"I've been scanning the personal ads, and I've come across a few abbreviations I don't understand. Can you explain: BBW, HWP, GS and WFW?"

"Are there any products that can keep my nipples erect? I sometimes like the look of my erect nipples showing through my clothing. What do you suggest besides ice cubes?"

"I keep coming across the term 'fisting' but have been too shy to actually ask anyone what it is. Is it pretty much what it sounds like or is there more to it?"

These are just some of the thousands of questions the nation's sex advice columnists receive every month. Chip Rowe, who writes the Advisor column in Playboy, fields some 500 a month. He and two colleagues answer every one of them and select about a dozen for publication in the magazine and on the Playboy Advisor Web site. Louanne Weston, a sex therapist in Fair Oaks, Calif., gets 1,500 questions a month as the Sex Matters advice columnist for OnHealth.com (recently acquired by WebMD). San Francsico sexuality authority Sandor Gardos receives 2,500 questions a week as the sex advice columnist for Thriveonline/Oxygen. That's 10,000 a month. "Answering sex questions is a dirty job," Playboy's Rowe says, "but someone has to do it."

Answering sex questions is also a job fraught with mixed emotions -- chief among them, feelings of being overwhelmed and profound sadness at the sexual ignorance apparent in so many letters. "Sometimes I feel like I'm buried under an avalanche," Weston sighs. "I open my e-mail and I typically have 2,000 to 3,000 messages waiting. I often wonder if anyone out there knows how to have good sex. Sometimes I feel crushed under the weight of people's ignorance and misery."

You'd expect people who write to sex columnists to have sexual questions and problems. They're a self-selected group. People who don't have sexual issues don't write. But a staggeringly large number of people do write. And the questions they ask, often tinged with desperation, suggest that 30 years after the so-called sexual revolution -- the sexual frankness triggered by the Pill, the women's movement, gay liberation, general acceptance of premarital sex, the popularization of oral sex, record numbers of sexually transmitted diseases and greater availability of sex media -- Americans are no better informed about sex and no happier in bed than their parents or grandparents were.

"I feel so sorry for so many of the people who write me," says Isadora Alman, a San Francisco sex therapist and, since 1984, author of the Ask Isadora sex advice column, which runs in 16 alternative weeklies around the country. Alman also operates the online Sexuality Forum. "It's so sad when people feel the only place they can turn to is a sex advice column, and it's sadder still because I can't answer most questions that get submitted. There are way too many, and I can only publish a relative few."

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