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researcher’s poster did address a question somebody had once asked me. My reader wanted to know about bukkake. I had never heard of bukkake, so I looked it up, promptly dismissed it as urban legend, and never answered. But as the poster explained, bukkake “is a Japanese term that refers to showering a receiver, male or female, with semen from one, several, or many men.” I had seen porn and so I had seen the facial “cum shot,” but according to the poster, bukkake was neither urban legend nor a pornography trope. It had “spread across the globe and…has gone from cult-like status to an accepted sexual practice.” There were now organized bukkake groups that “have generated several popular schools and techniques” of bukkake practice and that have brought bukkake into the sexual “mainstream.”
    Though I was grateful for such bits of information, I preferred talking with Kathy because she was not a sexologist or a sexuality theorist. She was giving people what she said they wanted—more information on how to expand their sex lives in any number of ways, with any number of accessories. Still, I half expected her to be apologetic. Kathy just didn’t fit the part of somebody who works in the sex industry. But she is proud, she said. Kathy believes that helping people find more and better sex is a noble purpose. She is a middle-class mom whose concern for others is expressed by making sex videos.
    The DVDs seemed popular among the sex therapists, psychologists, and sociologists. Several stopped by as Kathy and I talked. They like the idea of visual aids, they said, because there is now so much curiosity out in the big world away from sexology conferences. People are asking questions they never asked before. Hearing answers from a therapist in an office about how to slide a butt plug into your ass or how to use your tongue on a woman’s clitoris is a far less amusing experience than watching a well-made video with folks who look like more attractive versions of your neighbors.
    â€œWe’re very successful,” Kathy said. “We sell to people all over the country. Big cities, small towns, Midwest, South, West, everywhere.”
    When I asked her if it isn’t difficult to find couples to perform for her, especially considering that the videos didn’t seem to hire pros with porn-star names like Allysin Chaynes, she said no.
    â€œIt’s not really hard at all.” Some are indeed porn-industry wannabes, “but most are just couples who like having sex in front of cameras.” Kathy had a way of making this sound like taking the dog for a walk. “And thank God for them. They help us promote better sexual health, better relationships.”
    Kathy made her work seem practically altruistic, but she is not exactly employed by a sexier version of the Maryknoll Sisters. Sinclair is a division of PHE, Phil Harvey Enterprises, of Hillsborough, a porn and sex toy empire founded by, naturally, Phil Harvey.
    Despite her insistence that she was exactly what I had thought her to be—a mom, a businesswoman, a churchgoer—despite the way she regarded her work as being as American as the Wal-Mart greeter, I had to ask how others living in the geographical heart of the nation’s evangelical revival react to her job. Do they stop her in the produce aisle at Food Lion to inquire how the dildo scene worked out that day? Or do they hug their child close and dash over to canned soups?
    â€œWe’ve all had the ‘What do I tell my mother?’ moment,” she replied, referring to how she and her coworkers explain their careers to friends and family in North Carolina. “But everyone accepts that this is a job I love and that we do a lot of good for people.”
    â€œSo how did you solve the threesome dilemma?” I asked. Her face lit up with the triumph of mothers everywhere who respond with, “If Jimmy jumped off the