Beyond the Birds and the Bees

U-Md. public health professor Robin Sawyer finds a surprising lack of knowledge among students. (By Linda Davidson -- The Washington Post)

Sawyer moves on to contraceptive devices. There's a paradox here, he tells the class. As a group, you perform oral sex and other sexual acts more often than past generations, but you still resist using any device that requires touching your genitals.

"A young woman recently told me she liked the idea of a diaphragm; she just didn't want to have to put her hand down there. I said, 'You think it's like a flying saucer? It's just going to go whoosh and fly up there on its own?'

"The best birth control device is the one you're willing to use."

A young man asks Sawyer about timing intercourse around a woman's menstrual cycle, the so-called rhythm method of birth control. Sawyer resists the urge to ask what decade the young man is living in.

"What do you call the woman who uses 'natural' family planning?" he responds. "Mommy."

Sometimes Sawyer learns from the students. Last semester, he split the class into men and women and encouraged them to ask questions of each other. A young man raised his hand wanting to know, "How many of you fake orgasms?"

Sawyer recalls: "Before I could say anything, 90 percent of the women raised their hands. The men's jaws dropped." The women were asked why.

"Didn't want to hurt his feelings," said one young woman.

"Guys just want to go on and on, and we have things to do," said another.

Sawyer is a sandy-haired, reasonably trim married man with four daughters and a cheeky attitude that students love. He has won virtually every teaching award that the 35,000-student university gives.

Apart from student attire, his lecture hall could have been lifted right out of "Kinsey," the 2004 movie about professor and sexual researcher Alfred Kinsey, who stunned America with his frankness and his findings more than half a century ago -- and provoked the sex-education debate that continues to this day.

All eyes are on Sawyer. Many students appear to be writing down everything he says; he actually stops lecturing a couple of times to persuade them to put down their pens and simply listen.