For students looking to choose their spring classes, there is a veritable playground of subject material -- from sciences to mathematics to literature.
But for College alumna Vanessa Bayer, there was one subject she had yet to study at Penn -- sex. So last spring, Bayer enrolled in Nursing 503 -- "Contemporary Issues in Human Sexuality."
To Bayer's friends, her "sex class" was a running joke.
"Whenever you say to your friends, 'I have to study for sex class,' they say, 'What -- like do you have to have sex?'" Bayer says.
Yet according to the course's instructors, being able to understand different sexual attitudes and messages is serious business, and in today's sex-saturated world, the need for such education is rapidly growing.
"We're living in a culture where you're completely bombarded with sexual information, but that doesn't mean you recognize where it's coming from and can process it in some way," Nursing professor Kathy Brown says.
Brown teaches Nursing 503 with Susan Villari, director of the Office of Health Education and Stephen McCann, OHE's office and wellness coordinator.
The popular course was revamped and expanded from its nursing roots with the help of OHE three years ago and features unorthodox guest speakers, such as a sex therapist, a woman employed as an escort and a member of the local fetish community.
"He's an attorney by day," Villari says.
The class also incorporates a number of current pop culture icons, like Sex and the City and The Simpsons.
Before the course was updated, it existed primarily to teach nursing graduate students how to handle sexual issues with patients.
But branching out to cultural issues of sexuality seemed timely and logical.
"It's amazing how you can apply sexuality to a wide number of professions," Villari says.
And according to McCann, the team effort of teaching is one of the class' biggest benefits.
"We come from very different backgrounds, so between [all] of us, we have everything covered," McCann says.
"We can challenge the students' views and show them that there's not one right answer."
By discussing difficult issues in class, the instructors hope to generate students' opinions on topics they might not otherwise have considered -- including medical testing on fetuses.
"It forces students to deal with issues they might not have developed an opinion on yet," Villari says.
There is another class at Penn that teaches human sexuality -- only in an entirely different capacity. It is entitled "Human Sexuality: An Evolutionary Approach" and differs in subject matter from the Nursing course.
"It's different because the foundations of my approach are in biology and evolution," says Robert Kurzban, who teaches the class.
Kurzban focuses on the "lifespan of sexuality" from a combined biological and emotional perspective and explores such concepts as Darwinism, sexual selection and natural selection, using texts like Why Is Sex Fun?: The Evolution of Human Sexuality to supplement lectures.
"This is not the course for the person who wants to explore highly charged issues about sexuality, though of course that's very relevant too," Kurzban said.
"But my course is a science course."
The course will be offered Tuesdays and Thursdays in the spring from 9 to 10:30 a.m.
"Contemporary Issues in Human Sexuality" will be offered Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3 to 4:30 p.m. in the spring, and more information is available on OHE's Web site.
