The Playboy Advisor Goes (Back) to College

Today in America, it is still easier to have sex than it is to talk about sex. I write an advice column for people who have nowhere else to turn. You can't go to your dad and ask, 'Dad, does Mom get on top?' You can't go to your mom and say, 'Mom, do you swallow?' You do that and they'll send you to a school like this. AIDS was the best thing that ever happened to sex education. Nowadays, the conversation we have about sex has been reduced to just three words. 'Just say no.' Surgeon General C. Everett Koop would get on TV and say, 'Just say no.' Easy for him. He's been saying yes for fifty-some-odd years. Do you think those sideburns chafe his wife's thighs? The problem is, what do you do when you want to say yes?"

The Playboy Advisor's Traveling Road Show is off and running. I do stand-up sex therapy for a living. In the past five years, I have spoken at more than 150 colleges, almost always at the request of students. Administrations are not always delighted. Some allow the dates to proceed but will not allow students to put up posters announcing a lecture on sex. Other colleges think the lecture should be heard by all, even those who cannot hear.

The University of Pittsburgh hired two interpreters for the deaf to sign the lecture. It is something the college does as a matter of policy; there is no indication that the roomful of college students intent on learning secret Oriental sex techniques from the Playboy Advisor are hearing impaired.

The interpreters had asked for an outline of the lecture and had figured out most of the words. I talk about blow jobs and jerking off; their hands move, knitting without needles. I feellike Gladys Knight and the Pips.

Conducting a one-man sex lecture is a cross between being a Rorschach ink blot and the modern equivalent of the Dow Chemical recruiter. Students tell mestories. My appearance provides a chance for the campus to decide what it thinks about sex. And today, sex is an issue of political, religious and medical significance in a way that is unprecedented. As a veteran of the sexual revolution, I am unapologetically pro-sex. I try to describe it without the baggage of adjectives like premarital, marital, sacred or profane, moral or immoral.

When I started lecturing, I was struck by how conservative and career oriented the students appeared to be. Two students in three-piece suits took me out drinking. They struck me as larval Yuppies, or Michael J. Fox clones. What kind of man, I wondered, would go to a sex lecture in a three-piece suit? I asked if they ever had fun.

One student opened his vest, undid his tie and unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a mermaid drawn on his skin with a felt-tip pen, a souvenir of the previous weekend. "She was an art student from another college. I read her the Dear Playmates column on how to kiss. The way she reacted to the first answer, I knew I was in for a good time. She rubbed ice cubes on my neck. She drew tattoos all over my body, in what appears to be indelible ink. Do you think I should see her again?"

College is where appearance and passion duke it out.

•

At Ithaca College, I met a student who would have fit right into the Sixties. He (continued onpage 138)Playboy Advisor(continued from page 72) believed that the point of life was collecting stories. "I tell girls that I want to be an epic poet. I try to convey an ability to be sensitive for prolonged periods." He'd traveled through Germany with a buddy, trying to pick up women with a phrase book. They would sit in a car rehearsing the three lines that seemed to work: "Can you help me change the oil?" "Do you live alone?" "May we follow you home?"

Did it work? A girl had heard them rehearsing, interrupted and invited them home.

Sometimes things just happen. "You want to hear about my hottest sexual act? Two girls had been drinking downtown and stumbled into my room by mistake. I put on some music and we started making out. I knew I had to control myself. The minute I came, it would be over. I paced myself."

So how did it go?

"I lasted an hour and a half, long enough so both girls had time to go to the bathroom and throw up."

Who says romance is dead?

•

The lecture tour has taken me through the Bible Belt, through the Midwest, the Northwest and places I can't find on the map. There are regional differences in how Americans treat sex and sex roles.

In the Seattle airport was a soldier whose lower face had been horribly burned in a recent accident. The skin was still molten rivulets of plastic. Freddy in A Nightmare on Elm Street. I had to ask. He had gotten into a bar contest that involved tossing back shot glasses of flaming alcohol. His hand had slipped. It was a warning that I was headed into the seriously macho region of the country.

That night, at a university in Bozeman, Montana, a student scoffed at the AIDS epidemic. "We don't like gays here in Montana. We kill 'em."

"What do you do? Shoot them?"

"Hell, no. We lynch 'em. We save our ammo for important things."

"Such as?"

"Road signs."

•

If you came of age in the counterculture, surfing the wave in the population curve known as the baby boom, there seemed to be a single sexual culture, a sense of shared adventure. That moment has passed, and in the resulting ebb, I've encountered all sorts of eclectic sexual attitudes. I met a woman who had learned sex at her parents' commune, by watching the baby sitters couple in front of a fire. Another woman had been forbidden to play touch football, because her parents did not want her to become accustomed to touch.

In southwest Minnesota, I walked past about 20-year-old brick dormitories with names such as Ocean Boulevard and Charisma. Two guys were parking motorcycles in front of a dorm. I asked if they had named the dorms. "No, the first occupants did. Why?"

"Well, you have a dorm named after the Kama Sutra."

"What's that?"

"It's a two-thousand-year-old sex manual, the record label that the Lovin' Spoonful recorded on or a body oil used for erotic massage."

"Oh, neat."

I had found the high-water mark of the sexual revolution, laid bare by a receding tide. "It was twenty years ago today, Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play."

•

College is where you escape parental supervision for the first time. If there is weirdness, this is where it reveals itself, the psychic baggage your parents packed when they sent you away. At Butler, in Indianapolis, a flasher had been working the dorms and sorority houses for the first few weeks of school. He would stand outside a window, holding a flashlight on his erection, masturbating. I told the women to sleep with a flashlight so they could yell, "Wait a minute. I'll get my light and help you look for your penis, too."

At the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, a student asked, "What do you think of hypnosis and sex?" I gave a skeptic's answer, that some therapist used it to plant the suggestion that sex was desirable, but if he were doing amateur hypnosis, then probably all he was doing was giving his dates a chance to preview the evening with their eyes closed.

"No, you don't understand. I use hypnosis to help me fulfill my sexual fantasies. I also use black magic."

I was still flippant, riding the adrenaline from the lecture. "Hey, you don't need hypnosis or magic to get what you want sexually. I've gotten by on good manners and decent dinner conversation for years, and there are some people who would question the manners."

And then I looked at his eyes: your basic Charles Manson, Ted Bundy laser discs. The kid walked away with a shrug that said I would never understand. I woke up the next morning thinking of those eyes and wondering what fantasies he had in mind.

•

When I say that I am like a Rorschach ink blot, consider something as simple as the poster that usually announces my lectures. I send a copy of the illustration that accompanied my first campus-tour article. The poster is based on circus posters: I am shown in a ringmaster's outfit stepping through a hoop with Rabbit Heads on either side, with a microphone in hand. The copy across the bottom proclaims: Learn the Chinese Basket Trick and Other Secret Oriental Techniques. The G Spot. The Y Spot. The Wet Spot. Some colleges consider it too flamboyant and refuse to use it. It's all right to talk about sex; you just can't laugh about it. Other colleges censor the poster, for one reason or another. A community college president in Spokane was offended by the references to the G spot and the Y spot--though he couldn't have possibly known what the Y spot was, since I'd invented it. In Appalachia, a feminist professor woke from a troubled sleep and roamed the campus at three A.M., tearing down my posters. She thought that the illustration was subliminally sexist--that I was emerging from a vagina, that the cord of the microphone symbolized a bullwhip. In New Orleans, an Asian feminist censored the reference to the Chinese basket trick, claiming that it used her ethnic tradition to sell a lecture on sex, that it celebrated a stereotype that Oriental women were somehow exotic, a tradition that had led to the exploitation of her sisters.

The poster wars came to a head at Louisiana Tech University, in Ruston. The local Campus Crusade for Christ was concerned about my visit. It had gone around campus covering my poster with one of Amy Grant. While I am just as happy as the next guy to have Amy Grant plastered over my face, her posters were a different size. The bottom line of my poster, the one that announced that my lecture was R rated, was still visible, producing an event that boggled the mind: Amy Grant, R rated. Was America's vestal virgin into strip Gospel?

The Campus Crusade for Christ had gone into the lecture hall, placing Gideon Bibles and little recruiting pamphlets on the seats:

The real purpose of Life. A person goes to school and he eventually graduates, marries, gets a job, has a family, buys a house, sends his children through school, continues to work, eventually retires, dies. Is this all there is to life? Something seems wrong. What is it?

The Chinese basket trick? I thanked the members of the Crusade for the gesture, told them I would return on Sunday to place Gideon condoms in the pews of the local church.

All of this would have been simply amusing, except that before the lecture, students had milled around outside the hall, discussing whether it was safe to be seen at a lecture on sex. "I can't go in there. What if there are cameras? What if someone takes pictures?"

•

At SMU in Dallas, I heard a story that put my own views of sex into perspective. A group of students took me to a burgerand-cheese-fries place, jammed into a booth and talked. One of the students had arrived in an immaculate 1967 powder-blue Mustang.

"That's some car."

"It was my grandfather's. He gave it to my father. My father gave it to me."

I was impressed. "A car like that comes with some responsibility. Have you ever had an accident?"

"Senior year. I did six hundred dollars' worth of sheet-metal damage to the front fender. My father, brother and I decided it was an excuse to restore the car. We spent all summer bringing it up to cherry."

"Do you adopt?"

That night, the lecture was picketed by two women. Since the school has a policy that lecturers should not have to cross picket lines, the women handed out their literature in the restroom outside the lecture hall. They had, at least, a room of their own. Here's what they passed out:

Are we really so blind? We are flocking to listen to a speaker from a soft-porn company and at the same time crying out in pain and anger at child abuse and women being raped. There is a connection between a person's thoughts and his or her actions. The women and children will eventually be the victims of this freedom to pollute our minds.... I believe that if every man who loved at least one woman would make the connection between that woman and the person portrayed in the pornography, we would see a change. The loved one, be she aunt or daughter, could be the next victim.... If the straight people would stop giving their dollars and time to pornography, maybe the perverts could not support the industry sufficiently to enable it to be readily accepted as a source for an education speaker on a college campus. The choice is always ours, but maybe the same people who shouted "Die, Bundy, die!" will someday shout "Die, apathetic listener, die!"

"Die, apathetic listener, die"? It does have a certain ring to it, don't you think? The author wanted to punish curiosity with 50,000 volts.

•

I'm driving to the University of New Orleans, down Airline Highway, where Jimmy Swaggart came to play. My hostess is the stand-up improv energy nqueen of New Orleans. We cruise past posters for David Duke for state representative. Down here, the K.K.K. is as much of a stain on your past as four years in the boy scouts. We talk about the telegenic little twerp taking pride in how normal he can make himself appear. Ten years after being Grand Wizard of the K.K.K., Duke is one of the boys.

We talk about AIDS: I tell her that oral sex does not seem to transmit AIDS. My guide replies, "Good. I don't like going down on Tupperware."

She is a fabulous character who likes to hang out at gay cabarets, where performers sing The Streetcar Named Iguana Doesn't Live Here Anymore. She spoke of a Mardi Gras ball where "I had so many rhinestones you could have melted me down for a sliding glass door." The original heterosexual poster child, she spots a nice-looking guy and screams, "Be still, my gonads." She says that the one way to appreciate New Orleans is to go with the pageantry of it all.

The student center is a concrete cathedral. As I walked around the mezzanine to my room, I passed a small classroom, darkened. A slide of Job wrestling with an angelic being flashed on the wall. The lecturer stood silhouetted. The next slide was a Smokey the Bear illustration of the tree of sin. The roots were original sin, the trunk biological sin, giving way to historical sin, then community sin before finally branching into individual sin. It was a disturbing image: shadows in front of a brightly lit image of man's inherent badness. I looked at the tree and thought, Great place to have a picnic. I spread a blanket and gave my lecture.

•

Outside the lecture hall at Xavier University, a Jesuie institution in Cincinnati, girls wear green T-shirts with the slogan Ask me about sex. Green, I am told, because certain well-known chocolate candies, at least the green-coated ones, are considered aphrodisiacs. Oh. At a small table, three feminists conduct a slide show. The projector flashes images of child-abuse victims, images from ads, while the sound track blares quotes from rapists, quotes from Sister Gloria, Sister Robin and Sister Judith. Watching the parade of violence is like sticking a cattle prod in your eye, which is the point. The feminist victim rap is the tollbooth you have to pass before you get an unapologetic lecture on sex.

I have to laugh: The only mention of Playboy in the slide show is a shot of a cover. The narrator says, "Look how Playboy juxtaposes images of sexy young women with the cover line Blood! Gore! Goo!" The cover line promotes a Stephen King interview.

"Sort of stretching it, aren't you? If you think that reading an interview with an author within a few dozen pages of a picture of a nude girl is dangerous, why not go all the way and say that your male companions can't have sex within twenty-four hours of reading a Stephen King novel or within five hours of watching the six-o'clock news, or would that strike even you as profoundly silly?"

I usually start the lecture by asking the students, at the count of three, to make the noise they make when they reach orgasm. The students of Xavier maintain complete silence. Welcome to the monastery.

The school had arranged for me to be part of a sex-exploration week, with segments on date rape, venereal disease, acquaintance rape, AIDS and, finally, me. The driver's-ed approach to sex ed: Scare them with pictures of highway fatalities, and then teach them how to find first gear. But I was controversial enough that the school felt obligated to have a deprograming session immediately after the lecture.

One guy asked the victims of my lecture, "Why such an emphasis on pleasure? I counted words. He said orgasm thirty-six times, masturbation thirty-one times, chastity zero times, love once and monogamy once, in the context of AIDS."

Here, for his benefit, is the Chinese chastity trick. You hang a basket from the ceiling. The woman takes off her clothes and climbs into it. You place the basket over the favorite part of your body and slowly raise the woman to the ceiling, where she remains for the rest of her life.

The school's sexuality instructor was next: "I don't believe there was a sexual revolution. It was a hoax. No one is happier because of what happened. The percentage of men who experience premarital sex hasn't changed since 1900. The percentage of women has increased slightly. It used to be that sluts serviced whole fleets of men. Today, it exists in relationships."

A feminist, quivering with anger, was outraged that people were calmly accepting my appearance. "The neutrality is dangerous to women. When there is so much violation, when date rape is on the increase, we can't be neutral."

A female student, quivering with courage, stood up: "I personally voted for him to come. It was never as an expert; it was as a writer of advice. I feel that the week should be devoted to sexual awareness, not to the pornography debate. The two are separate issues."

Afterward, a young woman cruised past and sniffed, "What kind of animals read your magazine?"

"Ask your father. Ask your brother."

"How dare you say anything about my father? He exists on a moral plane you can't even comprehend."

"Oh, he reads Hustler."

She shattered and ran from the room.

Another woman took her place: "I think your speech trivialized sex and trivialized women."

"Quick, use the word trivialize in a sentence that does not include sex or women. Show me what you mean by the word in another context. Show me that you aren't just parroting feminist rhetoric."

She shattered Pull. An older woman suggested that I was showing hostility toward women.

"Why must I handle slander with kid gloves? It's not that I treat women with hostility; the question is whether I treat men who are gullible, imbecilic, cantspouting cretins differently. And the answer is, I don't." Pull.

•

Penn State: After the lecture, we played Sex in the Lobby. I had heard about this from a director of student activities at Northern Illinois University. Students get together in their dorm, the women on one side, the men on the other. Any student can ask any member of the opposite sex a question about sex. I wanted to see if it worked. About 20 students sat in a circle. A guy asked, "How would you like to be treated the morning after?"

The responses ranged from "It changes something. You have shared something that is very much like a secret, and something in your glance should show that" to "You don't always have to say something. Sometimes, you sleep with someone as an experiment. You've found out what you wanted to know, then it's a matter of having to pretend you're asleep until they leave."

A third woman said, "Yeah. Sometimes I wake up and say, 'How am I going to party with these guys again?'"

Guys? From that moment, every guy in the room was auditioning.

There are some students who are not afraid to talk about sex in public.

•

The College of DuPage is a white-collar commuter college, servicing some 30,000 suburban kids. The front row was filled with punk rockers, guys with purple mohawks, six inches of razorback hair sticking out of shaved skulls. "Tell me," I asked, "when you're going down on your girlfriend, doesn't the hair get there six inches before you do?"

"Ask my girlfriend."

The girlfriend just smiled.

Later, one of the punkers stood up in front of a couple of hundred classmates and asked, "Why, when a woman pulls away during a blow job, can you have an orgasm--contractions and everything--but the rest of your body is numb? You don't feel anything. The orgasm doesn't reach your head." His voice had a poignant tone that enlisted great sympathy and, possibly, changed behavior. Someone willing to say what sex felt like for a guy.

•

Last fall, Dr. Gary K. Noble, deputy director of the Atlanta Centers for Disease Control, had lunch with a bunch of reporters from the Gannett newspaper chain. He mentioned that in the preliminary findings of a study of 20,000 blood samples taken from 20 colleges, about three out of 1000 college students tested positive for HIV. The figure found its way to campus newspapers, in some cases rising from three in 1000 to three in 100. What surprised me was how quickly the figure became engraved in stone. (Months later, the official finding was 1.7 in 1000.)

At Knox College, a small conservative institution in western Illinois, three women fiercely debated my assessment of the odds of getting AIDS, culled from C.D.C. figures and a report to The Journal of the American Medical Association. They were sure that one could get AIDS from oral sex (quoting Masters and Johnson and Kolodny's warning that flossing increases one's vulnerability to the virus while ignoring the less publicized study of gay men who practice only oral sex, which concluded that oral sex was a highly unlikely route of transmission). I had the sense that for the people who wanted to say no to sex, AIDS had given them a bullhorn and a supporting choir. Flinging down the key to their chastity belts, they delivered the coup de grâce: They knew for sure that there were several students on campus with AIDS.

(I asked the dean of students if this were true. He said it was absolutely false but that the rumormongering was indicative of gay bashing, a problem that had cropped up on campus.)

I allowed the three women to challenge my assessment and tried to respond with state-of-the-art studies. Finally, one of the other women in the audience raised her hand and said, "You could go on debating this all night. Could you move on to the other questions, the fun stuff?"

Part of this country wants very much to get back to the fun stuff.

•

That polarization cropped up again and again as I traveled through the South. There were some people who embraced the scare stories as reason to say no to sex forever. They had a sense of righteousness that could not be swayed with science. Sometimes the stories were clearly apocryphal: At Kearney State College, students knew of two cases of AIDS. One was a 21-year-old virgin who had slept with the wrong guy once. (This information was supposedly from a gay activist who had traveled the state administering blood tests--he had reportedly found seven HIV-positives in Kearney, two of them students. It was his job to tell them--he hadn't told the 21-year-old woman yet.) I allowed as how these cautionary tales probably had no basis. After instructing students in safe sex, condom usage and spermicidal foam, I try to put AIDS into perspective.

"Look at your lives. Nowadays, they say that because of AIDS, when you sleep with someone, you sleep with every person that person has slept with for ten years. Ten years ago, most of you were sleeping with your Teddy bears. Unless Teddy was getting butt-fucked in San Francisco, or was shooting up smack with the cool dudes in the South Bronx, he was clean. And if he was, he deserves your compassion, not your fear or wrath. Most of you can count your partners on one hand; for some of you, the only partner you've had is your hand. Do you know where your hand was last night? Be careful, but don't be carried away. About fifty thousand people die in traffic accidents a year. We don't say, 'Just say no to driving.' We say, 'Here's what you need to know to drive safely.'"

•

At the University of Northern Colorado at Greeley, the student committee re-enacted the condom song it had performed at the college vaudeville show. To the tune of Under the Boardwalk, the group had crooned, "Don't be silly / Don't be a sleaze / Wear one to prevent disease." One woman showed me the condom dance--arms tight against her side, neck hunched, waving back and forth like a safe-sex penis. I can't wait for these kids to have to answer their kids' question, "What did you do in college, Daddy?"

•

At one school, two members of the Campus Crusade for Christ sat in the back row, heads bowed, praying audibly for my soul. "Don't pray for my soul," I said, "pray for my hair."

At some point in the lecture, one member rose and walked to the front of the stage. The school security forces were at his elbow, just like that, in the slow-motion replay of Secret Service films. They had sensed a threat and acted.

It turned out that the guy wanted to read passages from the final report of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography. Both hands were clutching the book as though it were the Bible, which, to these guys, it is. And I am the Salman Rushdie of sex.

As for me, it took about five minutes for the adrenaline to subside. Of all the risk sports I pursue, I never expected talking about sex to be one of them.