Sex Ed

One of the frustrating parts of this rotation so far is the 14 hours of lecture per week. It's the end of the year and my tolerance for bs is at an all-time low. Sitting in a dim lecture hall to listen to crappy "teaching" is an abuse of my time, imho. Add to that my unrewarding assignment to the forensics unit of the psych hospital (more about this later), and my slipslide into senioritis, and I feel kinda cranky.

The majority of the lectures are given by an old foreign psychiatrist who is totally obsessed with sex. I believe he trained during a time when psychoanalysis held sway, so just like Freud everything comes back to sex. Yesterday, we had two hours of lecture on "Human Sexuality", which should be a useful topic to young doctors-to-be. If he had followed the outlines on his powerpoint slides, we would have thoroughly discussed sexual anatomy, the usual "desire-excitement-orgasm-resolution" curve theory, disorders of the above, gender identity, etc.

All of the above topics were mentioned, but in a very hasty way. The majority of the two hours was spent in tedious anecdotes of sex and really thorough descriptions of his favorite (there are hundreds more--we just learned the ones he likes) disgusting paraphilias, including vomerophilia, klismaphilia, coprophilia, etc. (Look them up--I dare you!) We heard the story of the famous Mexican actor "who advertises the leetle pump" for the fourth time. We heard a story about Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh--supposedly he complained that there was something wrong with her because she was multi-orgasmic--she must be a nymphomaniac! (Although she did have bipolar disorder--she may have been hypersexual while manic, in which case Olivier was actually right). We heard tales of our fearless instructor traveling through Amsterdam to see the prostitutes--"only to see, I don't know how much they cost, of course" and various brothels which cater to certain of the above-mentioned paraphilias.

Instead of really discussing gender identity disorder, he told us about a medical student who refused to work with a post-op transsexual. He wanted to be sure that we all knew what the proper term for a failed resolution phase in the testicles was. He told us about how beautiful it is to see naked people on a nude beach in France--"but of course, France has the highest level of AIDS in Europe."

Basically, instead of a serious lecture on any of these subjects, we listened to a bunch of bizarre, unrelated stories, some of which were entertaining, none of which were educational. Also, they would have been more entertaining if we hadn't had the exact same lecturer with the exact same stories last year in Behavioral Science. Thus, I'd already heard the hilarious story of the coprophilia crystal commode in Amsterdam--not so shocking the second time.

I'm at the point now where I feel like, if I'm not learning anything, I should just go home and watch TV. My time is valuable, dammit! I just wish I wasn't the only person who seemed to think so.