True story: I was driving through Berkeley on a sunny California day. At the time, I was a community college instructor on my way to teach a class at one of the five schools at which I worked part-time. In a sexually suggestive way, a man hooted at me from the window of a mini-truck, even though I was fully clothed with my blonde hair under a baseball cap.
Ignoring the man, I flipped through the AM channels and settled on a conservative talk show host who was expressing his outrage over ethnic studies classes. He was making crude comments and describing the people who teach the classes as 'thugs' and so on. As he perused the course catalog of one of the schools where I was teaching, he came across my human sexuality class.
'Listen to this class!' he fumed. 'Human Sexuality!' I perked up and increased the volume. 'There is no way,' the talk show host whispered in fury, 'that anyone teaching this class is anything other than a sick, disgusting, perverted freak!' That person was me.
The sexologist must be one of the most misunderstood of all academics. Typically an academic is imagined to be old, male, white and, frankly, sexless. But the mention of sexuality as a primary interest transforms the stereotype into a voluptuous and 'liberated' woman. Of course, in this case 'liberated' means willing to do anything with anyone at any time. Unlike so many pop sexologists, I have not yet changed my last name to something suggestive such as 'Love,' 'Bendover,' or 'Westheimer.' I suppose it's hard for people to envision exactly what I study, which, though I'll leave you in suspense, is not sex.
Men in bars are by far the worst offenders. A night out inevitably ends with a slew of jokes in extremely poor taste, all of which I have heard countless times before. You see, eventually men in bars usually ask what I do for a living. And I, being the crusader that I am, insist on telling them the truth. Which, despite its drawbacks, really does separate the men from the boys. The men at least feign interest in the academics of my discipline. The boys titter, make jokes and soon retreat. They repeat four, and only four, jokes. All of them are bad. Some of them are worse than others. They are:
1. 'Well,' they say as they gather their machismo and place their hands in their belt, 'If you ever need a case study'? As if I would be fascinated by their meager exploits.
2. And then, feeling deflated by my lack of response, 'Do they have labs in that class? He, he.'
3. For their next attempt, they return to an old reliable. 'If you ever need a study partner, you know who to call.' Ouch. Painfully transparent. Occasionally they are brave enough to ask me what exactly I mean by sexologist or human sexuality. I tell them it's interdisciplinary history and anthropology, sociology and psychology, biology and physiology, the works. And the degree isn't from some mail-order sex catalog, it's from New York University. Most often, their response is:
4. 'Well, that sounds interesting, but I got my degree in human sexuality from the University of Life.' They say proudly, 'I learn from experience.' I look them straight in the eye and say, 'Unfortunately, most people do.'
