Sex and the Stethoscope: Cable's Heart-to-Heart Doc

Doc's first show? "The Orgasm." Later: "Masturbation." Future episodes are titled "Was It Good for You?" and "Sex, What Scares You?"

O'Neill has high hopes for Drew Pinsky, and so she's on hand to watch her Pasadena sexpert tape an episode of the new talk show. Pinsky, a working internist who daylights at the Las Encinas psychiatric hospital (specialty: addiction medicine) is famous in some circles from his two decades doing the late night call-in radio show "Loveline" (and the now-canceled MTV show of the same name) that is, by turns, useful, hilarious, raunchy. If you are of the preteen female persuasion, you may recognize the doc from his 2004 role (playing himself) in "New York Minute," the Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen vanity flick.

Apparently, becoming a sexpert does not require board certification. Pinsky became one when, as a 24-year-old third-year medical student, he was asked to show up at a Los Angeles rock radio station to do "Ask a Surgeon," which quickly morphed into "Loveline."

"Strictly Sex" is taping on a recent Saturday afternoon before a live studio audience, a hundred chair-warmers wrangled into the Burbank sound stage. They look sexually active enough. The set is not subtle. It contains an S-shaped desk, a bowl filled with red apples, a carpet whose color could be described as a flushed, rosy, engorged pink and a couple of glass vases that look either like bongs or phalluses, depending.

Before he goes into makeup, Pinsky pulls up a chair and offers us some background. The first thing you need to know about Dr. Drew is that he drives a cherry-red BMW. The second thing: He's married with triplets who play Little League (he whips out a family photo from his wallet). Trim and silver-haired, bright-eyed and California casual, Pinsky comes across as more suburban doc than pervy tipster.

Asked if Americans, always branded as repressed but oversexualized puritans (especially by the French), are ready for another live sex show, Pinsky says, "Actually, I don't see it. Where are the Puritan attitudes? How can people keep saying that? I think it" -- he means sex in the media -- "needs to be more contained."

For example, Pinsky thinks sex ed in schools is generally a good idea, "but abstinence should be the goal," and that too much "plumbing lesson" too soon could be traumatizing to younger children. As for teens, "what they want is real," he says. The straight dope. "And they need a parent, too, who shapes their values and behaviors to get them safely through adolescence to become a productive adult," and not the kind of parent "who wants to be their best buddy."

Say whoa. This is some serious public health message from a man whose radio show (co-hosted by Adam Carolla, most recently of "The Man Show") features guys asking about three-ways, but Pinsky says that every question about sex is almost always a question about relationships.

Asked what will be different about his TV show vs. his radio show, Pinsky smiles and says, "Well, there's no Adam Carolla now, thank God."

He says he hopes the show will serve as an adult antidote to the twaddle served up by men's and women's magazines.

To wit: He points to a cover of Glamour magazine on the coffee table with its cover tout, "Your Top 15 Sex Questions."

"What the women's magazines teach is that their job is to make men happy," Pinsky says. And the laddie rags? "That women are sexual objects."