When Jason Flick, our editor here at Fanway, asked me to cover the Howard Stern Tiger Woods Mistress Beauty Pageant for the website today, I was slightly taken aback.

I told him I could write a straight news story. I have a journalism degree from a very respected university. Turns out I was wrong.

Here is a quick rundown of the news we learned from that event, as it would appear in a news ticker: Jamie Jungers beat out Jaimee Grubbs and Loredana Jolie for the $75,000 that the affair-searching website AshleyMadison.com put up in this pageant. Tiger Woods did not always use a condom with his mistresses. He enjoyed rough sex, and on certain occasions, wearing a suit while watching naked women participate in orgies. He stayed with the women he was cheating with for long periods of time. He doesn’t tip well, and only spent money on his women when it advanced his sexual purposes. He has a large, circumcised penis, and is apparently something to brag about in bed. We also learned from Jolie that Woods has a bigger penis than Michael Jordan. Fantastic.

But none of these details matter a hair. The real story today was that Stern effectively skewered the media and the American public for their need to know every detail of Tiger’s improprieties.

The king of sexual humor and fart jokes looked us all square in the eye and told us to grow up today. We would be wise to listen.

“Tiger Woods owed nobody an apology,” Stern said. “If I do something stupid, that’s between me and my wife.”

This is not our business. I'm not sure if this is the ghost of the Salem Witch Trials or the grandson of McCarthyism, but we Americans have an inherent desire to publicly slaughter people in our Puritanical cores.

I have heard a lot of explanations about the outrage over Woods’ affairs. There are a couple of popular ones. The first is that he is part black, and the women in the story are white and blonde. This could be true, especially for the segment of our country simmering with anger over the election of our first black president. Another is that people viewed him as a true role model for our children. Possible. But I propose that a guy who can hit a tiny ball far with a metal stick hardly has earned the right to teach morality to a generation. I think it is deeper than that.

I propose that we as a nation are still terrified of sex and sexuality. So terrified that we hardly ever make it to an honest discussion of sexual morality. We don't discuss the fact that there is perfectly healthy sex that happens between unmarried adults. Because that is sinful. We end up with a generation of people who learned almost everything they know about sex from pornography and reality television. We are so repressed that we end up doing things like wearing suits while naked people make love around us if we ever wield power.

I think Stern touched on another key topic in his segment: our perception of the girls he slept with. The girls, in their early-to-mid twenties, were no different than most of us. Some of them were legitimately starstruck and smitten with the man and his celebrity. Some thought it would be a cool story and probably used sleeping with a man of that value as a self-esteem boost. But they are NOT hussies or harlots simply because they slept with him. They are human beings with feelings who played into a game that they either didn’t fully understand or in some cases accepted as, pardon the pun, par for the course with a cheating man.

There may be people out there who have never done anything sexually unethical. I don’t doubt your existence. But I am willing to bet that most of the people who have come down hardest on these girls did some pretty stupid things in their teens and twenties. Most of you probably never had to have that thing printed all over newspapers alongside aspersions about your character based on a single action. You were able to put your mistake where it belonged, in the past, learn from it and move on. We should do the same for these girls. Most of them did not seek out this publicity.

Before I wrap this piece up, I would like to clarify two things. The first is that I in no way excuse Tiger Woods’ behavior, but I do think it is between him, his family, and the girls he slept with. The second is that I am a comedian, which means that I think it is perfectly fair to make fun of him or any of the parties involved in this story because it is public. These points may seem contradictory. I argue that laughter is healthy, but outrage is not.

But I think the shock and judgment that the media and the public have expressed is ludicrous. I think at the end of the day, we mostly just want to know the details because we have let our own guilt and fear of sex turn us into voyeurs. We are sitting in suits watching this man and these women fornicate for us while pretending to be appalled.

It’s too bad that it takes Howard Stern throwing the details of a ‘scandal’ in our faces to remind us of that.