By Tanya Pampalone
Of The Examiner Staff
UC-Berkeley officials recently vowed to keep closer tabs on a sexuality class after students came clean about their after-school activities: strip-club field trips and a front-row view of their instructor's bedroom workout were par for the course.
But back in The City, sex school is always in session.
At the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, more than 250 students have received their master's and doctorate degrees in human sexuality during the past 25 years.
Graduates range from porn-star cult-icon Annie Sprinkle to Betty Dodson, author of the popular masturbation how-to book "Sex for One." These sexual intellectuals are part of the fringe science of sexology and, armed with their institute degrees, are pioneers in the field, daring to go where no conventional school -- not even Berkeley -- has gone before. The school's know-thyself curriculum is based on the notion that one can't help others until one has helped oneself -- so to speak.
Any organization with sex in the title is bound for controversy. But a school with a hot tub on campus, and where students are required to watch 100 hours of pornography as part of the course work, is apt to get more than its share.
And it has. The institute has been investigated 137 times since it opened in 1976 by various government agencies and private organizations looking for something behind the sexual education and its extensive porn library. So far, no one has found anything that is not in the syllabus.
Maybe it is because all they teach is sex here -- and they are not fooling around.
It is a typical afternoon at the campus of carnal knowledge, housed in a nondescript blue and gray building on Franklin Street.
The head librarian reviews a porn video, while interns pack lecture tapes for students who study through their distance-learning programs around the world.
Dissertations in conservative gold-lettered, mahogany-brown bindings line the bookcases in the first-floor reading room, where "Anal Eroticism in Women" sits alongside "Understanding Incest and Sex in China." On the second floor, crowded rooms are stuffed with volumes of sex journals, stacks of graphic magazines, piles of anatomy textbooks and shelves overflowing with practically every porn film ever made.
In the bright-orange lecture hall with brown shag carpet, oversized pillows fill the space that transports students back to the 1970s. This is the room where many of the 104 students enrolled for a master's, doctorate or certificate in sexuality will get their education lying down.
For $4,500 a trimester, porn stars and prostitutes will learn all the sex they ever wanted to know, alongside therapists and social workers. Much of their lecture time will be consumed through videos of past speakers, but they will congregate on campus three times a year for an intensive three-week-long lecture series. Degrees can take anywhere from two to 10 years to complete.
One of the first lecture series students encounter is the SAR, or sexual attitude restructuring, course, the cornerstone of the institute's program.
For seven straight days, students will witness every type of sex act imaginable in what they call their "F----O-Rama," and talk to various sexual professionals, who include a dominatrix or a clinical sexologist.
They will study everything from anatomy and HIV/AIDS prevention to the how and why of bestiality and the finer points of masturbation. They will learn about golden showers, how to help disabled people have a fulfilling sex life, and the historical significance of sexual artifacts from around the world.
The students will watch a requisite 100 hours of porn. And for every film they see, they will write an abstract and discuss how the film made them feel.
Mike Yurchisin has already seen loads of porn. Someday he hopes to make some of his own. In addition to his studies at the institute, he is the general manager of one of the largest porn shops in The City.
The 30-year-old says sexology is his calling and he can remember wanting to study sex since he was a teenager. He says the institute is a personal growth and charm school all in one.
It is the personal growth -- and the sex-soaked studies -- that draw students such as Yurchisin to the program. It is an integral part of the curriculum and part of the reason it has attracted a loyal following.
"You can't be a properly trained sex professional without having come to grips with your own personal sexual script," says Howard Ruppel, the institute's chancellor and academic dean.
Getting students in touch with their own sexual desires -- or repulsions -- is only one focal point that sets the institute apart from traditional academia.
There is also the unconventional classroom methodology, such as students stripping off their clothing to examine their body parts, and the ability to specialize in anything sex related, from bondage practices in rural Kansas to vibrator use among transsexuals.
It's exactly those types of practices that have made other academics call the school Porno U.
Indiana University and San Francisco State University offer degrees in human sexuality. Their programs are far more cognitive and far less controversial.
That the institute is accredited only at a state level, but not at a national level like other major universities, has been another hindrance to respectability.
"There are a number of people who come from the institute who are well-regarded. But it's like comparing a history degree from Princeton to a history degree from a rural community college," says Diane DiMauro, head of the sexuality fellowship program for the Social Science Research Council, a nonprofit group that promotes research through its various programs.
"Obviously, it's just not going to be the same."
Still, there are benefits to not being tied to mainstream universities. After all, there is no board of regents to meddle in school affairs and possibly shut them down.
"No school wants something like (Berkeley) to happen and have the press descend on them in a scandal," says Carol Queen, an institute graduate and a sexologist for Good Vibrations, The City's famous sex-toy store for women. "Ted doesn't give a shit."
"Ted" would be the Rev. Ted McIlvenna, a man of the cloth who discovered he was more taken with latex.
The 70-year-old retired United Methodist minister has eight grandchildren, two children and has been married to the same woman for 46 years. His wife, son and daughter all work at the school.
McIlvenna is the type of guy who can tell you how to get in touch with your spiritual side as well as discuss the art of having better orgasms.
"I was not really called to the ministry," McIlvenna says. "I didn't wear 'Win with Jesus' buttons. I didn't believe a bunch of the religious stuff. I was interested in the concept of life and having it more abundantly."
For McIlvenna, having it more abundantly became the thrust of his teachings.
He merged spirituality with sexuality in the late '60s when he began working with San Francisco's homosexual youth through the Methodist church. He soon realized he wasn't going to understand homosexuality without first understanding sexuality.
He started the National Sex Forum with a group of academics. McIlvenna drifted further and further from conventional religious practices and opened the institute in the mid-70s.
In 1980, the government went after his homemade films -- 163 of them to date. Now nearly ancient relics of the '70s, these graphic sex films caused a controversy that landed him on the talk show "Donohue" and on the pages of the New York Times.
Countless agencies, conservative groups and journalists from around the world have scrutinized McIlvenna and his institute.
"They all expect to find something," McIlvenna says, shaking his head. "They expect me to be a fake minister, a defrocked priest. But there isn't anything here."
He barely opens his eyes when he speaks. He is a man who has seen plenty.
One page from his book "Meditations on the Gift of Sexuality," written in the early days of the institute, illustrates just how he views things.
Religious passages sit above graphic pictures of men and women engaging in various sexual activities. There is even a photo of several people engaging in group sex, with the young reverend looking lovingly over his disciples.
"Those folks have gone way off the deep end," says Judith Reisman, longtime sexology critic and author of "Kinsey, Sex and Fraud."
Reisman says the institute is downright dangerous and she echoes the mantra of anti-porn protesters -- mainly that the institute contributes to child sexual abuse. She sees no difference between the institute, the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, or even the well-respected Sexual Information and Education Council of the United States.
"Sex is not math," she says. "These people are not scientists. There are too many personal agendas going on for them to address the issues."
But Ruppel says true sexology is all about personal agendas.
He joined the institute's staff last year, after teaching human sexuality for 26 years at the University of Iowa. Coming from a traditional academic environment, he was skeptical of the institute's experimental approach.
But he is a true believer now. He says understanding what rarely gets discussed outside episodes of "Sex and the City" is crucial to the field.
"If someone has a secret desire to get tied up or they want to transition to another sex, someone has got to know how to talk with them," Ruppel says.
Most people currently go to their doctor or psychiatrist for sexual advice, though sexuality experts say most of them get less than 10 hours of training in sexuality in school.
"You'd think doctors would be well-versed," says DiMauro, "but they get bits and snips of it. Some will graduate from school without ever having a human-sexuality course."
Those who currently work in sexology come from a variety of disciplines -- they are doctors, anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists. But very few who specialize in sex -- such as sex educators, clinical sex therapists or self-proclaimed "sexperts" who write books or magazine columns -- get the kind of sex-only training the institute offers.
That is the sort of thing that makes McIlvenna really mad.
It's the curse of the field, he says, that there are a bunch of people walking around calling themselves experts on sex when they haven't really studied the material.
"There are a bunch of liars out there calling themselves experts!" he declares in disgust, praying for the day his sexual sermon is heard around the world.
"Ignorance about sex is not bliss," he says. "It's being stupid."
E-mail Tanya Pampalone at [email protected]
� 1997
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