Hey Natalie Dylan, Here's Some Advice for Selling Your Virginity

"Virtue has never been as respectable as money." -- Mark Twain

"I always thought of losing my virginity as a career move." -- Madonna

Obama, Blagojevich, the economy, Gitmo, torture, Mickey Rourke ... it's been a juicy news month. So, who do you have to screw to get a little attention around here?

The answer: The highest acceptable bidder.

We are now officially in the 15 minutes of Natalie Dylan, the pseudonym of the enterprising 22-year-old who is auctioning off her virginity through the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in Nevada as part of a thesis project for a master's degree in marriage and family therapy (she recently completed her BA in women's studies from California State University, Sacramento). The bidding began in September and, as of this writing, is up to $3.7 million.

Natalie's maiden muff is hers to do with as she wishes -- sexual desires, values and limits vary wildly, and as long as no one gets hurt, t'ain't nobody's business what you do. We just wonder -- what if some religious group buys it and decides to keep it intact forever?

Any pro-virginity faction could pool some loot and once the "Sold!" sign is planted (but not too deep) -- WHAM! -- on goes the chastity belt. Then she'll be screwed -- or not -- for life. Imagine getting punk'd by Ned Flanders.

Presumably Natalie has some kind of filters in place to avoid any such weirdness and has said, in a story written for the Daily Beast, that the highest bidder won't necessarily be the lucky recipient. She'll make the choice. "It's not like an eBay auction ..." she says in the Edinburgh Journal. "I don't have to take the highest bidder. I'm taking time to get to know the guys. We contact each other back and forth."

It sounds a bit like online dating, which means she should feel the novelty wear off and close her account right about nnnnnnow.

It's interesting that virginity should command so much when it's common knowledge that the first time isn't usually a charm. "I didn't lose my virginity until I was 18," Adam Ant once told an interviewer. "The first time was a nightmare. Who shows you how to use a condom?" This is a pretty universal first-time experience, but with maturity, education and good partners (or by being huge rock stars), most of us get better at it.

Good for Adam, though, for being forthright about safety. First-timers aren't always, and may be less so if they don't allow themselves the latitude that it might happen. Virginity pledges -- vows by young people to stay cherry until marriage -- first popped up in our culture in the early '90s, and a recent report from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health shows that teens who took pledges were just as likely to have sex as their counterparts who didn't and more likely to engage in risky behavior. Pledge or not, half the youths surveyed were sexually active before marriage, writes Rob Stein in the Washington Post, "but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers."

It's hard to imagine Natalie not being safe, but if she needs any tips on her enterprise, she can get them from those who have auctioned off their virginity before her. Radar Online lists five virginity auctions that have taken place since January 2004.

Britney Spears was not among them, but a high price was once offered for her much-touted virtue. Laura Carpenter writes in her book, Virginity Lost, that "when the singer was just 18, a wealthy American businessman offered to give her over $7 million if she would lose her virginity with him. Britney was outraged, telling journalists, "It's a disgusting offer. He should go have a cold shower and leave me alone ..." (US Weekly reported in 2007 that Spears "lost her virginity at 14 to boyfriend Reg Jones" and that Eric Ervin, a lawyer who worked with Spears, said the purity pitch was a PR blitz.) Seven million dollars -- you could probably buy a Senate seat for that. It's nearly twice what Natalie's is commanding, but then, she doesn't have the kink factor of having once been a Mouseketeer).