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)

The students will ask or say anything. Frequently they do both.

"Does anal sex cause AIDS?" one young woman recently inquired. "Because my boyfriend wants to have anal sex, and I don't know whether I should let him."

One would think that today's undergraduates might know more. The grade point average of entering students has improved considerably since Sawyer started teaching. "I get a higher intellectual level now," Sawyer says.

But students don't know much more about sex than their parents did, he says. They're somewhat better at preventing pregnancy but continue to acquire life-threatening infections at an alarming rate. He blames this on lousy sex education in the lower grades.

At the beginning of this school year, he asked his class how many had had sex education in middle school or high school. Virtually all listeners raised their hands.

Then he asked how many had had sex ed for at least a semester. Three-quarters of the hands went down. How many had been taught by a certified health professional? A bunch of other hands went down, leaving about five students out of the 200 who had had, in his view, adequate preparation for sexual activity.

Sexuality is a complex psycho-social behavior, he says in an interview, and it takes more than six weeks of lectures by a football coach to understand. Current efforts by political conservatives restricting sex education in the public schools to abstinence-only programs is making a bad situation worse. "There is no scientific evidence showing that dogma works," he says.

Sawyer's ire over political agendas is not confined to the political right. The left, he says, has made it more difficult for his male students to talk about their attitudes toward women. Fearful of being politically incorrect, they're afraid to say, for example, that in certain instances of sexual assault, they believe the women in question bear some responsibility for what happened.

"He's really up-to-date," says student Megan Lhotsky, "and he knows what young people are interested in."

Classmate Matthew Liebman provides an example. He says Sawyer asked him to start a recent class discussion on sexual communication.

"So I asked the girls, 'When a young man comes up to you at a bar and starts dancing, it's natural for his body to, uh, wake up. Is that a compliment or an insult? Do you run away?' "

One thinks of the old line attributed to Mae West, who reached her peak as movie star and scriptwriter in the 1930s: "Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?"

Some questions keep getting asked, generation after generation. Sawyer plans to keep answering them.