe malfunction that was 2004.

The Exposure of Breasts and Their Painful-Looking Augmentations

Let's just get this one over with: Super Bowl halftime show. Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake are singing a duet in which Timberlake promises that he'll rip off Jackson's clothes by the end of the song. At tuneful climax, he fulfills promise, exposing Ms. Jackson (if you're nasty)'s right breast, which looks big, natural, and pretty attractive. Or would look big and natural if it weren't decorated with a spiky nipple ring that blocks most of the view, looks upsettingly heavy, and would draw blood from any suitor who approached the heaving bosom with too much ardor. Jackson covers her exposed flesh dramatically. Chaos reigns.

How the hell did this become the most talked-about sex story of the year?

It was nine fateful months later that B-list staple and Page Six family member Tara Reid walked into P.Diddy's birthday party in Manhattan, faced a rope line of her paparazzi tormenters, and stared at them blank-faced and oblivious as her dress fell down, fully exposing her left boob. The scene was ugly on its own: photographers laughing at the clueless Reid, snapping away until her publicist finally alerted her that the breeze she might be feeling was her missing clothing. But what really added insult to injured pride was the fact that her ineptly enlarged knocker had a ridge of purple welts around the nipple.

Gross and sad, yes. But it does present us with the chance to bid adieu to this particular chapter in American history with a line that could not be used enough in 2004: Thanks for the mammaries, ladies.

Next page: Memo to Bernardo Bertolucci: Incest is not a turn-on