Campus Sex and the Playboy Advisor's Traveling Road Show

Tonight's lecture is going to be about sex. To be exact, it will be about talking about sex.

"I know it's sometimes hard to believe when you look around these days, "I begin, "but there was a sexual revolution. There was permission granted to experiment sexually. And there's no doubt that people's sexual habits have changed in many ways. But we still don't talk about sex.

"I was on The Merv Griffin Show a few years ago, promoting a book, The Playboy Advisor on Love & Sex. When you are on a talk show, there is a pre-interview. A talent coordinator sits with you and says, 'These are the questions Merv might ask,' then he types up your answers and runs them past the producer. The coordinator came back and said, 'Your answers are fine; you just can't say oral sex or masturbation.'

"'Fine,' I said. 'Blow job and jerking off Ok with you?'"

The audience laughs--the sound of breaking ice. The students of the night are listening. And, God help us, some of them are taking notes.

•

Last year, Lordly & Dame, a lecture agency in Boston, called me and asked if I had ever given thought to speaking on campus. I'd been answering questions for readers in the pages of Playboy for 12 years, so a lecture tour seemed like a good idea. In the fall of 1984, I traveled to 20 campuses, from Portales, New Mexico, to Geneseo, New York. Students from Pocatello, Idaho, to Middlebury, Vermont, listened to an hour of sex advice. It was an education for all of us.

There may have been a sexual revolution, but at the time, these kids were too busy watching Sesame Street to notice. These are the children of parents who were already making house payments when the counterculture hit campuses in the Sixties. I was overwhelmed by the conservative nature of campus life, particularly with regard to sex. It was freshman year in the Fifties.

Prior to each lecture, I would ask students to write out their questions. I discovered early in the tour that members of the audience were not able to speak their piece in front of their peers. But there were always questions.

The questions were, for the most part, remarkably basic: How do you prevent premature ejaculation? Is premarital sex wrong? What is the G spot? What is the difference between clitoral and vaginal orgasm? My girlfriend can't reach orgasm through intercourse; what am I doing wrong? Where does one go to find cheap, meaningless sex?

Some of the questions, such as the G-spot and vaginal/clitoral-orgasm inquiries, were obvious setups by semiknowledgeable students trying to make the teacher's job easier by asking leading questions. The answers were models of wit and sexual sophistication. (Vaginal, clitoral, digital or orbital--it's all the same. Freud said that the vaginal orgasm was more mature. Can anyone tell me what a mature orgasm looks like? Does it wear a three-piece suit, carry an American Express card? As for the G spot, all I've been able to find so far is the Y spot. You touch it and your partner says, "Why are you doing that?")

The questions, as I say, were basic and recurrent; they were the questions of people who were having sex for the first time and finding that it didn't live up to expectations. Only one campus (the Community College of Allegheny County, outside Pittsburgh) didn't inquire about problems with female orgasm. I asked the student-activities director if he thought there was a reason. "Most of our students are dislocated workers from steel mills," he told me. "They've been unemployed for months. When you spend 24 hours a day at home, you have time to work out the little problems, like where the clitoris is and how to give your partner pleasure. Female orgasm is not a problem in the Monongahela valley."

Long before I reached Allegheny, though, there were indications that the sexual atmosphere on campus had changed in surprising ways. Two years ago, while working on The Playboy Readers' Sex Survey, I addressed a sex-roles class at Northwestern University. These were students interested enough in sex to take a course in it. They had conducted their own study, with themselves as subjects, and were curious how their figures compared with national norms. I read through their statistics and came to a halt on the question of masturbation. Something like 40 percent of the class had never masturbated.

"What's wrong with you kids?" I asked.

The instructor volunteered an explanation: "Jim, they're getting a higher education."

"OK," I said, "but it doesn't take both hands."

That was my first glimpse of the notion, now prevalent on campus, that sex is a powerful distraction. Sex can fuck up your grade-point average. Sex can ruin your career potential. I knew I was in trouble when I lectured at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, a town where the locals cruise Main Street in Camaros, Corvettes and pickup trucks, where they buy their liquor from drive-in windows behind package stores and where they keep sex hidden. On the night of the lecture, a group of students took me to dinner at a fancy restaurant near the river. Now, I know there's a box at the end of each Advisor column that says, "All reasonable questions--from fashion, food and drink, stereo and sports cars to dating problems, taste and etiquette--will be personally answered." But it still caught me off guard when the first question posed was, How do you build a business wardrobe on a student's salary?

The kid who asked it was serious. He had never heard of the phrase psychosocial moratorium. That's Latin for recess. In the Sixties, when I was a student, school was a place where you got your act together before you took it on the road. Nowadays, it's different.

"College," he said, "is where they put you under four years 'of pressure. They want to see if you break before you get into a position of responsibility."

When you are a living transcript, I realized soon enough, there's little room for sex.

•

There is a serious rain beyond the windshield. I am sitting in the back seat of a van, hunkered down between the bucket seats up front, as we drive through Wisconsin. I have just asked two women to rate their school's social and political attitudes. "Stevens Point is conservative," they agree. "This is farm country."

I notice that when I ask that question, the answer is always the same: My school is conservative. Only the tone differs. Some say it apologetically. Some say it with pride. Some say it with an air of bewilderment, wondering what I think of their answers.

"What percentage of students, would you say, are virgins?" I ask.

"My wing is maybe 20 percent virgin," says the driver.

"My wing is 100 percent sexual," says the other. "All of my friends have sex."

"A hundred percent?" the driver says. "You mean you've had sex?" She looks at her friend, communicating as much betrayal as the driving conditions allow.

"Yes," says the other.

Silence. I detect that the driver has avoided the issue.

"You said 'All of my friends ...'" she says, then glances back and says to me, "I'm a virgin. Last year, we played the winds are blowing. You know the game--when someone says, 'The winds are blowing for everyone wearing red,' everyone in red moves to a different chair. Someone here said, 'The winds are blowing for virgins.' Everyone changed seats."

"What do you think it will take for you to lose your virginity?" I ask.

"I'm not afraid of sex. I have four brothers who read Hustler. I just haven't found someone I can trust."

I have come to Wisconsin to talk about love and sex. Trust is something I have found to be different--and difficult. It seems to grow at different rates in different climates. Jay Segal, the author of The Sex Lives of College Students, found that "62 percent of male and 77 percent of female students said that their first coital experiences were with 'steady partners.' The average length of a relationship before first intercourse was four months for females and two and a half months for males. The decision to have coitus was made by females 95 percent of the time. Rarely did male students have control over the eventual decision to have intercourse."

I ask the girl riding shotgun what her prerequisites for sex are.

"The door has to be locked, the lights have to be out and my mother has to be in another state."

•

I am discussing sex education with a young blonde from West Virginia University in Morgantown. She says she is a "smart jock" and that she seems to intimidate guys. She says her motto is "Life is an adventure or it is nothing." I am reminded that there were three revolutions in the past decade--sexual, feminist and fitness. She seems to be hitting three for three. I am open in my admiration. The term "immediate undying love" comes to mind. She has invited her entire sorority to the lecture as a "chapter-education project." She is taking a course in human sexuality.

"You should have been here this morning," she says. "It was porn day. Every year, this guy comes and shows a collection of antique dirty movies--people having sex with animals, that sort of thing. It's a big deal every year. Everybody shows up from all over campus with popcorn. It's a regular party."

I ask her what she thinks of the course.

"It's very complicated. Hormones. Endocrinology. Physiology. I'm taking it pass/fail."

In the South, sex has always been sacred or profane, casual or committed, premarital or extramarital. In Morgantown, it's now pass or fail.

Later that night, at the lecture, there are about 500 students, almost 100 written questions, including these:

"What's a good way to let a guy know where a girl's clitoris is?" (Show him with your hand. You'll appreciate it. His next lover will appreciate it. If everyone lit just one little candle, what a bright world....)

"Do you believe in premarital sex?" (Yes. Until recently, it was the only kind I'd ever had.)

"Is masturbation a way of letting out your sexual anxieties?" (Yes, and it's a good way to get your heart started in the morning.)

"How can one overcome an extreme shyness and reluctance to try sex in positions other than the basic man-on-top position?" (Say you're doing research for The Playboy Advisor.)

"What should you do if a guy wants oral sex but won't give it to you?" (Find another guy.)

"Should you kiss a girl after she goes down on you, or is that a sign of homosexual tendencies?" (Right. A very ominous sign.)

"How do you turn away the hundreds, maybe thousands of girls who want to throw you into bed and have their way with you?" (With great difficulty.)

After the lecture, a man introduces himself as the instructor of the humansexuality class. "This has been a very revealing night," he says. "I didn't realize that my students had so many questions. I'll have to devote a whole day to just the sexual side of sex." Seriously. He says that.

Later on, I feel as if I am trying to fall asleep on the surface of a snare drum. There is an energy flowing through the campus, and strange sounds. It is two days before the Penn State football game, and as near as I can tell, they are sacrificing virgins over at the stadium. Whatever it is, it must work. On Saturday, WVU beats Penn State for the first time in 28 years.

•

There are days in your life that you wish you had on film. I will have to settle for a still photo of my day at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. As the picture is snapped, I am surrounded by eight students. I appear to be wearing Bunny ears. (An offer will have to he made to secure the negative, I realize right away. In return, I'll promise not to mention any names.)

The lecture is attended by some 700 students. The first question is this: Has Playboy ever conducted a survey saying that Miami University has the most beautiful women on any campus in America? The answer: No, but it was our mistake.

Miami University has the most beautiful women on any campus in America.

Unfortunately, 43 percent of them are virgins.

Every few years, several members of the sociology department conduct a survey of Oxford students. Here are the percentages of virgins:

1963 1971 1978 1984

40% M 37% M 34% M 28% M

75% F 56% F 38% F 43% F

A sociology professor asks what I think of the apparent rise in female-virginity rate in recent years. She wonders whether or not the pendulum is swinging back. Is there a sexual counterrevolution going on? I consider her question and--this being the Eighties--try to think of sex as though it were economics. In the world of money, there is something known as the acceleration principle, which says that an increase in demand can cause a much larger increase in investment spending. (A ten percent increase in demand, for example, may trigger a 100 percent increase in investment spending; everyone wants to get in on the action.) But when the rate of increase in demand begins to level off, spending can actually decline, even though demand is still growing (it's just growing at a slower rate). In sexual matters, people seem to behave the same way.

In the Sixties and Seventies, when the ex-virgin quotients were growing, the media and the participants in the ongoing upheaval invested nearly 100 percent of their attention in sex. It was fast action--a good time to be alive. But now that the figures are declining, attention has shifted sharply; students are investing their time in other things, such as careers and security and grade-point averages.

Looking at the results of the Miami survey, I notice how the spread between male and female rates has changed. For a while, there was only a four percent difference between men and women; we were in it together, neck and neck, chest to breast, etc. Now the spread is back to 15 percent and there seems to be a difference of opinion once again. One pair of written questions from the Oxford audience says it all:

Male: "Why is it that women don't like friendly sex? Why do we have to propose to them first? It seems awfully popular on this campus."

Female: "Why don't guys here date? Why are relationships here like either a marriage or a one-night stand?"

After the lecture, I find myself at a party in a house off campus. There is a tradition at Oxford of naming houses--things like The Paradise, The Seven Incredible Virgins, The Three Cool Guys. The Sack Lunch is where I attend the party. A member of the lecture committee asks whether or not the questions from the Miami audience were normal. How did alma ma stack up against other schools? What was weird?

"Well," I say, "last night at De Kalb, someone asked how long you have to suck a penis to make it red and pulpy."

A heartbreak blonde at the end of the table says, "Mmm. Red and pulpy, just the way I like 'em." Gee, maybe last night's question wasn't so weird.

The host of the party has invited me here, it seems, to talk the women of Miami into having sex. I confess to a sense of helplessness. I have not had to talk a woman into having sex for 20 years. "Usually, when they walk into the room without clothes, I get the idea that sex is in the air," I say. "The night I lost my virginity, I was in a hotel room with a woman I still think about. We were watching a Spencer Tracy movie on TV. She undressed. I said, 'Wait a minute. I can lose my virginity any time. It's not every night you get to see Inherit the Wind on TV.' There's a rumor that I'm retarded, you have to understand. But let's have a look at the figures. Apparently, 65 percent of the women on campuses nationwide lose their virginity in a caring relationship...."

"And the other 35 percent lose it at the Sack Lunch?" the host asks hopefully.

"Dream on."

•

The students at Florida International University seem dead-set earnest about making sex happen this night. The Advisor is part of a three-ring circus. At six o'clock, there is a screening of Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex** But Were Afraid to Ask. At eight, there is the lecture. And at nine, a dance. To facilitate mingling, the dance committee hands out little plastic nuts and bolts. Most of the bolts are right-threaded, most of the nuts left-threaded. Any guy and girl whose nuts and bolts are compatible will win a prize.

A guy comes up to me, testosterone backed up behind the eyes, terminally horny. "Do you have any idea how frustrating these things are?" He shows me a nut and a bolt, hopelessly dry-locked. "Why can't I get this thing on?"

"Have you tried foreplay?" I ask.

I descend a flight of steps leading from the dance floor into the campus rathskeller. On the other side of a glass panel, a couple of guys in drag are rehearsing something. "I think I got here just in time," I say, joining a group of students.

"Oh, that's just the local comedy revue," I am reassured. There are four or five of us at the table, a couple of males and a couple of striking females. We sit and drink wine coolers from plastic cups the size of popcorn containers. Most of these students are from Miami, city kids with street smarts, probably a lot of graduates from Scarface High.

"Tell us what you think about this," one guy says. "We've got a friend who hasn't been laid in a couple of months. He's starting to get twitchy. We thought for his birthday, we would hire a hooker at one of the hotels. We know the girl. Adjoining rooms, the works, comes to about $150. We figure we'll set him up with the girl, then break in at the appropriate moment."

I look at the faces of these concerned friends. One of them bears a remarkable resemblance to Jamie Lee Curtis. I can see how a guy can get twitchy without sex when there are women on campus who look like that.

"Excuse me," I say, "but haven't any of you given any thought to the trauma potential of this event? You could be talking serious humiliation."

"Hey, you're right. What happens if he bolts? Does the hooker spend the night? I mean, if she hasn't got anything better planned, I wouldn't mind...."

So much for concern. So much for friends.

Later, we sit together on the hood of a car, drinking Scotch and discussing the night's conversation. I am still disturbed by their notion that sex is something that can be subcontracted. These kids are thinking of sending a friend out for the cure, hiring professionals to get the job done--an idea straight from the Fifties. I try to recall a Sixties motto to the effect that friends will get you through times of no sex better than sex will get you through times of no friends. What are friends for, after all, if not for sex? We discuss women who look like Jamie Lee Curtis. We discuss affairs. We discuss Scotch. "You really shouldn't drink Scotch," I tell them. "It makes you act like your parents."

•

I am being driven to a lecture in a rented Lincoln Continental by a student who plans to fly jets next year. At the moment, he is having a hard time figuring out which switches raise and lower the windows and which ones lock and unlock the doors. Finally we roll.

"USC is conservative," he says. "Not Orange County conservative--big-bucks conservative. We call ourselves the University of Spoiled Children. UCLA is the Universal College of Lower Achievement. We pay $9000 a year for the same education the state system charges $1300 for. There is a bumper sticker that says, sell (continued on page 189)Campus Sex(continued from page 82) The house, mom--I have to stay at USC. This is a school of Vuarnet sunglasses, BMWs, fat-tired Schwinns with passenger pegs on the front wheels. We're talking fashion and fad. You should see the show the girls put on for a big football game. You sit in this huge football stadium and all you can smell is perfume. Imagine trying to play football in a bowl of perfume."

We wheel down fraternity row. Students spend hundreds of bucks taking the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving course so they can cruise their Porsches at five miles per hour on sorority row without scratching the paint. We find a bar and talk about women.

My driver tells me he is a member of the R.O.T.C. He likes to go balls to the wall with his buddies, he says. I say that I have mastered several forms of yoga, as well as the Jane Fonda workout, and I can think of no position that brings my testicles into proximity to a wall and still allows me to have fun.

"Hey, I can see why you're a journalist," he says. "You have communication skills. That must be your game plan."

He tells me he assembled and published the Women of USC calendar--not a bad way to meet girls, though he swears that was not the intention. The intention was to make lots of money, he says, then meet women. It didn't work out that way.

"There was a girl in one of my classes freshman year," he says. "I said to myself, 'If I ever get to go out with a girl like that, life will be right.' She walked into the auditions and I put her on the calendar. We've been going out for a semester."

"Have you ever told her that you noticed her four years ago?"

"No. That would raise things to a different level of seriousness. That's not part of my game plan now. Maybe in the spring...."

The conversation continues. The other students in the car want to know what I do when I really want to impress girls. "Where do you get your ideas for dates?" one of them asks.

"I'm doing my master's thesis on dating trends as revealed by the Love Connection," I tell him. "I see what the girls think a romantic date is. Sushi is out, by the way. So is miniature golf. Flowers work."

Later on, after the lecture, I am cornered by two fairly radical USC guys wearing outfits that look like a cross between GQ and Punk Surfer. "What do you think of fashion?" one of them asks. "I mean, there was a girl in dance class, with a leotard you wouldn't believe, who was rad. But in bed, she was stone-cold normal. Your basic straight-legged sex. No imagination. I think fashion is a lie. It puts distance between you and a woman. They give the appearance of sexuality, but it's just visual. They don't know how to sweat. They don't know what to do when they're naked."

"Has it always been like this here?" I ask.

"No, my sister went to this school. She could tell you stories that would curl your toes."

I wait, but the stories never come.

Here is a kid who grew up with an expectation that sex at USC would immediately be the max. Hell, he had better sex in high school with his 17-year-old girlfriend, to hear him tell it. Older women just aren't all they were cracked up to be.

Later, I think about his impatience and what it cost him. He had just rejected a woman because she didn't wrestle in his weight class when, instead, he could have helped her learn a new move or two. I wonder what ever happened to teaching each other.

•

Youngstown State University is an odd school. When I walk into the lecture hall, there are camera crews from the local television stations. The lecture committee looks at me and someone says, "Did you invite them?"

I hadn't, but a group of women calling themselves something like the Atomic Task Force to Take Back the Night and End Violence to Women and Pornography and Film at Five had. They sat in the front row in black T-shirts, holding little cards that said Playboy degrates women. Playboy exploits women. Playboy treats women as sex objects. I ask them if they want to say anything in front of the audience. They decline. They are here to create a media event: a picture of me, a picture of them, an interview outside. They control the news, without debate. They are slick, sophisticated. The rest of the audience isn't even aware of their presence.

I try to deal with the question of sex objects. "Listen, sex is a verb, at least if you are doing it right. You make love to, with or at someone. Let me quote a passage from a writer named John Gordon: 'In the past, when I looked at someone as a sex object, it was generally with the hope that she might come to consider me in the same way.... On the occasions when my feelings were returned ... things wound up where the old sex-objectification business tends to lead them--that is, to two people humping happily away.' You seem to miss the point of Playboy. When we think of women, we don't always think of sex. But when we think of sex, we always think of women."

I usually end a lecture with the Playboy Advisor oath--I ask the audience to raise their right hands and repeat after me: "I am incredible in bed. And when someone else is there with me, I'm even better." This time, a young black male raises his hand; then, when he hears the oath, he raises both hands, climbs up on his chair and begins chanting, "I am incredible. I am incredible in bed! Yeah! I am!" Somehow, I suspect, this is not the first time the thought has occurred to him.

The Playboy Advisor Traveling Road Show has its first miracle.

•

At some point during every lecture, I explain why I asked for written questions in advance.

"I was at a college once where someone asked what the caloric content of sperm was. She didn't want to blow her diet, just her boyfriend. I was going over the list of ingredients. Do you realize how hard it is to read the label on those little buggers? Anyway, it's mostly water and glucose. Suddenly, this girl raised her hand and interrupted, 'You can't tell me it's glucose. How come it tastes salty?' Then, realizing what she had said, she did a nuclear blush and fled the room. Twenty guys followed her."

The audience laughs. It is not a true story, but everyone believes it happened--usually at the state college down the road. It is the Eighties equivalent of the girl on the gearshift knob. It is a folk tale, in this case designed to release the tension that everyone has about having a public conversation about sex.

The Youngstown lecture is a nooner. Afterward, I stop for lunch at the campus pub, scarfing down a beer and pizza at a table with a group of students, mostly females. The guy on my left is a rock musician. He plays in an MTV-style band and swears that if you dress like the guys in rock videos and play guitar like the guys in rock videos, you get laid by girls like the girls in rock videos. He is unabashed, a word I never expected to meet outside Playboy's Party Jokes. He learned his social skills watching Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin on Saturday Night Live reruns.

"Hey, premature ejaculation isn't a problem," he says. 'Just tell them you respect them. That's what I do."

"I beg your pardon," I say.

"When I come premature, you know, before I even get it out, I just tell them that I respect them too much to make love to them. Then the next time you try, they think you're sensitive."

We're at a table with five women, and here is this wild-and-crazy guy who says he plays in a band and gets laid a lot.

"Are these women friends of yours?" I ask.

"Sure, they fell on a grenade for me in 'Nam. I've got a question for you, though. Is it possible to be too big to make love to a woman?"

"What is this--shameless self-promotion?"

"I mean, what do you do? Take your time? Wait until she's ready?"

One of the girls has had enough. She leaves the table. He waves and hollers out to her, "I suppose a blow job is out of the question."

•

I am on a plane, collecting my thoughts as I head East toward the first New England college I'll visit with my sex-advice lecture and road show. College is where many students have their first sexual relationships and first suffer the trauma of broken relationships. Others feel the pressure of inexperience and just want to fool around--to get experience, to get revenge. The Sex Lives of College Students mentioned that in response to the sexual pressure, women are especially fond of flirting: "They continued to look for the best catch they could find and felt they might be missing something if they let an opportunity pass ... flirting gave them the feeling that they were sexually attractive and in demand. Occasionally, females recalled that they were guilty about their flirtatious behavior, but for the most part they found it enjoyable and exciting to play games with other men."

I am reminded of a female student from Northwestern who once sat in a bar telling me about her most recent session of game playing.

"A lot of guys think that if they offer you drugs, it's an automatic contract to have sex," she said. "I was at this bar, and this guy said he had some coke. I said I would touch his cock if he laid out a three-inch line of coke on top of it. He unzipped his trousers, pulled out his prick and dumped half a bottle of coke on it. I looked at it for a while, then said, 'No, I changed my mind.' I left him looking at his stash, wondering where he could find a three-foot straw."

My, how times have changed.

Then again, I recall reading a recent newspaper story with the headline "Pressure for sex tops coed gripes." It seems that almost one out of four women who responded to a campus survey thought that men wanted to become sexually involved too quickly. They wondered how to resist a man's advances while keeping him interested enough to continue the relationship. (Undoubtedly, they wrote to Ann Landers for advice.) Apparently, 35 percent of the guys in the study said that the problem of communication was a drag, that they didn't know what to say and felt pressure to keep an interesting conversation going or risk being considered a bore.

Some things never change.

•

It is the last day of fall classes when I hit Middlebury College. The Vermont hills are covered by two feet of snow and 240,000 vertical miles of moonlight. I am at a bar, listening to a girl talk about sex in New England. Her eyes and cheeks are two thirds of a juggling act.

"Is this place conservative? Well, there's a saying that the average first date at Middlebury lasts two months. Before you ask a girl out, you have to be able to make a commitment, to be willing to consider marriage, six kids, the whole package. And another weird statistic, or maybe it's just a folk tale--supposedly, 60 percent of Middlebury graduates marry other Middlebury graduates. They meet each other in the outside world and discover that they have this thing in common."

"What thing?" I ask. "Acute hominess from never having gotten laid in college?"

"No. We still have sex. There's this thing called the Middlebury muckle. The ingredients are alcohol and previous eye contact. You get together at the end of the night in a bar and leave together. Or get together in a closet at a party. The problem on this campus is, if you have sex, everyone hears about it, usually before you're even finished. You leave a bar together, it's like shooting skeet--pull!--and next thing you know, your reputation is in fragments, like clay shards. But still, we have a sense of humor about it. Girls wake up and say, 'You wouldn't believe who I had a fling with last night.'"

The talk turns to the Women's Union. A group of concerned feminists had protested the lecture in a letter to the school paper: "Engaging a speaker affiliated with Playboy magazine is inappropriate.... Our request that the posters not exploit the affiliation with Playboy magazine was disregarded. The posters exploit the phrases 'Playboy Advisor' and 'Love and Sex' by means of their size, positioning and highlighting."

"What did they want the posters to say?" I ask. " 'A slightly balding guy in wire-rims will address students on something or other'?"

"Yeah," she agreed. "Where do they get off? Pornography reduces people to objects, perpetuating the degradation of women? Come off it. We've all got our Soloflex posters."

I like the attitude. I watch students drink, re-establish eye contact and leave to muckle. God, I love New England.

•

Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh is a school where everyone gets his own personal computer. You have to have 1200 SATs even to consider applying. It costs 14 grand a year. It is a school of technodarlings, the kind of kids who watch Riptide and get turned on by the robot. The school recently got a contract to design software for the Government.

"That's all we fucking need," my student guide says. "Now we are targeted by the Russians."

I am being shown around Delta Upsilon, as close as Carnegie Mellon gets to an animal house. The only piece of furniture in the rec room is a table saw. (I don't want to know.) The walls of the living areas are covered with rejection letters from Texas Instruments, General Dynamics, IBM: "We have reviewed your educational accomplishments and abilities. We have no openings at this time. We will keep your application in the active file." Students have drawn arrows to flaws in the word-processing program that printed the identical letters. Class act is scrawled on many of the letters.

My host explains the difference between Greeks and geeks at Carnegie. "We work hard, play hard--all the frat guys here do. I go four days without sleep, crash for two, eat, then study. The geeks never sleep. It's hard for anyone to have a relationship. But at least we don't kill ourselves, like the kids at Harvard or Stanford.

"The girls who come to Carnegie are mostly trogs"--female computer jocks--"and they don't have time for relationships, either. They just want a quick release. A Friday-night physical. No commitments. Which is just as well. Most of us have to resort to P.F.W.s--plastic-fantastic weekends. First we drink a case of beer. We put on our mirrored shades, Hawaiian shirts and skin heads, then head out for a game of airport roulette. We take the first plane out on People Express."

He shows me a skin head. It is a half mask of a guy with glasses and a fright wig. "Do you mean to tell me that dressing up to look like Gene Shalit gets you laid?" I ask.

"Yeah. People Express puts us right on a plane. They don't want us hanging around the airport. And when you wear a mask, people think you're rich. Only the rich act ridiculous. And acting rich can get you laid."

We are in the den. A crowd has gathered around. The guys are going over the details of the last P.F.W.: "Yeah, wasn't that the trip where you were throwing bait to the kid across the aisle?"

"Bait?" I wonder.

"You had to be there."

Finally, they ask me what schools I've found sexy. I tell them about a school I visited in Upstate New York that has a ratio of seven women to one guy.

"Road trip!" the group shouts as one. I feel like the only decent citizen in a lynch mob.

"Can you give us names?" someone wants to know.

"I don't think you need any."

•

Most of my lectures have been in the Southeast, at schools where, until recently, men were forbidden to visit women in their dorms. The issue of parietal hours was settled for me in New England in the Sixties. If the country could send 18-year-olds to fight a war, then no goddamn college was going to deny us the company of women. The concept of in loco parentis was abandoned. I recall all this as I arrive at the State University of New York College at Geneseo, a sophisticated place by any standards. The problem is not how to get sex but what to think of it once you've got it.

I am being driven toward campus by two completely competent girls, obviously friends. The talk is of orgasms, the usual stuff. The girls have a nice feel about them, a Mary Lou Retton kind of energy. The girl in the passenger seat in front has just Xeroxed a study of sexual coercion on campus. She thinks it may come in handy.

"Do you mean sex at Geneseo is forced?" I ask.

"Oh, we have our share of brutal frat boys and women who encourage and tolerate that kind of sex. Then we have the kind of students who march into The In-Between, a downtown bar, have a few drinks and see what happens. There may even be one or two instances of love. Most of the girls have boyfriends back on Long Island."

"Any virgins?" I want to know.

"Not according to the bear," she says.

"The bear?"

"According to campus legend, the first time a virgin graduates from Geneseo, the statue of the bear on Main Street will climb down from the pedestal and run away. So far, it's still on the pedestal.

"We had two virgins in our dorm last year--but they didn't stay virgins for long. Geneseo will do that to you. It's quaint, apathetic, upwardly mobile. But mostly it's relaxed. You can have a fling, then next day meet your roommate for a beer and laugh about it."

A few hours later, I'm having a beer with someone who needs a laugh or a good chuckle. "I have this problem," she begins. "I've been going with this guy back home. I really care for him. But I had the best sex of my life last week with someone else. There was this guy on campus. Someone had given him an extra-large T-shirt to wear. I told him to belt it and wear it as a miniskirt. He said he would need tights and spike heels. I told him I had some. He groaned and said, 'That makes my nipples hard.' So I told my girlfriend I thought he was trying to pick me up.

"He saw me later that night and invited me up to his room to drink Kahlúa. I wasn't sure. He teased me: 'Little girl can't make up her mind?' I went."

Here she paused--someone running a thumb across the edge of a change.

"He was totally without inhibition," she went on. "He pulled my hair. He called me 'My little slut.' I kinda liked it. It was the best sex I ever had. Now I've got to go home and face my boyfriend. It's always the same. I give him head. Then I get on top. Then, if I'm lucky, he eats me. Then lie gets on top. It will be like that every day. I don't look forward to it. If I ask him to change, he's going to suspect something. If he doesn't change, I'm going to die."

"Well, you might tell him you learned all this neat stuff at a lecture by the Playboy Advisor," I suggest. "Look, seriously, you've got a choice. If you want to save the relationship, you will make suggestions. If you want the relationship to die, you won't say anything, and you'll think it ended because the sex was bad. You've got to have the courage to ask for the stuff you've read about. Don't accuse someone else of your own lack of imagination. I think I heard that on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood."

Next morning, one of the campus conservatives drives me to the airport. He is a young Republican and part of the new conservative-Christian coalition. I have met someone like him at every college where I've spoken--together, they delivered the country to Reagan, and just in time, they believe.

Tucked into his armrest is a three-by-five index card filled with fine-hard-point pencil jottings, notes from last evening's lecture. Both sides of the index card are filled. As we swing out onto the interstate, he pulls out the card. There are a few things he wants to clear up.

"You want to know what I think of Geneseo?" he says. "Well, it's a school that tolerates all kinds of behavior. I'm a conservative. I resent it when someone puts pressure on me to have sex. Last night, you said you couldn't think of a reason not to have sex."

"Yes."

"What about church tradition?"

This is a guy who says he thinks Jerry Falwell is bad but thinks the people Falwell is afraid of pose an even greater danger. He thinks Playboy espouses a message that makes teenaged girls pregnant and leads to abortion. I tell him that the girls who are getting pregnant are too busy fucking to read Playboy, but if they read Playboy, they would read that we believe in responsible sex, including birth control.

"You made it sound like there was something wrong with being a virgin," he says. "There's someone I care about, and your message seemed to be if you care about someone, you should have sex."

"It's worked for me" is all I can tell him.

"You trivialize sex. I resent that pressure. You make it sound like Masters and Johnson are the only authorities. What about the Bible? If I had sex with this girl, it would change things between us. I don't know how, but it would."

"That's the point. It will change things," I say. "And no matter what happens, you can live with it."

(I stop to think. One of the students last night asked whether it was possible to have guilt without sex. Yes, and the guilt is even less fun that way.)

He turns the card over, trying to steer the conversation away from his personal business. "What do you think of those magazines you can order only by mail? Aren't they making a fast buck off the weakness of their readers?"

I wonder which magazines he means. Oriental Wet Snatch Quarterly? Whipped Waitresses? Chained Cheerleaders? Popular Mechanics? "I admit that guys who are crippled and can get off only on rubberware are sad," I say. "But if you define that as a weakness and take it upon yourself to save others from it, you are overstepping your bounds. Next, you might try to define the Man Who Reads Playboy's interest in naked women with large breasts and blonde hair and California Zip Codes as a weakness. I don't want to be saved from that weakness, thank you. You sound like Phil Donahue does when he gets on my case for publishing pictures of naked women. I always want to ask him, 'What do you fantasize about when you masturbate, Phil?' If he's smart, he'll say it's none of my business. I am saying to you that what readers do with magazines is none of your business."

We pull into the airport. He looks at his notes. A moral skycap, he wants to carry everyone's emotional baggage. I have five minutes to make my flight, not enough time to make the moral ascent he has in mind. He tucks the card back into the armrest and drives away.

I pull out my copy of Oriental Wet Snatch Quarterly and head for the plane that will take me home.