If the year in major sex stories were to be written like a Craigslist personal ad, it would sound something like this:

"Horny Einstein with HPV seeks a little Girls Gone Wild action in space. No sex toys, please, as they are toxic, but respond to this CL ad if you want to play Justice Department and get all up in my 2257, if domain names are your kink, and you love the Matrix but fantasize most about Neo's secret lingerie drawer. No griefers."

For your end-of-the-year sexual entertainment, my picks for the Top 10 Sex Stories of 2006:

10. The Larry Wachowski Story

OK, so it wasn't a total secret that "Matrix" co-creator and producer Larry Wachowski was a cross-dresser -- the relationship with dominatrix Mistress Isla Strix was never really hidden, as it destroyed two marriages -- but the in-depth article in Rolling Stone revealed much more. In "The Mystery of Larry Wachowski," Peter Wilkinson writes: "Leaving Los Angeles, he and Ilsa moved into a $2.7 million home in San Francisco, on a steep hill in the Castro, with sweeping views of San Francisco Bay. (As of last month, work was still under way on an expensive addition to the house, and a sparkling new red Lexus was parked in the indoor garage.) On the transfer deed for the Castro home, the name Laurence Wachowski does not appear. Instead, it's 'Laurenca' Wachowski. And in a judge's order, filed in the divorce proceeding, he is similarly identified as Laurence Wachowski, a.k.a. Laurenca Wachowski."

9. .XXX Goes Down

In March 2005, Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) and Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) proposed a bill that would require all commercial Web sites with material "harmful to minors" (in other words, sexually explicit content) to move to a .xxx domain within six months of their bill becoming law. Anyone with a vaguely sex-related Web site instantly felt the first frost of the chilling effects that would come from such an Internet red light district. In a Boing Boing post, San Francisco's Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Jason Schultz said, "Talk about a misguided attempt at Internet zoning ... also has severe implications for filtering as I'd imagine every .xxx domain would be on the universal black list." But by May 2006 the Register reported .xxx dead in the water, and all the sex writers in Blogistan heaved a collective sigh of relief.

8. 2257 Raids

The Justice Department added a whole bunch of new age-monitoring regulations in 2005 to their 2257 requirements for pornographers. They added so many, you'd expect them to be done for a while. And because 2257 news died down last year, it's really easy to get lulled into thinking the harassment and shakedowns of pornographers are over. But 2006 has been the year of the surprise 2257 raid for porn film companies. Even though porn is not illegal in the United States and 2257 is For the Children, the laundry list of legitimate businesses on the receiving end of raids this year grew by one more entry this month. In addition to Pure Play Media, Evasive Angles, Darkside Entertainment, Legend, Sunshine Films, Robert Hill Releasing, Sebastian Sloane Productions and Diabolic -- a team of FBI agents conducting 2257 records inspections visited the offices of K-Beech Inc.

7. Einstein, Sex Fiend

Yeah, he could talk the talk, but could he walk the walk? As it happens, Albert Einstein talked all kinds of smack about his fellow scientists -- and if he ever boasted about how chicks dig physics geeks or his theory of (his own) relativity to a trophy-drawer of personally collected science-wife panties, he wasn't just pulling another fast equation on y'all. In July, a bevy of Einstein's private letters were unlocked after a 20-year hold, revealing that the king of all high-math nerds had a number of mistresses and numerous sexual liaisons with women who showered him with "affection and gifts."

6. Toxic Sex Toys

Sex educators had been making increasing noise all year about the use of phthalates (toxic chemicals) in cheaply made sex toys, but the lube really hit the fan when Greenpeace issued a toxic sex toy warning based on their investigative report that put those Crystal Jelly Dongs right off the menu. Calling on the European Union to address what they called an "EU sex scandal," Greenpeace requested a ban on the toys similar to one put on children's toys made with the same chemicals -- just like we've proposed here in San Francisco. Blogs responded in kind, with more information on the chemicals and a guide to unsafe sex toys (or two).

5. Sex Toy Bans

Sex toys had a rough year, coming and going. Not only did people freak out about what was in their toys, but legislators had fits so profound about their very existence that it kinda made us all a bit uncomfortable to associate senators and butt plugs all in one sentence. ... But because they tried -- in some cases, successfully -- to make sex toys illegal in certain states, we have all been forced (with a vibrator to our collective heads) to consider anal beads and politicians in bed together, as it were. But seriously -- healthy, average adult Americans were forbidden their fundamental right to buzzing bunny vibrators and bend-over-boyfriend behind closed doors when a federal appeals court in Mississippi upheld the dismissal of a case challenging the state's sex toy ban. Mississippi joined the ranks of sex-toy hatin' states Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Texas, Louisiana and Virginia.

4. Sex in Space

In space, no one can hear you masturbate. At least that was the theory tossed (ahem) about the Internet and in print this year, especially when Laura S. Woodmansee came out with the well-researched (and highly amusing) book "Sex in Space." Aside from jokes about getting fluids out of your hair, the choreography of connection and not leaving condoms on the console, MSNBC's science writer Alan Boyle remarked that "new devices and data would be required to hit the zero-g g-spot," and zero-gravity veteran Xeni Jardin got a sex-positive microgravity post going on Boing Boing that garnered comments from pro-abstinence pseudo-Christians as well as hanky-flagging space sluts.

3. 'Girls Gone Wild"s Joe Francis

We all knew that those annoying "Girls Gone Wild" ads we had to sit through while waiting for Stephen Colbert to come back on just had to come from the father of all douche bags, but then this year we found out we were right. Joe Francis, the founder and director of the video series, is officially looking like the king craziest douche bag of all times. He was robbed at gunpoint and forced to perform in a bend-over-boyfriend extortion video and was arrested on charges of racketeering and drugs. The Los Angeles Times profile in which he publicly sexually humiliated the female journalist on the story significantly raised his douche bag quotient (DQ). And this month, his guilty plea for using underage girls (gone wild with lawyers, natch) got him a tidy little sentence.

2. The Craigslist Experiment Sex Scandal

In September, Seattle resident Jason Fortuny (and a friend) carried a Craigslist thought experiment over into shocking reality. He took a hard-core Women Seeking Men ad from another city and reposted it to see how many replies he could get in 24 hours. Then he published every single response -- photos, e-mails, IM info, phone numbers, names, everything -- to a public wiki. Then he went public on Jason's LiveJournal page, calling it "The Craigslist Experiment." He got 178 responses, with 145 photos of men -- one respondent used a Microsoft employee e-mail address, another used a usar.army.mil (military) e-mail address -- all sparking huge debates on Internet privacy. Since then, Portland copycat Michael Crook performed the same experiment but took it further, baiting respondents into giving more sexual and personal information. Crook became a troll par excellence by trying to milk his 15 minutes of attention by barraging local Web sites like 10 Zen Monkeys and Web hosting providers like Laughing Squid with bogus DMCA takedown notices related to his image (when they wrote about him), turning sex-baiting into DMCA-baiting -- and now the local Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing Crook for bogus DMCA claims.

1. The HPV Vaccine

HPV (human papillomavirus) is a very popular sexually transmitted virus, but not exactly the kind of popular that makes you want to be in the "in" crowd. It's believed that 75 percent of the population will become infected with HPV during their adulthood, and studies show that certain types of HPV infections cause about 70 percent of all cervical cancer., while 370,000 cases of cervical cancer are identified in the United States every year and the CDC estimates that 6.2 million Americans are infected every year. In June, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first preventive HPV vaccine, marketed by Merck & Co. under the trade name Gardasil. Yay! But wait: Conservative Christian groups have come out in opposition against the HPV vaccine, claiming that a vaccine will only encourage promiscuity and that abstinence is the best way to avoid getting HPV -- and thus injecting a life-saving breakthrough with a virus of its own: life-threatening sexual hysteria. It's too bad: Something called "The Promiscuity Vaccine" sounds like a shot I'd like to get from a naughty nurse, rather than a dose of misinformation from the Family Research Council.

This column has been changed since its original posting. - Ed

Violet Blue is a Forbes "Web Celeb", notorious blogger (Laughing Squid), high-profile tech personality and one of Wired's "Faces of Innovation." She writes for outlets ranging from Forbes.com to O, The Oprah Magazine. She is regarded as the foremost expert in the field of sex and technology, a sex-positive pundit in mainstream media ( CNN, The Oprah Winfrey Show) and is interviewed, quoted and featured prominently by major media outlets. Violet has many award-winning, best-selling books, a famous podcast, is fun to follow on Twitter, and is a San Francisco native.

Blue headlines at conferences ranging from ETech, The Forbes Internet Leadership Conference, LeWeb and SXSW: Interactive, to Google Tech Talks at Google, Inc. Her tech site is Techyum; her audio and e-books are at Digita Publications.

For more information and links to Web sites discussed in Open Source Sex, go to Violet Blue's Web site, tinynibbles.com.