Dr. Drew Gets Phillial

Dr. Drew Pinsky is mad. About the Discovery Channel, no less.

We're sitting with him - and sex journalists from around the country - in the penthouse of the W Hotel in New York City, where he's hosting a conversation with us about anything and everything, from sex in America to STD's, from his stint on Loveline to his new radio partnership with the toothy Man Show staple, Adam Carolla. And he's pissed.

"How many of you guys have been censored?" He's an intelligent man - he cites medical textbooks and NIMH as readily as one would spout commercial jingles and sports scores - yet he knows how to talk with young'uns without being condescending.

A show of hands rise. "I wasn't allowed to write about orgasms." "I wasn't allowed to defend gay rights." "I wasn't allowed to talk about vibrators."

"Well, I have a story for you." He claps his fingers, unclasps them. "I'm not allowed to say the word "sex" on Discovery Health."

He goes on to explain that the special he filmed gave him a list of no-no words pre-production: "sex" has become "intercourse," "breast cancer" the acronym "BC". "Hell no" has been sanitized into "heck no." We can't help but wonder if the Bloodhound Gang now regrets crooning about "doing it like we do" on the Discovery Channel.

The room laughs about it - it's a familiar refrain among sex journalists that a three-way tension exists between the author, the audience, and the advertisers. We're all worried about what we can write, what we can say - what we can think. But enough about that. We want to know the good stuff.

"What is the biggest fallacy in porn movies?"

"The biggest fallacy? Let's talk about the orgasm gap. What the porn industry doesn't understand - or doesn't choose to portray - is that women are genetically programmed to orgasm in different ways - and no amount of nurture is going to overcome that. Women - and men - are getting an unrealistic expectation about the orgasm from porn movies."

"What different ways?"

"Here's the breakdown - about 60% of women can't come from intercourse alone. 20% can come from intercourse occasionally, but need other stimulation, while a final 20% can almost always come from intercourse. And of those women, 5-10% are capable of multiple orgasms. Those women actually don't like oral sex - it's too much for them. Too much stimulus."

Our group is silent, processing the information. He laughs, trying to break the tension. "Here's a fact for you," he says, addressing a group of mostly women. "Functional MRI scans of sexually aroused males show that most men just need a visual stimulus - anything from pure porn to a picture of a woman in a bikini - to get aroused. Women have that same arousal trigger, and a similar response. But you know what triggers that erotic response? Intimate conversation."

Oh. That explains a lot. The meaning of candlelight dinners - revealed!

Herr Doctor was conservative without being preachy - "I do wish that more people your age dated," he said, noting that he has observed the rise of the hook-up culture relatively recently - yet can juxtapose "cunt" with "the scientific observation of female receptivity" with relative gusto. We learned that porn addiction is on the rise, while the age of puberty's onset has fallen (but not menarche - that was rather unfortunately misquoted by no less a publication than Time). We questioned the empowerment - or lack of - of stripping classes and Girls Gone Wild. We dissected "lesbian bed death" and The Education of Shelby Knox. But most importantly, we talked about censorship.

"I can't talk about breast cancer to an audience old enough to be your parents," Dr. Drew lamented. We remembered watching his straight-guy banter with Adam on Loveline and thought, a lot has changed in the last ten years. "I don't know what I'm going to do. You know what? I am just... I get more scared of this, every day. I feel myself shutting out the conservative influence. It just scares me."

We at Phillial don't care how you voted (except if it was for a man whose surname suggests the, er, after-effects of anal sex). But we do care that you care - about us, about sex, and about censorship in our culture. Paper bags on nudie mags is one thing - censoring a medical professional from telling us about the orgasm gap and risk factors for breast and cervical cancer is another. We at Phillial like to think that we're somewhere in between. And we hope you stay sex-positive.