Over the past week, an extraordinary story played out, in which a married Canadian college professor fell into a three-day coma during a secret jaunt to a bondage club in New York. In the club, he was left alone as he preferred, after being hooked up by a dominatrix to a device called "the wheel," and began to choke when his foot slipped out of a high-heeled shoe he was wearing and the rope attaching him to the ceiling went taut, nearly choking the man to death. The New York Post broke the story Wednesday and Thursday in basically the same tabloidy way it covers any other story it cares about: the man was named, was interviewed in the hospital in an impaired state of consciousness and his wife was phoned by a Post reporter before she heard the news elsewhere. Not terribly groundbreaking by Post standards. But sex writers, plus, kind of randomly, this one guy from Portfolio, are in a snit, with the sex writers insisting, variously, that people not have sex with anyone who reads the Post (crazytalk!) or that people disseminate information about kinky News Corp. executives (tips@gawker.com), all because the Post named the kinky professor, then had their flack say "The Post will happily name every adult caught in a dog collar," and called cheating on your wife a "shameful habit." This is insane.

The sex writers, Emily Farris at Nerve and Dan Savage at every alternative weekly ever printed, plus Jeff Bercovici at Portfolio, want the professor's identity protected. They wonder about the news value in printing his name. They wonder why he's being "shamed. " What problem does the New York Post have with kinky sex?

None, from the looks of things. This is what the New York Post does. It finds people in extraordinary situations, even compromising ones, like cheating on one's spouse, and uncovers and prints details. The paper is sometimes sloppy with the facts and is often criticized for shady ethics. All the time, on all sorts of stories.

There's nothing wrong with going for some kinky sex in a dungeon. There are surely many, many people who do so without the knowledge of their spouse. But someone who specifically asks and pays for a dangerous situation, because that's what he gets off on, has no reasonable expectation of privacy if an accident should happen and he should lapse into a coma. The cops will be called. The wife will find out. A reporter will show up at the hospital.

The bondage coma story, which is a staggeringly awesome story by the way, should be covered like any other story precisely because the sex fetish is not shameful, and because the likes of Nerve and Dan Savage surely don't want companies like News Corp. making judgement calls on what is shameful.

Embarrassing sex scandals are not, incidentally, fatal to one's life or career. Just ask Bill O'Reilly, Marv Alpert or Pat O'Brien, all of whom rebounded from their scandals (though O'Brien is again struggling with chemical dependency).

In sex as in politics, the hush up can be more damaging than the original mistake. This one has been aired out and described as a wakeup call by the person at the center of it all. There's no need to take a step backward and reinforce a culture of whispers.