And so, like former evangelical leader Rev. Ted Haggard (or Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Bakker or too many Catholic priests) or politicians as far back as our lusty founding fathers, we learned to espouse one thing publicly and do another in private. We stashed our porn behind furnaces, hid our leather corsets under the bath towels, spoke in code to potential sex partners. We created the American sexual cliché of a repressed population that did it all anyway, but felt creepy about it.

When it comes to sex, we created a hypocritical culture.

The America Unzipped series and my research for the upcoming book of the same name is showing that this is changing, and quickly. Naturally, change makes some people upset.

So you have a man like Joe Beam, a sincere, Bible-believing leader of his faith, advocating the right of married people to enjoy their sex lives, and catching flak for it. Despite the good he seems to be doing for those who believe as he does, he is frequently criticized — one blogger labeled him a “heretic” after the Unzipped story about him came out — for trying to help married people throw off Augustine.

A bourgeois pursuit
But what such combatants do not seem to realize is that an awful lot of people have already done this. For them, the sex wars are over. Augustine? Who’s he? Americans are tired of feeling guilty. Sexual exploration has become a bourgeois pursuit.

This is especially true among people under 35. For many of them, sex has become wallpaper, not a hand-wringing issue at all.

American Apparel, the Los Angeles maker of clothing aimed at youth culture, uses a vaguely 1970s porn aesthetic to sell T-shirts, including hiring a porn star, Lauren Phoenix, who specializes in anal sex (“Buttwoman Iz Lauren Phoenix”) to model socks and underwear. The kids get the joke.

Abercrombie and Fitch’s famous catalogues have featured Bruce Weber-esque nudity and a French clothing maker named Shai goes further by hosting an online video catalogue complete with X-rated scenes of couples in action. You can stop the video and learn about the clothes they are taking off.

Paris Hilton, a parody of herself as the dissolute heiress preening in the grainy, greenish sex video, has ridden that strategy to create a minor financial empire.

America Unzipped     |   FULL COVERAGE L. Kleinhenz/Docuvitae A sizzling sex life is no sin MSNBC.com Adult superstores seduce a new crowd MSNBC.com Sex and the suburbs Bob Croslin All dressed up – in latex and dog collars Getty Images file The thrill of putting it all out there  MSNBC.com Are we satisfied yet?

There is a lot of fuss about all this, but Americans vote with dollars. So while church groups protest the opening of adult stores in an effort to “save the community,” the community is inside buying vibrators.

Trends like these illustrate something new about American sex and raise a question. We are consumers. If we are to keep up our end of the consumer bargain in the great American capitalist enterprise, we have to buy. To entice us into buying, we are saturated — flooded, really — with media, information and marketing. In it, we are told that a new Bosch dishwasher, a cold Pepsi and a BMW will lead to satisfaction, not just the satisfying feeling of clean dishes, a quenched thirst or great cornering, but of life.

In the void left by the banishment of social restrictions on our sex lives, sexual satisfaction is being marketed this way, too. We need window-breaking orgasms, penises the size of a chorizo sausage and the thrills of the Marquis de Sade or else we’re missing out. Women all over the country watched the striving Manhattan sophisticates in "Sex and the City" talking about rabbit pearl vibrators and suddenly had to have them for themselves.  

But what, exactly, are we pursuing? Naturally, the details vary from one person to the next, but in the big picture, I think we are seeking satisfaction and not just the obvious kind.

Some of the people I have spoken to so far have clearly found a measure of satisfaction, depending on what they hoped sex could do for them.

Some have found deeper relationships, a more intense connection with a partner. A few have found membership in an extended community. No doubt some find the enforced open-mindedness itself to be liberating now that they are free to express themselves as they choose.

But as the marketing of sex becomes ever more pervasive, some find that handcuffs and a XXX German discipline video just don’t provide an escape from the loneliness of an atomized, hyperspeed culture in which entertainment is king.     

So, caveat emptor.

Still, all of the people I’ve spoken to so far — conservatives, liberals, religious, non-religious, men and women, young and old, satisfied and disappointed — believe they have every right to take the risk, to make the choice, for themselves.

Brian Alexander, a California-based freelance writer and MSNBC.com's Sexploration columnist, is traveling around the country to find out how Americans get sexual satisfaction. Alexander, also a Glamour contributing editor, is chronicling his work in the MSNBC.com special report "America Unzipped" and in an upcoming book for Harmony, an imprint of Crown Publishing.

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