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bridge, would you do it, too?”
    â€œI just asked him, ‘Well, how would you feel if your girlfriend wanted to be with you and another boy?’
    â€œHe said, ‘Ewww! That’d be really gross. No way!’ And so I said, ‘I think there’s your answer,’ and that ended his flirtation with threesomes.”
    Yes, well, having once been a fifteen-year-old boy I was not quite as confident as Kathy that her kid’s flirtation with threesomes was over for good. Actually, I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for him. He is being robbed of one of the three ways kids have to persecute parents. Other than drugs or absurdly fast cars with questionable provenance, sex is supposed to be the great tool of teen tormentors. Most wouldn’t even have to come close to suggesting a three-way to send Mom dashing for the Valium. At least that’s the way it was when I was a kid. Of course, none of us had a mom who was the Harvey Weinstein of sex.
    â€œYou ought to come down and see us,” Kathy said cheerily as we parted. “We’re just regular folks.”
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    W hich is how I have come to be sitting in Kathy’s office surrounded by sex videos and dildos and talking about Jesus Christ. “He is my Lord and Savior,” Kathy tells me. That is exactly the sort of statement that brought me here. Kathy seems to be a rich stew of apparent contradiction and the more I thought about traveling to PHE, the more I thought it might provide insight into what was going on around the country and who or what was making it happen.
    PHE is the largest online and mail-order sex retailer in America, possibly the world, selling to over ten million customers. It comprises several divisions. The Sinclair Institute positions itself as the progressive, high-minded instructor in sexual happiness. Since 1994, it has sold over four million copies of its Better Sex videos. Its raunchy big sister, Adam and Eve, earns the bulk of the corporate income by selling sex toys, porn DVDs, and cheap lingerie. Adam Male markets to gay men. A video-on-demand arm sells streaming porn online. PHE also has a growing chain of retail store franchises. Adam and Eve Productions is a pornography powerhouse that finances and distributes over one hundred movies per year. Exactly how much money the entire company makes is impossible to know; it is privately held by Harvey and a few close associates. But sales in 2006 amounted to somewhere north of $109 million.
    Sinclair is located apart from the rest of PHE in an office park of redbrick buildings vaguely resembling southern plantation architecture. Kathy drives to work, and most every morning she prays while she drives, giving thanks for a new day because it will present her with another opportunity to help people. She is descended from tobacco farmers who believed what they read in the Bible and they read that all people are equal before the eyes of God whether a body is white, black, or green. Everyone, they believed, is to be treated as you would wish them to treat you. Sometimes, during the days when Kathy was growing up, that created a little friction with neighbors who didn’t always agree and that friction taught her that one did not always have to live by the prevailing thinking.
    After college, Kathy became a buyer at Thalhimer’s. For nearly a century, that venerable Virginia department store was an anchor to Richmond’s downtown social and civic life. But then, like all other regional department stores, it succumbed to the merging giants of retail and the malling of America.
    She wasn’t looking to work in the adult industry; things just turned out that way. Kathy is a family person, the kind of woman who makes sweet potato pudding for Thanksgiving. (Long after I have left North Carolina, she will send me a recipe for chess pie, a heart attack on a plate worth dying for.) So she used to commute often from Virginia back home to North Carolina and