'Fees up: Are you watching SEX ... or carpentry

Shag carpet installation, or . . . other things shag-adelic?

That, fair Seattle Times reader, is what we want you to vote on today.

See, I heard a rumor that you do not want to read articles about the knockin' o' the boots. Seattle is home to the country's top sex columnist, Dan Savage, who never seems to lack for letters in his weekly column. You don't cotton to his kind of filth, though, because Seattle Times readers don't read, ahem, that sort of thing.

You'll have to forgive me if I don't believe it. Underneath the Gore-Tex and the funky Birkenstocks lurks a sexy, sexy Seattle just raring for some hanky-panky. As the mercury rises, so do hemlines. Girls and boys show off the goods. People get a little, um, anxious, if you know what I mean.

To see even more strangers' skin, we tune into cable: After all, it's where the nudity is. In a time when AIDS has reshaped the rules of sexual engagement, our society has become less touchy-feely and more voyeuristic. Enter the institution of late-night cable viewing. With each season, more channels have decided to dive into the racy stuff because we like to watch. The more intimate and expository the program, the better.

Premium channel subscribers are champing at the bit for new episodes of HBO's "Sex and the City," starting June 4. In the meantime, they surreptitiously tune in to HBO's other late-night programming, including "Sex Bytes" and the now-classic "Real Sex" series. Saturday at 11 p.m., HBO's "America Undercover" series debuts a new episode called "Hookers & Johns: Trick or Treat." When we call this a warts-and-all look at prostitution's highs and lows, we aren't kidding.

Around midnight Cinemax becomes Skinemax, and Showtime gets its own nickname - just remove the S and the W. Its late-night lineup includes the female-written, -produced and -directed soft-core series "Women: Stories of Passion" and the more ribald-sounding "Compromising Situations." In May, Showtime airs "Rated X," starring Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez as San Francisco's legendary skin-flick emperors, the Mitchell Brothers.

Even stoic old A&E gets down with "Love Chronicles," which explores our methods of courtship and mating rituals. Then there's the dusty old History Channel, whose "History of Sex" earned the channel's highest ratings ever.

Yes, cable is where you can see sex in all its facets. Yet we haven't addressed this kind of programming in this column because . . . well, you know.

My duty is to cover the most strange, wonderful and dangerous aspects of cable, so for May I thought I'd follow TV's lead and gawk at cable's various treatments of the old horizontal mambo. That is, if my assumption is correct and you enjoy reading about it. This may be a family newspaper, but you and I both know how your family got here. Those who don't can probably find a cable documentary that'll explain it.

But I'm willing to give readers another option. If you really don't like reading about sex, I'll spend the whole month talking another subject I've neglected here. It's the sort of programming we may be embarrassed to admit we like, but it gets our idle, lonely hands working away. That's right, I'm talking about do-it-yourself shows.

You may think I'm stacking the deck against Bob Vila and his pals by putting them up against carnal concerns. Am I? Nothing gets Seattle more hot and bothered than a good home-decorating project, you know.

Turn on BBC America's "Changing Rooms," which makes home decor a sensual experience. Surprising, too. The premise: A pair of friends engage in a little swapping - of house keys. Then, with a fixed budget and the help of a handyman (sexy!) and interior decorator (sassy!), the friends transform one another's places into new visions of glam and glitz. At the end, we find out if each loves what the other has done, or hates it.

Home-improvement gurus also have it over their nekkid counterparts in the personality department. Just click over to "The Christopher Lowell Show" on Discovery for proof of that. He takes viewers through design and decor dilemmas with panache and humor.

Doing your own wainscoting, building a living-room set with your own two hands, watching paint dry - it's all sexy! Katie Brown makes sexy, oily olive tapenade on Lifetime! HGTV even has a program called "Designing for the Sexes"! Who needs titillation when you have sandpaper and a dream?

Ahem. So, like I said, you'll help decide which way this column will swing during the month of May: sexy cable, or home-improvement programming?

Would you rather read about "Rated X" in this column, or the PG-rated "Restore America with Bob Vila"?

Regardless of how you vote, I fully expect to cover one subject or the other sometime soon. Your call is completely anonymous, so all you embarrassed Martha Stewart fetishists can feel free to come out of the woodwork. We won't tell.

Remodeling or reproduction? Register your vote by calling The Seattle Times InfoLine service at 206-464-2000, and entering category 8683. It's a free call in the Seattle area.