sex, god and jury duty; Joan Juliet Buck watches dissolute party girls and tortured mystics search for the perfect union; supermodel Shalom Harlow, in a new incarnation, defends a cop.

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

Profane and sacred love are addressed in the correct

formats this month: casual sex in a new sitcom from Caryn Mandabach (whose company produces That 70's Show and Whoopi, among many others) and total surrender to Christ and its consequences in an HBO documentary by Antony Thomas that includes interesting footage of an Indian sadhu wrapping his penis around a pole and

securing it behind his legs. Neither the

sitcom, named Good Girls Don't, nor the documentary, titled Celibacy, has any answers to the tragic challenges posed by the sexual urge, but each in its own way addresses the questions that have been tormenting men and women forever. To wit, "Does it matter that my ass is too big?" and "How can I rise above carnal desire?"

In Good Girls Don't, on the cable channel Oxygen, two wide-eyed young women from Minnesota navigate the complexities of lust and insecurity in a Los Angeles that consists, in a logical progression, of public nightspots, apartments, and a laundry room. Unlike the girls in Sex and the City, Marjorie and Jane are outsiders. Their Midwestern eagerness, which on network television would be aimed at securing a

husband or, better still, a job as a network