SEXY SUBJECTS SPICING AMERICANS' CHATTER.

Byline: Janny Scott The New York Times

In corporate conference rooms, in dentists' chairs and over dinner, the continuing news about Viagra and Monica Lewinsky appears to have accelerated a change in the way many Americans speak about a subject that some would prefer be barely spoken about at all.

The subjects of sex and the language describing sex acts and sex organs have been nudged closer to the conversationally commonplace.

Many Americans say they have found themselves using words they would never previously have used, talking to their children about adultery, and laughing (uncomfortably) at sex jokes told in the presence of people like their bosses.

At a black-tie dinner at the New York Botanical Garden last month attended by 1,100 people, Peter Bijur, chairman and chief executive of Texaco, strode to

the podium and opened with a joke suggesting that some of the floral centerpieces were having Viagra-assisted erections.

``We now speak about the unspeakable as though it were fruit salad,'' said Elizabeth Gould Hemmerdinger, a New York writer who often entertains in her home.

Once upon a time, it was bad form in certain circles to speak of a ``breast'' of chicken. For many years, the word ``pregnant'' was not uttered on television. All that has changed, and not just in the past six months.

``So we've had this dialogue for a long time,'' said Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist at the University of Washington who studies sexuality, family and gender. ``What has happened now is that barriers of discussion have been broken in terms of actual acts being done by specific people.''

One reason has been the attention by the news media on issues like Gennifer Flowers' account of what she said was a 12-year affair with then-Gov. Bill Clinton along with Paula Corbin Jones' allegation that he propositioned her in a hotel room in Little Rock, Ark.

Then in January, the charges that Clinton had an affair with a White House intern, Lewinsky, catapulted oral sex onto the front page, trailing behind it unsubstantiated rumors of such things as a semen-stained dress and rumpled tissues retrieved from the trash. Two months later, the Food and Drug Administration's approval of Viagra put impotence at the top of the news.

Suddenly, men were all over television, testifying about erectile dysfunction. Bob Dole, the former senator, volunteered on ``Larry King Live'' on CNN that he had used Viagra. Even his wife, Elizabeth Dole, president of the American Red Cross, was induced by a reporter to comment on Viagra.

``Every morning, I open up the paper and say, This is another part of the Pepper Schwartz right-to-work law,'' said Schwartz, the sociologist. ``I've been studying sex for 25 years and this is just like the Gold Rush.''

Again and again, news media coverage has legitimized language and topics once considered taboo.

In the months since the Lewinsky story broke and Ted Koppel on ``Nightline'' on ABC gamely took up the question of whether oral sex constitutes adultery, one media research organization has counted hundreds of jokes about Clinton's sex life on four late-night comedy shows.

Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, said Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O'Brien and Bill Maher told 729 jokes about Clinton's sex life in the first five months of 1998, compared with 250 in all of 1997.

Chris Kelly, head writer for ``Politically Incorrect,'' Maher's show, said, ``It's hurt us in the quality satire game,'' of the glut of sexually oriented news stories. ``It's lowered our standards and raised the stakes: What can we do next?''

Among those who believe that things have changed, some say it is for the better. Anything that makes people more comfortable discussing sex is good, they reason. Others worry that talk of sex is coarsening public conversation and edging out more urgent topics.

Rochelle Gurstein, a historian at the Bard Graduate Center in New York and author of ``The Repeal of Reticence,'' which explores the evolution of what Americans can say and do in public, said the changes denigrate the lives of public figures and trivialize discussion.

Richard Weisberg, a professor at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law and a Guggenheim Fellow, is studying what he calls the ``privatization of public discourse'' - the clogging of the ``public space'' with conversation about things once thought private, like the sex lives of politicians.

Even Kelly, the comedy writer, is inclined to agree. ``Thinking about someone else's sex life is a waste of time. You lose time to do other things, like politics or comedy or art or science. I think it's easy and I think it's a shame. And I'll be doing some more in about 45 minutes.''