Scott Green

The recession has affected everything in this country, from tax policy to car purchases to the market of people willing to pay straight-out-of-college journalists six figures to write humor columns.

It’s also touched the love lives of a lot of Americans, or at least the ones whose bedrooms I can see into from my 21st-floor apartment.

Lucky thing your favorite (and only, thanks to trademark law) Sex Column Answer Man is on the case, answering whatever questions I felt like asking myself.

Question: What are some ways to save money in the bedroom?

Answer: Birth control is expensive. If you use condoms, for example, you can try wearing one only half the time you get amorous. Or if you’re really in a financial jam, you can switch to a cheaper method, such as prayer.

Q: How has the recession personally affected Lahoma Sue Smith of Oklahoma?

A: She was arrested for selling her body.

Q: So?

A: For a box of potato chips. This is according to an article in the Oklahoma City Oklahoman written by a reporter named – I would never lie to you – Johnny Johnson. The 36-year-old Smith was fined more than $1,100 after she traded sex for a $30 case of snacks with a man she believed was a Frito-Lay employee.

Q: He got sex for a box of chips?

A: Just imagine if he’d also had a party sub.

Q: Is the world’s oldest profession suffering as a whole?

A: Sadly, yes. According to British newspaper The Observer, legal brothels in Nevada have seen business cut by as much as 70 percent.

Q: Are the women who work there doing anything to recapture market share?

A: Many are taking half off.

Q: How else is the economy affecting Nevada?

A: The state’s Republican senator, John Ensign, was busted for an affair after refusing to pay his mistress’s husband blackmail.

Q: Didn’t Ensign have presidential aspirations?

A: Yes, but they were unrealistic. The president only makes $400,000 a year, and you can’t afford more than two or three mistresses on that.

Q: Why did Ensign’s Republican colleague, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, claim to be on a hiking trip when he knew he was going to admit to an affair a few days later?

A: Sanford was on an expensive trip to Argentina, and feared that if South Carolinians found out he had spent so much money on an opulent vacation, his political career would be finished.

Q: A trip to Argentina is that big a splurge?

A: In South Carolina it would be a major extravagance to wear a tuxedo t-shirt to the monster truck rally.

Q: How is pop culture reflecting the affect the economy has had on sex?

A: HBO is airing a new show, “Hung,” about a man blessed with an exceptional anatomy. Times are tough, so he moonlights as a gigolo.

Q: Does it solve his financial problems?

A: By the end of the first episode, he’d had all the Lays he could handle.