SAGE ADVICE: The naked truth

I’ve been getting a lot of e-mail lately from lonely women asking if they can send me some naked pictures.
Now I don’t claim to be an expert on loneliness or nakedness, though I do shower from time to time and sometimes my wife does leave me alone with a list of chores that usually gets thrown away with whatever it was I had been eating that morning, but it seems to me that sending complete strangers naked pictures of yourself would only accentuate the said loneliness. I’ve never, for the record, been sitting around and said, “Boy howdy am I lonely and bored. Sure would like to send somebody a naked picture of myself.”
It kind of makes me wonder, really, what sort of person even has naked pictures of themselves. I don’t even have studio portraits of myself from the Sears. I’ve got a few snapshots here and there, but even those are mostly of my torso –clothed – or the first two-thirds of my face, out of focus. Most of the pictures I have are of me holding one of my kids, me screaming “Stop jumping on your brother’s head” at one of my kids or me running in a blurred mess to catch up with one of my kids before he runs straight out into traffic without looking.
I don’t quite get the whole, “Can I send you some naked pictures?” thing. I’m fairly certain it has something to do with someone wanting to infect me with a virus. Naked pictures usually are related, in some way, with viral infections.
Again, I don’t claim to be an expert on the Internet, but part of me believes that I’m witnessing, through a barrage of daily e-mail messages, the last gasps of a really put-upon porn industry. In the early, good old days of the Internet, back when people were giddily calling it the Information Superhighway and other such nonsense, the only thing you could find on the Web was naked pictures of somebody. Seemed like every time you clicked your mouse, another face attached to a naked body – often a body that ought not have been naked – popped up at you. Nowadays, the Internet is actually useful. You can find just about anything you want on there. You can even search medical terms these days and not end up with a veritable pornucopia on your search engine. The Internet, to put it in different terms, is not longer the red-light district, the place in town where the sailors hang out while in port, the spot where longshoremen stab one another over beers, the place where you can see a peep show and get a tattoo at the same time. It’s become gentrified, respectable, and in doing so it’s pushed the pimps, prostitutes and weird guys who scream out “The end is near” every five minutes into my e-mail’s inbox.
Still, I don’t get why they picked me. My Lord, don’t they know I could have a newspaper column or something? Don’t these women think? The folks at Dateline ought to do one of their big surprise investigations on them. I might just turn out that they aren’t women at all. Or lonely. Or bored. Or naked. It might turn out they’re the weird guy who used to scream out “The end is near” every five minutes before the yuppies moved in with their expensive coffees and designer dogs. I’d like to see Chris Hansen have an in-depth conversation with that guy. 
I’ll keep thinking on it. While I do, feel free to drop me an e-mail sometime. If I get real good and bored, I just might e-mail the first two-thirds of my head, out of focus, right back at you.