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been involved in setting up the swing.
    Think about it: What are the chances you could hang a swing from your ceiling while factoring in the critical height differential between a hard and a flaccid penis, the weight of the person in the swing, and a dozen other variables, without making multiple trips to Home Depot? How were those calculations made? Did they consult a carpenter? Was a laser device involved?
    Meanwhile, Kathy was chattering away like a concerned PTA mom, seemingly oblivious to the video sex going on right behind her. “And it turned out that a friend of his wanted to have a threesome with my son’s girlfriend and his girlfriend…”
    I tried paying attention to Kathy, but now I couldn’t help counting all the reasons why, and I mean never in a hundred million years, I could never have broached this subject with my mother.
    â€œHe really said this to you?” I asked, interrupting the story. “I mean, you two actually discussed threesomes?”
    The guy on the video screen started moving the swing a little faster, bending his knees as if bearing down on a difficult task.
    â€œYes, of course,” she said.
    Then he arched his neck and stood up straight as if struck by lightning. His butt cheeks clenched. Apparently the love swing worked.
    â€œAnd so then I asked him, ‘Well, what do
you
think of threesomes?’ I didn’t want to appear shocked at all because I think he was testing me, though I do appreciate that he felt free to approach me with such a question, and he said, ‘It might be okay.’”
    Most mothers would have become hysterical at this point in the conversation, but not Kathy Brummitt. Thinking about threesomes is part of her job. I didn’t realize it at first, but Kathy was manning a convention exhibit booth for an outfit called the Sinclair Intimacy Institute, and as I soon learned, she was the director of production on the love swing video, and others, too, for Sinclair, based in the unlikely location of Hillsborough, North Carolina. In other words, it’s her job to hire people to have sex, hire other people to film those people having sex, and make sure the whole production looks classy.
    â€œSo you make porn.”
    Kathy smiled. No, she said, she doesn’t consider this porn. She knows porn, and porn doesn’t look or sound like this. This is education, erotic how-to, an exploration of fantasies and techniques that can forge a deeper bond between loving couples. The way she said all this made the love-swing video sound almost medicinal.
    Besides, she argued, the movies she helps create are produced by Sinclair for its Better Sex series, those DVDs and tapes advertised in sports sections of newspapers all over the country, in women’s magazines, even in highbrow publications like the
New York Times Book Review
and the
Atlantic
. The ads feature attractive people in each other’s arms apparently in the beginnings of foreplay. They are who we would like to be, or at least who we wish our lovers would be. This kind of product, Kathy told me, is far removed from the pizza-delivery-boy-meets-horny-housewife world of porn.
    The
Atlantic
!
    To me, Kathy was one of the more interesting people at the sexology convention, which, as far as I was concerned, was mostly a bust. I had gone because I had my questions and thought perhaps I could get most of them answered in two or three days of Power-Point presentations. There were seminars and symposia and lectures from Women Going Topless on the Red Mile During the Stanley Cup Playoffs, Calgary, May–June, 2004, to Sex with Animals on the Caribbean Coast of Columbia (76 percent of adolescent boys do it, apparently, usually with a “she-ass”). But an awful lot of the dialogue was opinionated and political and not really about why so many of my readers wanted to know if it would be a good idea to have sex in a car for the entertainment of passing truckers.
    One