So yesterday I was in Manhattan.

The occasion? A call-back audition for an upcoming women's television show about healthy sexuality. As the show is intended to be a webcast, I expected a veneer of informality about the whole thing, and so I startled as I walked into the chic studio to find impeccably groomed women sporting Anthropologie sweater-dresses, Balenciaga bags, and the kind of skin one only gets from repeated exposure to the Lancome counter at Macy's.  While I pride myself on looking put-together, I've got nothing on those Devil Wears Prada clones. So I'm standing there sweatin' in the radio room with all the other broads,  who smile fakely at each other and vainly attempt stilted, unnatural conversation.

As I sit there, a pretty, plaintive voice with the tiniest hint of a Southern twang catches my ear. I turn around to find a woman with a mane of brick-red hair and a presence the size of Kansas sitting there in jeans and a t-shirt, perfectly at ease. She exudes confidence -- much more than the bevy of the Botox'ed that graced the lobby, and, well, everywhere. I have to know who she is!

"I'm Jessica," I offer. "What's your name?"

It's ____," she says.

"Cool. So, where do you hail from?"

"Texas!"

"Get out of -- wait, you're from Texas too?"

As it turns out, we grew up within a four hours' drive of each other -- a long distance if you're an East Coaster, but if you're a Texas girl like myself, four hours is a piss in the ocean, distance wise. Of course, we immediately bond over recollections of Tex-Mex food and H-E-B and el barrio and the sadness of Ann Richard's recent passing.

Naturally, the conversation turns to politick, and because of the milieu, we discuss the Supreme Court's recent refusal to hear a challenge to Texas' law about vibrators. (For those of you not in the know -- while you can buy sex toys like cock rings and nipple clamps and anal plugs in The Lone Star State with no repercussion, one is technically not allowed to buy anything resembling a cock or cunt, unless you are going to be using it for "medical reasons. In fact, three years ago, a Texas housewife got in big trouble with the law for selling dildos for the company Passion Parties.)

"And we're supposed to be in the 21st century!" she says. "It's unbelievable."

"I know. I can't believe it either."

"So... how did you liberate yourself?" she asks, and I immediately know that she means "from Texas's prudish culture."

"I don't know. I've always been... weird."

"Yeah. Me too. It's the only way you can get out, you know? That's what I always tell people. If you're a Texan and you leave and move up to the East Coast, you have to be weird."

How could this happen in the 21st century? It always amuses me when people don't realize that this classic ideological struggle -- censorship and repression versus liberated sexuality and 'free love' -- has been going on for the better part of, oh, I don't know, the past two millenia. I think of Aristophanes and Catullus satirizing the conservative sexual mindset in Greco-Roman antiquity, and Plato arguing in The Republic that all "obscene" material should be banned for the good of the State. I think of medieval Europe, where the only sanctioned debauchery took place at the yearly Carnival, where the sacred and profane collided.

And most pertinently, I think of the battle between Anthony C. Comstock, that 19th century fin de siecle censorship czar (he of the famous Comstock Act and the Society for Suppression of Vice) exchanging words with free love, pro-sex radicals like Victoria Woodhull and Ezra Heywood (yes, as that old chestnut says -- it's not like hot sex was invented in the 1960s, people!).

The comparisons to today's Texas dildo debate are stunning. Here's just one excerpt from Comstock's tirades, circa 1883:

"Good reading refines, elevates, ennobles, and stimulates the ambition to lofty purposes. It points upward. Evil reading debases, degrades, perverts, and turns away from lofty aims to follow examples of corruption and criminality.

Compare this to an excerpt from this year's proposed bill H.R. 4830, which would ban the promotion of "sexual devices" in South Carolina:

1) to the average person applying contemporary community standards, the material depicts or describes in a patently offensive way sexual conduct specifically defined by subsection (C) of this section;

(2) the average person applying contemporary community standards relating to the depiction or description of sexual conduct would find that the material taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest in sex;

(2) ‘patently offensive’ means obviously and clearly disagreeable, objectionable, repugnant, displeasing, distasteful, or obnoxious to contemporary standards of decency and propriety within the community.

Both Comstock and the author of H.R. 4830 are making a claim that "obscenity" incites one to evil and objectionable behaviors; plenty of feminist anti-porn activists draw the same conclusion.

Yet according to legal theorist Anthony D'Amato, as porn has become more available in our society, the incidence of rape has decreased. This could, perhaps, be an instance of correlation not equal to causation, but at the very least, it's clear that more porn does not yield more violent acts, specifically rape.

Could it be that the anti-porn activists are projecting their own  "depraved and debased" thoughts about porn onto others who are capable of looking at the erotic withotu "perverting" their morality? Naw, couldn't be.

All hail the Nanny state! Or not. As Texas-lady-from-the-audtion said, "I think I'll stay weird, thanks."