The brick tower on the corner of Riverside and Monroe has a new coffee order this week: Make ours a double-tall Americano with no skin, please.

For reasons we can’t quite fathom, coffee stands have been increasingly linked to sleazy and downright illegal behavior. Their bizarre connection to sex began to percolate last June when a Spokane County detective pulled into a coffee shop’s drive-up and flashed the barista. Last Saturday afternoon, when temperatures hovered around freezing, another man drove up to a Starbucks window in Airway Heights and exposed himself to the server.

And just this week, we’re reading of Seattle-area coffee stand owners who are asking their employees to dress in bikinis and baby-doll negligees.

The sheer absurdity of this news, especially arriving in the middle of a cold, gray January, the traditional month of turtlenecks and long johns, after all, makes even a brick edifice want to chuckle.

We have chunks of mortar old enough to remember when Spokane was filled with Victorian-era matrons. They surely must be scolding from their graves right now. But even though we’ve noticed our appetite for coffee has begun to wane, we don’t wish to return to those days.

We do fear, however, that in the laughter over the lunacy of these tales, our gentle readers may be about to miss a larger point. Now in the 21st century, Americans live in a culture with ideas about human sexuality that strike us as even more dysfunctional than ever. We’re not going to tsk and hiss like those long-ago morality mavens, but we do know this: When we turn young American coffee servers into sex objects, we not only risk eroding their self-respect, but our own.

Dolloping a spoonful of sex into the coffee may strike a desperate entrepreneur as a clever marketing ploy. It’s not. It’s weary, it’s lame, and it’s offensive.

Sadly, it’s also likely to inspire the region’s sex offenders to wheel through coffee stand drive-ups with even more deviant behavior. Sex offenders have a knack for taking a culture’s unhealthiest messages and twisting them into not only justifications but invitations.

Even a venerable old brick tower can find humor in the irrepressible nature of human sexuality. But these acts of indecent exposure were no joke. They were sick instances of sexual abuse.

Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich was right in firing Detective Joseph Mastel, who exposed himself to a 23-year-old barista in June. If convicted, Saturday’s alleged exhibitionist, Douglas J. Dibiasi, also deserves to be punished.

And we’d be grateful if everybody inside the coffee stands of the Inland Northwest would keep their clothes on. This is one Seattle trend our region simply doesn’t need.

We’ve been standing on this street corner long enough to remember when civility and respect were considered among Spokane’s highest civic virtues.

And from our vantage point, we know our city can only flourish when those values endure.