Sexual tourism is a red-hot button on the scale of politically correct travel. While ostensibly about pleasure, jetting off to partake in exotic, erotic smorgasbords for a price is an activity that taps directly into deeply ingrained perceptions of gender, race and uncomfortable global intercourse between First, Second and Third World culturesThe female nude is ancient, one of the first things we learn about in that junior college art history course. She's the full-figured Venus of Willendorf, the bare-breasted, nursing Madonna in religious paintings, the figure studies attributed to so many male art historical kingpins. You know the drill -- nude women having an impressionist al fresco lunch with clothed guy; the nude descending staircase; the naked women covered in Yves Klein Blue and writhing on blank canvas.

Fast forward to the 1970s, when feminism and ideas about gender-specific gazes were the ideology du jour, and the female nude became a contested art genre. The political implications of unclothed women as subject became too loaded to be about pleasure or appreciation, except for boorish sorts who ignored signals of political correctness and brazenly exercised a libidinous eye. generational shift in the social acceptability of frankness about sexuality and its representation. It offers tangible evidence that the current administration in Washington in no way represents a majority of this country's electorate, who would, given a fair chance, reject its cultural neoconservatism. It shows us that this country's attitudes regarding matters sexual have changed radically, most probably, for the long termIn

Nicholson Baker's phone-sex novel "Vox" the male interlocutor poses a question to his female counterpart. "So if you walked into a room," he says, "and there was an armchair, and a table, and on one end of the table was a TV and a VCR and an X-rated tape, and at the other end of the table was some book of Victorian pornography, what would you choose?" And she answers, "The Victorian pornography, no question." "That's incredible to me," he replies.