By Carolyn Plocher
Culture & Media Institute
September 15, 2009

Three days before the Sept. 14 premier of Dr. Mehmet Oz’s newly syndicated talk show, he told “Good Morning America’s” Diane Sawyer, “. . .if I had to say the one question that I get asked more than any other – it’s not obesity – it’s the fact that people aren’t having intimate  relations with each other … “ America, he warned, had a  “big problem” and was in a “sexual famine.” That’s why he chose to kick off his new show with “The Top 4 Erogenous Zones Revealed.”

Oz, a cardiothoracic surgeon, has been the health expert on the “Oprah Winfrey Show” for the past five years. Like Winfrey’s previous protégé, Dr. Phil, Oz left “Oprah” to start his own program. The syndicated daily talk show airs on a variety of channels at a variety of times, but many of its time slots are prime after-school hours. In Washington, D.C., for example, it’s on CBS at 3:00 pm – a time when children are most likely to be home alone.

That’s why the show’s No. 1 rule, “There’s No Topic That’s Off Limits", is troubling. Oz quickly proved it at the beginning of his first show by announcing, “Today, we're talking sex. I’m excited because for the first time, using cutting edge animation, we can go inside the female body and see what happens during an orgasm.” The “animation” had outline images of the penis, the vagina, as well as the breasts, and it even showed men and women lying on top of each other as scientists studied computer screens that depicted the participants’ sexual arousal.

What followed was a graphic sex-ed lecture in which he detailed the process of female arousal and male and female orgasms. Oz then introduced a game in which a male and a female from the audience were brought to the front and asked to identify the four most erogenous areas of the opposite sex using magnets on body diagrams. He corrected the participants and went into detailed explanations, such as the location of the G Spot, again explaining in graphic detail.

Oz then brought on Dr. Laura Berman, “a friend, one of the country’s leading sex therapists.” She discussed “the foreplay map”, which is a front and back silhouette of a person, allowing an individual to number their erogenous zones and then giving it to their sexual partner. Dr. Berman also encouraged masturbation, saying, “If you don’t have a partner, you can make love with the person you love most: yourself. And that way you stay in-tune with your body, you stay in-tune with how it’s working, you keep in-tune with your sexual response.”

By the looks of Oz’s Web site, it doesn’t appear that the sexual focus of his show will be changing any time soon. “The 411 on Vaginas” is a video posted on his website; a six-minute excerpt from his show, it detailed the vagina’s physical components. He even called down an “assistant” from the audience and asked her to touch a look-alike replica of a vagina in order to describe how it feels.