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I was in the cafeteria when it occurred to me that I may have crossed some sort of line.

It was in the days after New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's expensive dalliances with hookers had been revealed and I was retelling a joke made by Lewis Black on The Daily Show.

"Spitzer paid $4,300 for two hours with a hooker. ... For that much money you could buy a used Honda and ..." Well, you get the idea.

The colleague I was addressing laughed, but as I turned my head I saw an older woman I didn't know staring at me.

I had just told a grossly inappropriate joke about infidelity, prostitution and a bizarre form of auto-eroticism in public, at work and before 10 a.m.

But these days, it seems that X-rated public statements are quickly becoming the new norm.

Last week, Mr. Spitzer's replacement, David Paterson, was asked point-blank by a reporter if he had ever patronized a prostitute and later openly discussed his past affairs.

Attend a dinner party and conversation will likely turn to some foul viral video currently burning up YouTube, or visit YouPorn, where regular folk upload videos of their intimate experiences.

Sexual openness bordering on the pathological seems commonplace today, so is there still any such thing as "too much information"?

"People talk about anything they want and it just continues to get worse," said Karen Mallett, founder of The Civility Group and one of the Winnipeg-based Etiquette Ladies. "It almost seems like you can bond with someone really quickly over something like that. It's instant familiarity."

Ms. Mallett attended a dinner party with neighbours last weekend during which a couple's daughter asked her opinion about the Spitzer debacle. Sex, politics and religion used to be off limits for polite conversation, she said, and she sometimes wishes they still were.

"There are still topics you shouldn't talk about," she said. "When did this become part of the game rather than something that's private?"

Rachel Sklar, a Canadian-born editor at the news website The Huffington Post, believes that sex has become the great conversational unifier, like discussing the weather or sports.

"It's something most people can relate to," she said. "And there's a voyeuristic angle of getting this sudden, shocking vantage point into the lives of other people."

Thanks to the Internet, almost everyone can know the lurid details of the latest sex scandal, the words to the Sarah Silverman-Matt Damon video and exactly what ended up in the hair of an American Airlines passenger when she fell asleep during a flight. (Hint: It wasn't salty peanuts.)

"It used to be that parents were in the awkward situation of explaining things to their kids," Ms. Sklar said. "Now there's the awkward situation of having to explain things to your parents."

Words, phrases and topics that were once confined to X-rated chat rooms have worked their way offline and into brunch conversations and network news shows.

Ms. Sklar still remembers the first time she saw the word "douche bag" in print, and said she was uncomfortable last week when, as part of a CNN panel discussing the Spitzer scandal, male guests began throwing around the term "hooker."

"It's a word I've used and written in headlines on The Huffington Post, but it was just like, 'I thought the polite word was prostitute or call girl,' " she said.

Society adopts controversial topics or phrases and neutralizes them through common use, she said, noting that presidential candidate Barack Obama used the term "gang banger" to describe gang activity in his speech on race on Tuesday and that on MSNBC, reporter David Shuster had accused Hillary Clinton of "pimping out" her daughter Chelsea on the campaign trail.

Many people have removed their filters when it comes to dirty talk, she said, either subconsciously or as a way to deliberately elicit shock.

"I don't want to live in a world where there are no lines," she said. "I want my close relationships to be the ones where I have the frank discussions."

But Sue Johanson, the sex educator known for her Sunday Night Sex Show and Talk Sex with Sue Johanson, believes most people are still unable to have frank discussions about sex.

During a recent episode of Oprah, Ms. Johanson said she watched with horror as the men and women in the audience were separated into different rooms before Dr. Mehmet Oz answered questions about sexual issues.

"I just get so pissed off," she said. "We still haven't gotten around to being able to talk about sex. I don't think we've gotten that far."

Elaine Lui, founder of the website Laineygossip.com and an eTalk correspondent, said North Americans are disproportionately obsessed with sex, as long as somebody else is having it.

"I don't think there's a line any more," she said. "I think it gets pushed back further and further."

But at the same time, Ms. Lui said, many people are more judgmental than ever.

"We like to believe our society has evolved to the point where we're much more open-minded," she said. "But I think there's something hypocritical about talking about somebody else's sex life, when the real line is talking about your own."