The surest sign yet, if you needed one, that President Obama's nominee for the CIA's number-two position is a middle-of-the-road D.C. establishment choice: She used to run an erotica reading night at a bookstore.

Avril Haines (pictured above: She's the only woman), a White House lawyer and former physics grad student, was nominated by Obama to replace outgoing deputy director Michael Morell. About 20 years ago, she hosted "Erotica Nights" at the bookstore she co-owned in Baltimore in her 20s, the Daily Beast reports, picking up a old Baltimore Sun story:

"Erotica has become more prevalent because people are trying to have sex without having sex. Others are trying to find new fantasies to make their monogamous relationships more satisfying,” Haines, then in her 20s, told the Sun. “What the erotic offers is spontaneity, twists and turns. And it affects everyone." (She also toldBaltimore Sun reporter Mary Corey that friends heckled “you just want a mass orgy in your bookstore, while she and her co-owner were initially worried only "dirty old men" would show up.)

The event Corey attended at the bookstore featured a room lit with red candles where guests held chicken tostadas, waiting to eat as Haines read aloud the opening pages of The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, by Anne Rice[.]

The only reason this might work against her is because unlike Scooter Libby, Jim Webb, Newt Gingrich, Lynne Cheney, Barbara Boxer, G. Gordon Liddy, Bill O'Reilly, Marlin Fitzwater, or John Ehrlichman she didn't write any hot sex scenes. She just read them out loud.