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The cash-strapped masses may be spending less on restaurants and entertainment, but not necessarily on the quality of their sex lives--and manufacturers of sexual aids are broadening their lines to meet the demand.

To wit: Trojan now offers a condom that comes with a disposable vibrating ring. Durex, another condom maker, sells a vibrator and a line of lubricants. Even Philips Electronics (nyse: PHG - news - people ) has joined competitor Hitachi (nyse: HIT - news - people ) in the vibrator business. "We're much more open now to experimenting sexually," says Louis Friedman, chief executive of Liberator, a maker of sex toys in Atlanta. "We’re seeing countless new products being sold to a much larger audience than people realized. Even the more conservative retailers have begun to come around."

Indeed, Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT - news - people ), Walgreen (nyse: WAG - news - people ) and Target (nyse: TGT - news - people ) now peddle sexual aids, including condoms, lubricants and personal massagers. Walgreen's Web site features a "sexual wellness" tab, behind which are listed not only contraceptives and fertility tests, but also pleasure-enhancing dietary supplements, romance-themed costumes and games, massage oils and lotions, and the "Emotional Bliss Femblossom" vibrator. (Representatives from Walgreen's and Target were unavailable for comment; a Wal-Mart communications manager would say only that the chain "has a diverse mix of shoppers who visit our stores each day, and we are committed to providing customers with the selection of products they expect to find in our stores.")

In Pictures: The Mainstreaming of the Sex Industry

Poor as we all may feel lately, it seems there's at least one bright spot in having to hunker down at home. "This industry is shielded in a way," says Katy Zvolerin, director of public relations with Adam & Eve, another sex toy maker. "It does seem people use us even more heavily in bad times." (Not that there's much of a correlation between recessions and birth rates--if people have more sex during a recession, they are being careful about it.)

Chad Braverman, director of product development and licensing at Doc Johnson, takes a more sober approach to the coming months. "I don't know if I'd say our industry was 'recession-proof,'" he says. "We need to be proactive in creating a quality product that's going to sell. And there's a lot more competition than there was 20 years ago."

The sex industry traces back to 500 B.C., when traders from the Greek port of Miletus sold olisbos, an early version of the dildo. Today, the business of sex (including pornography) now runs into the tens of billions of dollars. (No official estimates are available; Wall Street analysts don't tend to track this stuff.) And while print and video sales are ebbing, as more free adult content has become available online, sales of un-reproducible sexual aids are still healthy.

The global mass media change a lot of things, but regional identity probably isn't one of them.

It's been nearly 50 years since Marshall McLuhan coined the term "global village" to describe the shared (if largely vicarious) experience that television and other electronic media were fast creating. One of the foundational principles of the global village--which, of course, the Internet has expanded by some vast multiple--is that electronic media doesn't just serve people; it changes people.

As more people communicate over greater distances, goes the theory, the less important are geographic regions as unique repositories of ideas, languages and moral sensibilities--in a word, culture. If so, the cultural differences once assumed to distinguish, say, New Yorkers from Texas farmers should become increasingly vestigial artifacts of a pre-Google world.

But if freedom from geographic constraints means liberation from regional identity, why do many Americans still think in terms of the Midwest vote, Southern conservatism, urban this and rural that? If the entire globe is connected to the same cultural mother ship--drinking the same Starbucks, driving the same cars, using the same search engines, watching the same CNN--how is it that one can still identify regional politics, tastes, values, idioms--the very substance of identity? Were the prophets of convergence wrong?

One argument in their favor is that convergence simply hasn't had enough time-- the global village, after all, is still a new entity by historical standards. You don't have to believe in "the end of history" to recognize how much more alike, at least superficially, far-flung places are today than 100 years ago.

Consumerism, once thought of as a uniquely American phenomenon, is now a staple of life from Kuala Lumpur to Santiago. Drive down a highway anywhere in the U.S., and the first thing that strikes you is how alike every place looks--the same strip malls, the same visual clutter, the same boxy office buildings, whether you're in New Hampshire or New Mexico. (The architectural vernaculars that once distinguished regions from each other are now largely quaint, secondary relics preserved by self-conscious historical societies.)

An American visiting Bangkok, Thailand, 100 years ago would have been struck primarily by its otherness. Today he's struck by its sameness--the same consumer products, the same cars, even the same language (English is common there) as back in Houston. Project the arc of convergence out a few decades, and it's not hard to see regional origin being relegated to a rather minor component of personal identity.

Of course, the world is not a linear equation, and there are forces working to resist the trend. Proximity is surely one of them. There is a whole academic discipline that says, in effect, that you are who you know. So-called "social impact theory" holds that the stronger and more immediate your relationships, the more likely you are to adopt your friends' values, regardless of what else you might read, watch or hear.