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finds it and calls customer service. “They cuss us out, and say, ‘I go to church, God damn it!’”
    As if on cue, a Muslim man calls. “Uh, could you please take my name off the mailing list? My wife doesn’t like me getting the catalog.”
    A sixty-three-year-old man in Delaware orders
Black Chunky Chicks 4, Hip-Hop Hooters,
and
Pure Pussy 4,
adding a polite “please, ma’am.” Mary offers him a selection of a free gift—all customers who buy get something free—and she lists the offers like a tired waitress rattling off the domestic beers. “Okay, you can choose from
Girl Gasms 2; Over 30 and Dirty; Tight and Fresh Part 3;
and
Sistas 21,
with over two hours of mocha lesbian heaven and plenty of booty lickin’, or
Booty Call,
with over four solid hours of hot chocolate asses.” This guy goes for mass, choosing the four solid hours.
    Mary, in case you are wondering, is black. She says she blushed the first few days she worked here, but doesn’t anymore.
    A seventy-year-old man from a small town in Illinois chooses a
Buckleroos
DVD, a gay title, and a Senso Stroker masturbator. Oh, and how about
Summer in the City
? With the freebie
Dick to Dick
thrown in, he’s charged $79.35.
    They just keep calling, one after another. A fifty-year-old man in Grosse Point, Michigan, buys Jenna Jameson porn. A fifty-six-year-old Colorado man buys $110 worth of porn and vibrators for himself and his wife. A twenty-seven-year-old woman who calls from Oklahoma wants the catalog so she can start ordering. An Ohio man wants a refund. A thirty-five-year-old man in Florida wants a masturbator sleeve. A sixty-five-year-old New York man calls in a DVD order for his wife:
Pound Cakes, Pussy Worship,
and
Black and White Volume 2.
A sixty-two-year-old California man orders a copy of the Sinclair Institute’s Sensual Exploration series and
Great Sex Positions
for $65.75 and requests it be sent Express Mail so it will arrive by the weekend.
    Nobody calls from New York City, San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles. I have been wondering why, when I asked if I could listen in, managers eagerly agreed. Maybe this is why. I am listening to what media and politicians usually call “middle America” and listening to their voices demand what the sex industry is selling. If they are representative, then the mainstream really has shifted and the notion of community standards by which obscenity cases are supposed to be judged has shifted, too. Adam and Eve has an obvious interest in making this case.
    Over the past decade, two famous obscenity trials—one in Ohio and one in Utah—demonstrated how far a community’s perception of itself varied from private reality. During the case in Cincinnati, the local newspaper, the
Cincinnati Enquirer,
investigated Hamilton County’s own community standards and found that Adam and Eve had sold twenty-six thousand X-rated videos to county residents in 2000. Adam and Eve had twenty-eight thousand different customers in the county. In January of 2001, 182,000 people living in the greater Cincinnati area visited an online porn site.
    In 1996 two small video stores in Utah County, Utah, one of the most conservative counties in the United States and home to Brigham Young University, Mormonism’s version of Notre Dame, were raided by sheriff’s deputies after four thousand people signed a petition complaining that the stores were selling obscene materials.
    Kay Bryson, the Utah County district attorney, called pornography one of the world’s “misery-creating features” and “worthless.” One of his assistants called porn “nothing more and nothing less than vile concoctions of scum, sleaze, and sludge.” Bryson was sure the confiscated video titles used to accuse the owner of the stores were in no way an accepted part of the community standards of Utah County. “I know essentially what people in