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when a girlfriend told her about a job opening at PHE, she saw it as a chance to come home for good.
    Her story makes for a nice American homespun tale, but when I look around the room it is tough to reconcile the penises and porn and the “Jesus is my Lord and Savior” so I ask, “Uh, Kathy, you don’t find all this a little strange?”
    â€œSome people would find it strange, where I work, but I see no disconnect at all. Jesus may have lots of thoughts about how some people choose to use sex. But my personal mission fits nicely into Sinclair’s vision of helping people.”
    This is the Sinclair mantra. I am in Hillsborough for most of three days and over and over again I am told about how they help others. From executives and employees at both Adam and Eve and Sinclair, I hear the phrase
permission giving.
    â€œWe are in the permission business,” Martin Smith, Sinclair’s director of e-commerce, tells me when we meet in a conference room with Sinclair’s president, Peggy Oettinger; Kathy; and wholesale director Susan Yaeger Montani. “The idea I brought to the Web was, ‘Let’s approach this like we are the Pottery Barn of this space. And it worked because there are certain touchstones people are comfortable with…Our customers are older, richer, smarter than the average bear, especially online.” What those people are looking for is an upgraded experience and better packaging, what Smith says is “a prettified version of adult, packaged in a way to give people permission to buy it.”
    When Phil Harvey first bought the original Better Sex video concept in 1991, the company tiptoed around many sexual topics because he wanted the new division to appeal to an upmarket, skittish demographic who would not patronize Adam and Eve or an adult book store. So Harvey named it the Better Sex Institute. Soon, though, Kathy realized that Better Sex didn’t sound mainstream enough. Newspaper publishers, for example, rejected ads. So the name was changed to Chapel Hill Institute after the nearby college town, but then that sounded religious, like a Bible college. “Sinclair just sounded like a very dignified, clean, educational name to me,” Kathy says, “so I said, ‘Let’s try Sinclair. We do know a Sinclair, Lloyd Sinclair,’” a famous sex therapist. “I called him up and said, ‘Lloyd, would you be offended if we named our company Sinclair?’” She looks at me and says, “It could have easily been called the Alexander Institute.” That’s a double joke. Sinclair’s biggest competitor is the Alexander Institute in Sherman Oaks, California. As far as I know, it is not named after me.
    Sinclair’s customers have a conflicted relationship with the sex industry. They want what it offers but don’t like the idea of wanting it and what that wanting might mean for their self-image. They are both lured and repulsed by the taboo.
    I understand. I feel perfectly comfortable at Sinclair, with the idea of Sinclair, and with Kathy and the others because they inhabit, or at least appeal to, my own sexual territory. That land is a safe place from which one can see the adventure without having to live it.
    The truth is, I have always felt cowardly in this way. The summer after my senior year in high school I worked as a lifeguard at the swimming pool of a development of low-rent town-house apartments. People who lived there were newly divorced or had a boyfriend who’d been sent to prison or a spouse who’d died. The place was a living soap opera. One night, a few minutes after closing, two girls walked through the gate of the pool as I was cleaning up. They begged me to let them swim even though it was late, and when I said yes, they slipped out of bathrobes to show me how naked they were and how happy they were to be naked. They jumped into the pool, giggling.
    â€œCome in, join us!” they