All is not lost. This is the good news. All is not dire and hopeless and warmongering and sexless and Bush. I know, it's amazing, but it's true. You see, bright spots exist. Radiant spots. Glimmers of possibility and progress, deep pools of hope and moan and yum. We have but to look. And yearn.

Like, right here. Here is a mini-phenomenon, happening right before our eyes. It is this: Amazon.com is selling sex toys. A lot of sex toys. More than you knew it would ever dare sell and more than you even knew were being manufactured in the world today and a more advanced and varied selection than you probably imagined they could ever get away with.

And what's more, Amazon has added this array of delicious adult goods quietly, effortlessly, with zero fanfare and zero marketing and zero apparent intolerant outcry (so far as I know) from the right-wing Christian sex tormenters, and with absolutely no children anywhere in the nation spontaneously combusting or being struck by lightning and/or converting to wanton paganism (yet) by viewing any of these items (which they easily can) --

which, as we all know, is just fabulously encouraging and good.

Have you seen? Did you know? Let us look closer. Because it is not a small selection. This is no trifling thing. Amazon's sex-toy department is simply a huge portion of the site's Health and Personal Care area. The "Sex and Sensuality" section of the site contains a staggering 37,000 items, with the Sexual Enhancers (that's the toys, baby) subsection alone offering up a whopping 4,863 items -- enough to satisfy an entire repressed evangelical congregation and terrify Alabama and make Lynne Cheney swoon and still have plenty left over for a long weekend with the entire cast of "Hot Teen Slut Nurses IV."

This is no cheapy side venture, no Amazon trying to score a few bucks by secretly selling a few glorious Hitachi Magic Wands and those overrated (but still cute) pink-rabbit pearl vibes and some tubes of K-Y jelly and Trojan condoms and a handful of cheapy plastic Chinese-made vibrators.

No sirree. Amazon has not held back. Amazon has committed completely to the cause. This is America's favorite online bookstore, all grown up and happily kinky and winking in your general direction. And while I would normally recommend against buying such fabulous goods from Amazon and instead urge you to purchase from the indie shops that started it all, places such as Good Vibrations and Blowfish, all of which carry many better-quality toys than some of Amazon's brands and have been fearlessly illuminating the path to sexual satisfaction for years and decades, often against a staggeringly high wall of sexual ignorance from the government and the Christian right, it appears that Amazon has partnered with at least one of these fabulous stores (Seattle's Babeland), so you really can't go too wrong.

Of course, Amazon doesn't actually carry most of these items in its own warehouses. It is the mere reseller, the great middleman offering its distribution channel to specialty sex-toy companies such as ForePlay and Frolics Superstore and Boston Pump (go ahead, guess what it makes), Swedish Erotica and the venerable Doc Johnson and Hidden Flower and Sensua Organics and well over 300 others.

This makes them, interestingly, the great bringer of sex-toy awareness, the unwitting spreader of lubricious good news, the well-oiled and highly pleasurable anti-Wal-Mart. It also makes them, I imagine, the biggest sex-toy store in the world. And for much of America, for those too timid or too uncertain to shop for such delightful goods in the specialty sex stores, this is a divine development indeed.

There are no cheesy porny product shots. There is no explicit nudity or raunchy descriptions, except for the wonderful and silly product titles. There is no age-verification system and no insulting adult warning and no purchase restrictions. Amazon has done the perfectly natural thing of merely folding the toys into its array of general offerings as if nothing's unusual, no pornographic shock value, nothing to worry about. It's as if these items were perfectly commonplace and acceptable and everyone should have them. Imagine.

This, then, is the most glorious upshot. Sex toys, like much of the porn biz in general, have gone mainstream. They have been normalized.

There is no more guilt. There is no more fear and uptight sexual dread and nonsensical, ignorant cries of who, pray who, will save the children. There is only titillation and tingling skin and the big, wide grins of satisfied customers.

What a wonderful message this sends. What a desperately needed notion for a sex-starved and deeply misinformed, orgasmically uncertain nation. It is this: Sex and the heavenly toys that enhance and enliven it need not be some secret ugly thing, hidden, hesitant, embarrassing, separate from your "regular" life.

Do not shield your eyes and quiver in fear. Do not back away and think this sort of thing is not for you. Go ahead, just toss into your Amazon shopping cart a few things to go along with the latest Christopher Moore novel and a digital camera and an iPod sleeve and a beach umbrella and a camping stove and the new Brazilian Girls CD. See? Nothing to it.

It's just ... normal. It's just right. It's just healthy and affirmative and might actually go a long way toward alleviating a tiny bit of the nasty karmic tension currently racking the American body like a deep muscle knot, a coiled spring, a painfully repressed orgasm. Imagine.