A Northwestern University human sexuality professor who made headlines after he hosted an unconventionally risqué display as part of a lecture series has given the discipline of human sexuality and the construct of academic freedom a bad name, according to his counterpart at this university, Robin Sawyer.
Sawyer, who has taught human sexuality classes at this university for 27 years, said professor John Michael Bailey pushed the limits when he turned an optional after-class lecture on fetishes into a live sexual display where a woman had an orgasm in front of an assembly of about 100 students after being stimulated by a sex toy known as a “F— saw.”
“In my profession we are a little bit different than other subjects,” Sawyer said. “A lot of other people already view human sexuality as an aberrant discipline taught by perverts and freaks and then something like this happens and people are like ‘Well, see.'”
Parents and Northwestern administrators have chastised Bailey for approving of the display, which many have called inappropriate.
“There is a real sort of thin line between academic freedom and being able to do kind of what you want, but from an education perspective I don’t really see the purpose of what he did,” said Sawyer, who this semester instructs about 200 students in HLTH377: Human Sexuality.
“OK, there is a women having an orgasm in front of 100 people, well, what does that tell us? What’s the educational piece of that?”
While students in Sawyer’s classes do have the opportunity to observe women having orgasms, the presentation of such material is worlds apart from Bailey’s method, Sawyer said.
Rather than live demonstrations, students in Sawyer’s class get clinical, documentary-like material, known as sexual response videos, which are filmed in a laboratory and deal primarily with the physiological responses of the body during sexual stimulation.
Sawyer noted there have never been any complaints on the material he shows in class.
“It’s much more scientific. It’s certainly not porn,” he said. “And it’s definitely not sexy.”
Although Sawyer said having a live demonstration would be beyond his comfort zone, some students in his class said otherwise.
“I’d be all for it,” senior economics major Dmitiry Advolodkin said. “It’s interesting.”
“It wouldn’t bother me,” added Brett Harman, a senior kinesiology major, who said he would probably be more shocked than anything. “It’s not something you expect to see in a classroom setting.”
And that seemed to be the basis for Bailey’s decision to allow the exposition in the first place.
Northwestern spokesman Al Cubbage released a statement that read: “Northwestern University faculty members engage in teaching and research on a wide variety of topics, some of them controversial and at the leading edge of their respective disciplines. The university supports the efforts of its faculty to further the advancement of knowledge.”
Sawyer said it’s not necessary to see something to learn about it.
“I don’t honestly think that most professors at universities would put that in their lesson plan: At the end of the day a woman will leap up on stage, drop her pants and orgasm,” he said.
Elyse Geibel, a senior biology and psychology major in Sawyer’s class, agreed, noting a live sexual demonstration would be too much.
“I feel like that goes too far,” she said. “It’s not educational anymore. It would be forcing values and opinions on the students.”
Sawyer said the purpose of a human sexuality class should be to make students comfortable — not to shock them.
“I use a lot of humor in the class because I think a lot of people are nervous about it, but if you can laugh about it, it makes learning a lot easier,” said Sawyer. “The atmosphere in the class is such that students feel free to pretty much ask anything.”
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