I had such hopes when I read the headline Man injured in sex shop attack at CNN.com this morning. Things looked even more promising when I clicked on the link and saw that the story came out of Sweden — it just had to be juicy, right? I mean, we all know how kinky and oversexed Swedes are–I was picturing all manner of depravity and moral turpitude.

Alas, my hopes were dashed. Turns out an explosive was thrown through the window into the closed shop. The one person inside was slightly injured and he was treated at the scene. Apparently there was also some material damage, but there was nary a lurid description of said material to satisfy my prurient interests. Dang.

My own experience of sex shops is woefully small, coming as I do from a small town in one of the reddest of the red states. When I left that small town to go to college, I lived near Idaho’s version of the “big city” (at that time population less than 200,000), and my then-husband and I (like I said, I came from a small town in a red state — being married at eighteen meant I was practically a late-bloomer) spent a great deal of time driving around and staring slack-jawed at all the big-city attractions.

Often we’d be accompanied by my husband’s cousin and his eighteen-year-old wife, who had also made the move and lived not far from us. On one of these outings, we found ourselves driving through the seedy underbelly of Boise, a “suburb” deceptively named Garden City (Question: How is a tornado like a divorce in Garden City? Answer: Either way someone loses a trailer house.), and tucked in among the dive bars and nail salons was an “adult store.” We could hardly believe our eyes.

We were intrigued, of course, and I urged Jason (that was his name, my teenaged husband) to stop so we could check it out. There was a big sign on the front door telling us that you had to be eighteen to go in, which put a bit of a damper on our plans since Jason was only seventeen. (Yeah. His mom had to sign for us to get married. I know.) After some discussion, Debi (the cousin’s wife) and I decided that we’d go in by ourselves. Debi’s husband protested vigorously on the grounds that anybody seeing the two of us girls go into a sex shop together would automatically conclude that we were lesbians and that simply could not be borne. We decided it was worth the risk and left him and his minor cousin waiting in the car.

Apparently they were serious about that under-18 rule, because we were asked for ID less than a minute after we stepped through the door. I produced mine, but Debi didn’t have hers and she was asked to leave. While I was brave enough to risk being thought a lesbian, I wasn’t bold enough to browse around the sex shop on my own, so I left with her. I remember exactly two things that I had time to see before we were turned away: a glass counter-case filled with rows upon rows of studded leather collars and a comic book called “The Cop’s Butt-Slave” (with a delightfully-illustrated cover, no less). We were probably better off not having the chance to see what else was on offer, but I felt a little bereft all the same.