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[S]ex video series!”
    To me it sounds as if Sinclair might be manipulating demand, that perhaps people don’t really want anal sex, that they have just heard a lot about anal sex because Sinclair sold them videos with anal sex in it, thus piquing interest for a new product it could produce and sell. How else is a company like Sinclair going to grow except by giving people the idea that everybody else is having more fun?
    But when I suggest this to Smith, he admits he and Sinclair often have no idea what the hell is going on in America’s sex culture. “My job is to constantly, with different indexes, figure out what people are doing on our website and what they are doing out in the world so I can take that and put it on our site.” Sinclair follows, it doesn’t lead, and Smith is often shocked by where his customers want to go.
    â€œPeople are asking for more and more experimental stuff. That told me I have to let them ask questions,” and so he created a forum to help build Sinclair’s own online community. “I was very surprised at some of the questions I got. It’s incredible what people will ask you, like in your column. I get these long notes about what people are saying on the site and I am going, ‘Oh my God!’”
    This goes to show you, Smith, a Vassar graduate, tells me in his best business-school jargon, that “anything will become a commodity if you give it enough time. What was a boundary yesterday is today’s commodity.”
    Sinclair is trying to figure out the landscape just as I am. “It’s no longer Donna Reed out there,” Montani says. “People are talking about it. No more missionary position in the dark. And they all think the next guy is having better sex than me, so I had better figure it out.”
    â€œWell, it’s Britney Spears and her private parts exposed!” Kathy speculates, sounding once again like a concerned mother.
    â€œYou gotta get technology in there somewhere, because it is technology that has brought it into every home,” Smith interjects with his own theory.
    â€œYeah,” Montani says. “It is, like, in your face whether you want it to be or not.”
    â€œBut you think you are absolutely mainstream?” I ask.
    â€œYessir!” Oettinger, a tall, thin woman about sixty, says quickly in her thick southern accent. “We are absolutely mainstream America. Our product line is progressing, but I do not know if it is because people are progressing or if we are driving the culture. I would say the culture is driving me.”
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    S tarting about 11:00 a.m. the calls begin flooding into the Adam and Eve customer service desk, an all-day, everyday operation situated on the second floor of PHE’s modern three-story building in another office park not far from Sinclair. I sit with headphones on my head and listen to a twenty-four-year-old man order “Sistas” along with the Azz and Tits combo pack, which includes
Booty Talk 45, Nice Azz/Tits, New X-Rated Sistas,
and a free gift item,
Black Poles and Dark Holes,
all for just $19.95.
    A man from Massachusetts buys
Over 40 and Horny as Hell.
A Michigan woman requests Eve’s Pearl Diver vibrator as a replacement for a defective Eve’s Pearl Diver vibrator she bought a couple of weeks ago. “This one toy doesn’t seem to like me,” she tells Mary, the operator. “And it is my favorite one, too! They quit after one use.”
    A sixty-one-year-old Florida man selects several DVDs and a vibrator, and wants them quickly, please. But when Mary asks for his credit card number, he wants her to hold while he calls his wife on his cell phone. “What, honey?” Mary and I can hear him saying. “Yeah, Adam and Eve. Okay.” Then to us, “Four one seven…”
    Often, Mary says, the husband orders without the wife’s knowing. The company then sends the catalog to the house, and the wife