Thousands of questions are asked worldwide of sex advice
columnists every month. In the US alone, Chip Rowe, who writes
the Advisor column in Playboy, fields some 500 a month. He and
two colleagues answer every one of them and select about a
dozen for publication in the magazine and on the Playboy
Advisor Web site. San Francsico Sexologist and authority
Sandor Gardos receives 2,500 questions a week as the sex
advice columnist for Thriveonline/Oxygen. That's 10,000 a
month.
"Answering sex questions is a dirty job,"
Playboy's Rowe says, "but someone has to do it."
Louanne Weston, a sex therapist in Fair Oaks, California, gets
1,500 questions a month as the Sex Matters advice columnist
for OnHealth.com (recently acquired by WebMD) "Sometimes
I feel like I'm buried under an avalanche," Weston sighs.
"I open my e-mail and I typically have 2,000 to 3,000
messages waiting. I often wonder if anyone out there knows how
to have good sex. Sometimes I feel crushed under the weight of
people's ignorance and misery."
"We live in a culture obsessed with sex," says
San Francisco sex authority Sandor Gardos, "but basic
sexuality information often gets lost. "I feel so sorry
for so many of the people who write me," says Isadora
Alman, a San Francisco sex therapist and, since 1984, author
of the Ask Isadora sex advice column, which runs in 16
alternative weeklies around the country. Alman also operates
the online Sexuality Forum. "It's so sad when people feel
the only place they can turn to is a sex advice column, and
it's sadder still because I can't answer most questions that
get submitted. There are way too many, and I can only publish
a few."
The Web has done something for sex advice columnists too,
it's changed the kinds of questions they get: "Questions
that come in by e-mail tend to be more intelligent, more
literate," says Rowe, who launched PlayboyAdvisor in
1997. The Web site now accounts for two thirds of the letters
he receives. "Most people with computers and Web access
have a certain level of education, even if they don't know
much about sex."
USA syndicated sex columnist Isadora Alman agrees: "I
get more intelligent questions on the Web site." Her site
is unique in that she's not the sole expert. She invites site
visitors to answer questions as well as ask them, in part to
provide perspectives other than hers, and in part to have her
site function as a kind of sexuality salon, an ongoing
discussion group.
She has found her approach something of an antidote to one
occupational hazard of writing a sex advice column, the
feeling that the whole world is sexually out to lunch.
"Many people write in wonderful answers," she says.
And, in fact, Alman's latest book, "Doing It: Real People
Having Really Good Sex," is a compilation of visitors'
tips and experiences.
For Alman, whose readers span a broad range of age and
sexual experience, S/M and B&D have replaced previous
sexual practices considered "edgy."
"Twenty-five years ago, it was oral sex," she
explains. "Ten years ago, it was anal. Now it's S/M and
B&D." But Rowe's Playboy readers tend to be under 30,
and despite Playboy's anything-goes image, they're generally
not that sexually adventurous. "Based on the letters I
receive," Rowe says, "I'd say anal is still on the
edge for most of our readers."
You'd expect people who write to sex columnists to have
sexual questions and problems. They're a self-selected group.
People who don't have sexual issues don't write. But a
staggeringly large number of people do write. And the
questions they ask, suggest that 30 years after the so-called
sexual revolution, that people are no better informed about
sex and no happier in bed than their parents or grandparents
were.
Doc Hunny & SalonCom April 2001
