At a recent book launch, Gutter Press publisher Sam Hiyate introduced his latest discovery, the writer Tamara Faith Berger. Instead of extolling her novella's spectacular prose and poignant insights into the human condition, he informed the crowd that he published the book because it turned him on. As he explains: "I told them that as a publisher you want to get a mental hard-on, but in the case of Tamara's book, it was great, because it came with the physical accompaniment." Where once such frankness might have shocked and horrified staid Upper Canada, Hiyate's lewd public pronouncement was met with applause and appreciative chuckles.

At a time when graphicrepresentations of sexuality are abundantly evident in the mainstream -- from magazines to television to billboards to morning talk radio -- a book sold as sexually shocking seems like business as usual. Porn is estimated to be a 15 billion dollar industry in cultural ground zero the USA, and even in a slightly more restrictive Canada, sex shops offer courses on the best way to please a woman and the fetish porn banned at the border is just a mouse click away. As Hiyate puts it, "Pornography is mainstream, pornography is culture."

This is a far cry from the days when an artist seeking to push the boundaries could easily turn to sex. Books like Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence, the Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, and even pulp like Kathleen Windsor's Forever Amber and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place found instant cachet when, in the course of challenging the established mores, they garnered bans and outrage. But today, we live in a time where not just the representation of sex, but the act of sex itself, is rampant, readily available. For a price, you can watch anything. For a higher price, you can do anything. Everyone from artists, novelists, and filmmakers to scholars and crusty journalists, seems unsure how to represent this new climate -- the question where do we go from here has rarely been more urgent.

Enter Tamara Faith Berger's first book, Lie With Me. In bridging the gap between diary, porn, confession, erotica and literature, this surreal psychological thriller operates with the assumption that there are no boundaries left to break down. This book, with a plot consisting of a series of seemingly random and often violent sex acts recounted from the point of view of a nameless nymphomaniac, constantly reminds us that we aren't supposed to be shocked anymore. With its pink cover and crude cartoon drawings, it is even packaged to look like it belongs in the children's section, further reinforcing both its provocative nature and our ambivalent reaction to it. After all, we are constantly hearing about some solitary pervert caught in the act of dispensing real child porn. So how likely is it that we'll be appalled by Gutter Press' posturing?

Nevertheless, trapped in the increasingly hazy world between porn and pop culture, Lie With Me manages to push the reader's buttons. Though graphic representations of sex are readily available and something like 700 million pornographic movies were rented in the US last year, there remains a sense of shame and denial: Maxim and Cosmo give us scantily clad models, but always with the pretense that underlying it all is our quest for good clean everlasting love. Despite the legendary openness of our society, we remain unsure how to react to a book that truly captures the wanton anonymous carnal energy of a sex obsessed culture: "We both straightened our backs, like we were bracing ourselves. All my flesh pulled towards his flesh. I gulped my drink and banged for more. "More!" I shouted. More! More! More! I started rubbing that guy with my fist up and down under the bar."

Even Berger seems unsure what kind of response her book will, or should, garner. "I don't find what I do to be gratuitous," she says, "but in as much as it is gratuitous, I feel a certain amount of shame." Berger, who grew up in a middle class Toronto suburb, was inspired to write Lie With Me after a two year stint penning dirty stories for what she describes as the "lower rungs of pornography" -- newsprint magazines replete with grainy pictures.

"I spent years learning the genre, and it was fascinating to me," she explains. "I liked the form, but it wasn't enough. This book was a way to express myself with that craft. I wanted to make it better, I wanted it to be for myself."

The search for self is at the heart of not just Berger's book, but an explosion of cultural doings that seek, in some way, to merge the increasingly pedestrian pornographic with personal sensibilities of lust, loss and even shame. So far, this year in Canada alone, we have Berger's book, plus Patricia Anderson's Passion Lost: Public Sex, Private Desire in the Twentieth Century, and Simona Choise's upcoming Good Girls Do: Sex Chronicles of a Shameless Generation. The recent publishing past includes The End of Gay, Bert Archer's commentary on the blurring of homo and hetero; Michael Turner's novel The Pornographer's Poem, a coming of age set to a backdrop of amateur porn and a suburban animal sex scene; Bill Brownstein's Sex Carnival, a romp through the global sex village with stops to visit prostitutes, the kids behind raunchy rave tabloid Vice, and Hugh Hefner.

Moving outside literary circles, Toronto festival Hot Docs recently screened the Paul Cowan directed NFB film Give Me Your Soul, Canada's contribution to the booming sub-genre of documentaries chronicling the porn industry. Last year Montreal's Nadine Norman made waves in the art world when her Call Girl performance art piece was put on at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris. Before opening day, 10,000 cards were distributed around the city. They read: "Call Girl. 100 per cent dialogue. Free encounters by appointment." When people arrived at the centre for their appointment, they discovered, as Norman told the Montreal Gazette, "that Call Girl was an interactive art piece: 30-minute conversations with provocatively dressed actresses in a boudoir-like setting. Callers who chose to participate were given appointments. Callers searching for interactions of a more sexual nature were directed elsewhere."

New York based Canadian artist Charmaine Wheatley recently reenacted a performance in Winnipeg that consists of her entering strip clubs and taking off her clothes while standing at the bar. Sometimes she is invited up on stage, other times she is thrown out. Either way, the events are documented for posterity on video. Wheatley doesn't seem to know what she is trying to prove. As she explained in art mag Border Crossings, "Maybe I like looking at the ladies. Could be that. Maybe I like looking at the guys looking at the ladies; maybe I like looking at the guys; maybe I get off on the bright lights and the glitter and the glamour; maybe I get off on the superficial sex stuff, the marketing and the manufacturing of sexuality."

Wheatley's ambivalence is notable and hardly uncommon. It is similar to the way Berger, whether her publisher knows it or not, is leading the way toward a re-examination of sexuality, though her accomplishment is not about writing dirty. As she admits: "It's not shocking to anyone." Rather, the book, like so much of this work, is about the after-shock. It's about what happens after you fall into that yawning chasm of anything-goes post-millennia culture, only to realize that lust and liberation are not necessarily what they seem to be.

To be released this summer, Simona Choise's book Good Girls Do is practically a non- fiction companion piece to Berger's novella. In the book, Choise ponders her sexual psychology while visiting lesbian bath houses, dominatrixes, high-end call girls and strip-clubs. Choise also mixes genres, incorporating memoir, diary, and journalism into her narrative. But at the crux of this book is Choise's quest for her own sexual self in an age of permeable permissible sexual identity.

"As I was writing this book," she says, "what came into question for me was: what do I want my relationships to look like when I get older? What's important for me in terms of preserving my sexual freedom? But at the same time I realized that surfing from one relation to the next in pursuit of sexual kicks wasn't cutting it on an emotional level...as exciting as that can be when you're young."

Choise, ultimately, both revels in and blames the seemingly endless proliferation of sexual options she recounts in the book, writing that: "We're not giving up much by loosening our sexual mores. Or are we? Does losing the thrill of the forbidden, the suggestion, and the flirtation, count as a loss? Does not knowing the feel of leather that's been used against your body count as a loss?"

Last year, Bill Brownstein wrote what appears to be a very similar book -- he, too, interviews various sex workers and sex enthusiasts and tries to make sense of the changing cultural landscape which gives us naked news and naked carwashes. But Brownstein, a Montreal Gazette city columnist for more than fifteen years, is more voyeur than participant -- he cruises through the sex carwash with the windows up.

"Sex Carnival wasn't intended to condemn or condone," he says. "People used to believe that this kind of stuff was practised only by the trench coat types, but when you see the thousands of people at the porno Oscars and sex trades shows you realize it's a huge industry -- it's not an aberration."

Similarly, the Vancouver writer Patricia Anderson takes great pains to point out that her recently published book Passion Lost is not trying to suggest that society should or could move back to more stringent control over matters sexual. Anderson, who shares the baby boomer demographic with Brownstein, also shares his reticence -- neither book conveys the sense of openness, vulnerability and quest that mark the works of Choise, Berger, and performance artists like Wheatley and Norman. Anderson, like Brownstein, doesn't want her book to be about something as trifling and unimportant as sex. "My book isn't about sex," she says. "It's about unhappiness as it relates to the representation of sex and the interaction of that in private lives."

Regardless, as she charts the history of sexual representation to the present day, Anderson reveals that, in many ways, we are as repressed and confused as ever.

"We have a culture where the representation of sex creates very constricting images," she explains. "Supposedly we are liberated, we are pluralistic, but the irony is that all this representation merely provides us with new kinds of standards as related to sexuality: standards of frequency, standards of creativity we should all be living up to. Those who are happy have the ability to distance themselves from these standards."

While Brownstein's travelogue, documentaries on the porn industry like Paul Cowan's, and even Anderson's theoretical musings act partly as distancing agents, looking on in a bemused, uninvolved way, cultural pioneers from Berger to Choise to Wheately to Michael Turner don't hesitate to jump in feet (or some other part of the anatomy) first. At the same time, these more querulous works are not entirely optimistic; at their heart they portray a profound pessimism and even futility. They seem to be asking: where have the sexually explicit cultural pioneers of the past, the DeSades, Annie Sprinkles, Georges Batailles and Larry Flynts brought us? Is society less repressed, profit-motived, hierarchical or cruel now then two hundred or twenty years ago? Working as they are in the aftermath of the sexual revolution, younger creators seem concerned with political and economic hierarchies as much as they are motivated by breaking down increasingly fragile sexual barriers.

Berger recounts how one woman reader construed Lie With Me as an epic battle waged against the still powerful vestiges of embarrassment and shame conflicting with the female libido. How did the author feel about the interpretation? "I don't know," she shrugs. Like others in this new generation of cultural pioneers, she is neither willing to reduce her narrative to just another skirmish for sexual freedom, nor prepared to admit that the last century's cultural struggle for the freedom to do and show just about anything is completely over.