Popular Class at CSUN : Sexuality Course--Where Textbooks, Taboos Meet

Showing a movie of male and female genitals during orgasm is a sure way to wake up sleepy students at a morning class.

As California State University, Northridge, human sexuality instructor James Elias has discovered, it’s also a quick way to bring an auditorium filled with more than 200 whispering undergraduates to absolute silence.

“You don’t see a lot of heads nodding or chattering going on when the films are on,” he said.

Elias is one of five instructors who team-teach Human Sexuality 230, which in recent years has consistently been the first class to fill up at the 28,000-student Northridge campus. Each semester, one student is turned away for each of the 240 who successfully register for the class.

No Subject Taboo

Part of the lure is that no sexual subject is taboo. While it covers many of the same topics as high school sex-education classes, the course is to high school sex classes what the novels of James Joyce are to primary-school readers.

Besides the University of Copenhagen film of a male and female experiencing orgasms, there are guest lectures by homosexual men and women, slides and films of various positions of sexual intercourse and lectures on sadism, masochism and bondage.

There is also a textbook, authored by famed sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson, which informs students that the “percentage of women who are orgasmic during premarital intercourse has been increasing” and also provides detailed information about what men and women find stimulating or irritating during sex.

Not the sort of stuff that causes eyelids to grow heavy.

In 1978, CSUN became the first college in the nation to offer an undergraduate minor in human sexuality, although many colleges offer individual courses on sexuality, said sociology Prof. Veronica Elias, who founded the Northridge program.

Kinsey Graduates

Like her husband, James, Veronica Elias is a graduate of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, which pioneered in the field but is open only to graduate students.

In the past seven years, nine other universities, including UCLA, have launched graduate programs, said Veronica Elias, who is secretary of the National Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, the academic group that accredits such programs.

But only San Francisco State University has joined CSUN in offering enough sexuality courses to grant a minor in the subject to undergraduates.

Along with colleagues throughout the nation, the CSUN sexuality faculty was shaken three years ago when California State University, Long Beach, Prof. Barry Singer, who taught a course entitled Psychology of Sex, was suspended and then forced to resign following news reports that he had urged students to engage in homosexual experimentation, group sex and extramarital sex for extra credit.

Sex Parties

Singer, a tenured professor, also admitted that he had been romantically involved with at least three students and had attended parties given by his students at which nudity and sexual activity occurred.

The incidents came to light when a student complained to the Cal State Long Beach administration.

“The Singer affair hurt us deeply,” Veronica Elias said. “The public was justifiably very concerned by such improper actions. There were reverberations throughout the nation among those teaching sexuality courses.”

She insisted that no Northridge faculty member could behave as Singer did “because we run a very tight ship here.” She said no student, parent or community group has ever complained about the CSUN program.

Sex Research Center

In addition to the program offering a minor in human sexuality, CSUN also has the Center of Sex Research, an organization that provides official sanction to faculty members doing research on sexual topics.

Although the academic program and the research center are operated separately, most such research is conducted by those who teach sexuality courses.

In recent years, Northridge faculty members have conducted research and published papers on the prevalance of homosexuality among male athletes, the motives of surrogate mothers, images of the human body conveyed by various religions, female attitudes toward male nudity and the effects of sexual dysfunction on family life.

Most students enrolled in the 17 human sexuality courses offered at Northridge--including Eroticism in Literature, Sociology of Homosexuality and Sexual Dysfunction--plan to become professional therapists or are majoring in related fields such as anthropology or psychology.

Barometer of Attitudes

Only the basic course, which gives students three units of credit, draws from the student population at large. Although the course is already popular, James Elias estimated that 1,000 students a semester would take the course if the university were to designate it as fulfilling a general education requirement, as do most lower-level courses of its type.

Because the class includes a cross-section of students, it provides instructors with a barometer for measuring student attitudes toward sex and relationships.

James Elias, who has taught sexuality courses for nearly a decade, recalls that mid-1970s students were representative of the “me generation, and were far more interested in human plumbing, in what yields the greatest sexual pleasure, than they were in relationships.”

But more recently, there has been a “sharp increase in interest in intimacy and what makes some relationships work and others fail,” he said.

Veronica Elias said she has noticed that many students are “badly shaken by the divorce of their parents or close family friends,” a factor she views as contributing to the renewed interest in romantic relationships.

Wave of Conservatism

In five years of team-teaching the basic sexuality course, professors Roger N. Moss and Andrew Starrett have noticed a more recent ebb and flow in student attitudes toward sex.

In 1980, they said, students retained many of the liberal attitudes toward sex that had been predominant in the 1970s.

But a wave of conservatism swept the Northridge student body soon after President Reagan took office.

Students exhibited renewed interest in virginity and monogamy and hostility toward gay and lesbian life styles.

The conservative attitude manifests itself each semester when the class is addressed by a panel of gay and lesbian activists, who give a candid talk about homosexual life styles and sexual practices.

“Instead of asking the gays questions,” Moss said, “they would more likely make a statement about how the gay life style was not for them, or how they felt it was against God’s will.”

Back to ‘Middle Ground’

The conservative trend peaked in 1982, Starrett said, and student attitudes in 1985 have “pretty much returned to the middle ground where they were in 1980.”

If the campus grapevine hasn’t informed students in advance of the explicit nature of the course, an agreement that must be signed by all who enroll puts them on notice that there will be films and reading materials “which are explicit, and which deal openly with sexuality.”

Starrett said that, in recent years, he has noticed a decrease in the number of students who appear to have enrolled in the class “out of curiosity and a desire for titillation.”

If titillation was the lure for students taking the class this fall, they were loathe to admit it in interviews last week following the screening of the clinical Danish film showing the stages of orgasm, in which the camera stayed for about 30 minutes on genital areas as first a woman and then a man masturbated to orgasm.

In the case of the woman, the camera filmed the inside of the vagina during orgasm--the only film of its kind available in the world, James Elias said.

Not Shocked

Referring to the orgasm film, Kym Irons, a sophomore biology major, said matter-of-factly, “None of this is very shocking.”

Her friend and classmate, Laura Sayre, a junior psychology major, added that “things such as this can be explored more openly now that many taboos regarding sex are gone. I think that’s good.”

Brad Rubin, a junior business major, gave what proved to be a typical explanation for taking the class: “It seemed like a very interesting course. I had friends who took it, and they said there was lots to learn from the course, and that’s pretty much the way I have found it.”

Won’t Take Stand

To opponents of sex education, who contend that teaching sexuality apart from teaching moral sanctions against homosexuality and extramarital sex has the effect of encouraging promiscuity, James Elias replied that instructors “are careful not to take a stand on anything, whether it’s abortion or gay sex or sex outside marriage.