From Madison Avenue to Sunset Boulevard, from the Las Vegas Strip to Miami’s club scene, America is obsessed with sex. Titillation sells everything from fast cars to grapes to laundry soap. Porn fuels Internet innovation. Male arousal defines female fashion from earlobe to stiletto heel. Hollywood treats actresses as eye candy to the point that almost half of movies lack named female characters who talk with each other about something other than men.

In fact, the only subculture in America that may be more sex-centric than Hollywood is the religious right, which sees sex as having the power to bring on floods, droughts, economic collapse and Armageddon. In this worldview, unless we all adhere to an Iron Age script, the world will become a raging orgy of sex without consequences! And God will get very, very angry because He cares enormously about what we humans do with our hoo-has and weenies.

Capitalists who see sexual pleasure as an addictive commodity that can be refined and sold—like sugar or heroin—and devout conservatives who offer salvation from the moral abyss via procreative purity are not, as the religious conservatives like to think, opposites. In fact, their sex obsessions might be better thought of as two sides...