According to the newspaper last Monday morning a sexual revolution is underway in China. Quote: ‘The simple but tidy rooms in the no-tell hotels in the Beijing University district pulsate with sex.’

Now, there are a billion people in China. And they’ve just discovered sex?

It seems they’ve known quite a bit for quite a while.

The newspaper also reports sex is thriving in Raleigh. But in a different way. Lexi, ‘a blonde, fun-loving, open-minded girl from Denver,’ available for $180 an hour, is coming to town. Her ads (on the Internet) caught the eye of one of The News and Observer’s young men who wrote a story and discovered Lexi’s not the only one advertising sex online. A lot of people are. Of various persuasions and preferences.

The News and Observer’s young man reports one ‘john’ named Mike (who apparently is gay) lamenting on a sex-site that he’d been tricked. Mike read an ad describing a muscular, 26-year-old male ‘escort’ and set up a rendezvous at, of all places, the public library. Whoops. Mike complained afterwards that the escort “appeared to be 39 to 44 years old and smelled terrible even from across the table.” He added: “The past three months I’ve made appointments with four escorts who posted here. I cannot fully express my outrage and disappointment when I met them in person.”

A man in New Hampshire, who wrote two books on the Internet, had a more pleasant experience. He received an email from a prostitute in England saying she’d gotten a lot out of his second book, that it had shortened sales cycles and people tended to be repeat customers. One wonders what this remarkable young woman could have achieved using her marketing talents to sell shares in hedge funds.

My friend, Richard, is an intellectual. He’s also Irish and it’s a deadly mix. Lately, he’s been brooding over cultural phenomena like young girls fainting at Barack Obama’s rallies. To distract him, I told him about Lexi advertising her trip to Raleigh. He contemplated that for several days then called back and said, ‘Well, philosophically, there are several ways to look at it. But I can’t help but wonder what my grandmother would make of this.’

I thought about that.

Suppose in 1935 some magician had walked through my grandmother’s front door and plunked a magic box down on her kitchen table and as the sewing circle gathered ‘round clicked on a picture of Lexi saying she was coming to town looking for companionship.

I suspect, after the ladies finished swooning and got up off the floor, my grandmother, who was a practical woman, would have pointed to that magic box and said, ‘Can that thing do anything useful?’ Then those ladies would have represented a severe threat to Lexi’s professional ambitions. And, once they figured it out, they’d have probably have been an even bigger threat to the owners of those web-sites. Lord knows what they’d have done about Mike’s rendezvous in the library.

My grandmother never went on any crusades for prohibition. The way she saw it she had plenty sins of her own to worry about without sticking her nose into someone else’s. And, on top of that, in 1935 she had the Depression to deal with. But there was a line in the sand – when it came to things like trysts at the public library – and she saw it clearly. And I can’t help but think the America she lived in, when it drew that line, was trying in its own fumbling way to make itself a better place.

Of course, that line no longer exists. And trying to redraw it seems as futile as turning back the hands of a clock. Other than feeling a little uneasy that Mike’s rendezvous might have taken place at the library down the road from my home, when I read the The News and Observer’s story I didn’t feel much shock at all – at best it was sort of like watching a mud-wrestling match and thinking things were getting out of hand. Licentiousness, like sin, has proved resilient beyond imagination. It’s survived kings, emperor’s, parliaments and Carrie-Nation crusaders. But, on the other hand, trysts in the public library do seem to be going a bit too far.

Maybe a little outrage, now and then, would be a good thing.

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