Dr. Drew Checks In
A hip, cultural warrior speaks of a sane approach to sex.

By Ben Domenech
August 18-19, 2001

r. Drew Pinsky doesn't sound like he's on the front lines of the culture wars. Of course, maybe that's because of what he's usually talking about: dating, drugs, STDs, abuse, addiction, relationships — and above all, sex.

In his 17 years as the co-host of Loveline, a late-night call-in show syndicated to over 70 radio stations nationally, Pinsky has dealt with just about every bizarre sexual question imaginable. By day a medical director at a Pasadena hospital, Pinsky sits down five nights a week — alongside co-host Adam Carolla, a wisecracking former member of the L.A. comedy group The Groundlings — to field dozens of calls from insecure teens and twentysomethings. When Loveline was adapted into an MTV show five years ago, it vaulted "Dr. Drew" to national fame, and transformed the soft-spoken, middle-aged California physician into the sex-ed. spokesman for a generation. He wrote a book with Carolla (The Dr. Drew and Adam Book: A Survival Guide to Life and Love), launched a health-advice website (Drdrew.com), nabbed a USA Weekend column ("Ask Dr. Drew"), and began doing guest spots on all manner of TV shows, from The View to Hardball.

With fewer and fewer teens looking to parents for advice on sex, the "Dr. Drew" phenomenon comes as no surprise: A mature radio voice, offering comfort and sanity, makes for an attractive alternative to parental confrontation. What's surprising, though, is that despite his pop-culture celebrity, Pinsky's views represent an ideology that fits anything but MTV.

Though a supporter of several birth-control and contraceptive methods, Pinsky has championed abstinence as the "best choice for teenagers' emotional and physical health." He emphatically condemns drug abuse, and describes himself as anti-abortion: "I absolutely believe that life begins at conception. That's something that exists with absolute clarity, a line in the sand. There's no one who can argue about the beginning of human life."

In an ABC News profile two years ago, Pinsky and his show were described as the "stealth messengers of abstinence and family values" — a label he wholeheartedly accepts.

"Stealth is the name of the game," says Pinsky. "I remember when we sat down to put together Drdrew.com, I kept telling the staffers: think stealth, not just health. It's been that way all along. . . . You can't just try to scare young people into making the right choice. You have to answer their questions with abject honesty."

Though Pinsky frames the issue in terms of health, not ideology — he worries that if he made blatantly political statements, "they'd jump all over me" — the crux of his message is an avowedly pro-family one.

"It's pretty clear to me, based on anecdotal evidence, that there's a population improving in this country. . . . And then there's everyone else, who continue on this downward spiral — this cycle of abuse, fractured families, and teen pregnancy," says Pinsky. "The biggest danger for children and teens today, without a doubt, is surviving the broken home."

This was Pinsky's message to teen viewers, every week on MTV, for four years. With guest celebrities, audience participation, and juvenile entertainment from Carolla, Loveline's TV format resembled a late-night talk show — albeit one with call-ins that might equally have been heard on the "quiz" section of Howard Stern.

"MTV never really appreciated the stealth message of our show," says Pinsky. "They only appreciated the salacious details. We were the ugly stepchild, and they always wanted to get rid of us. But it was too popular, so they couldn't."

The MTV context could be raunchy, but Pinsky provided a dose of maturity notably absent from the channel's other 23-and-a-half hours of programming. And now, with the TV stint done, Pinsky feels he has more freedom to discuss his beliefs — both on the radio and in public. He recently visited Washington, D.C., to help unveil a study conducted by the Institute for American Values at the behest of the Independent Women's Forum.

Dubbed "Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hoping for Mr. Right — College Women on Dating and Mating Today," the comprehensive national survey found that 83 percent of college women said marriage was one of their "important goals." Another 63 percent said they'd "like to meet [their] future husband in college."

Despite these goals, however, many women — over 40 percent — said they'd experienced a "hook up" (a slang definition that covers everything from kissing to sex) outside of a relationship, and one in ten women reported having done so more than six times. Pinsky also describes himself as an enormous fan of author Wendy Shalit, whose Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue stirred up controversy when it was published in 1999. Shalit blamed the hook-up culture on the failure to properly socialize young men and women: "In the age of the hook-up, young women confess their romantic hopes in hushed tones, as if harboring some terrible secret."

"[The study] completely backs up what I've seen all across the country, on college campuses, at speeches and in the office," said Pinsky. "I see women every day who've gone out and done these sort of things, been free and loose and acted how pop culture tells them to act. They're left unsatisfied, with the painful knowledge that, according to what the culture says, they should be happy — and they aren't happy at all."

Pinsky is unconcerned about the risks of taking such a public stand: By framing the issues in terms of "health," rather than making a moral judgement, his comments could well pass under the radar of the feminist cognoscenti. While Pinsky is hardly an across-the-board conservative — he favors certain forms of the "morning-after" pill — his message of abstinence, responsibility, and a mature attitude toward relationships stands directly opposed to MTV and its pop-culture progeny. Given his stature among the MTV generation, Pinsky's remarks on sex are likely to fire from the ideologues seeking to couch it all in terms of "liberation." Uninterested in debate or in civic conversation, the academics and feminists may find him a ripe target for attack.

Pinsky's advantage, though, lies not in his celebrity, but in the solid nature of his reputation — and his deep understanding of how teens truly think. So long as he continues to defend reason and responsibility against extremism and hysteria, Pinsky can win the argument — and, more importantly, win over the hearts and minds of today's youth.

In any case, Pinsky's opposition to the modern sexual scene is no longer under wraps. As he wrote last year in USA Weekend: "It's clear to me that the generation that came of age in the 1960s had a notion of sexual equality that was poorly thought out. It seems to have been conceived by and for seventeen-year-old boys. Men think, 'This is great!' And all women find from [the current sexual scene] is disillusionment.

"We've been forced to operate under the false assumption that men and women are the same and should behave the same. . . . But people today live in a different world. They've never had to repress their sexuality. They're free with their sexual vocabulary and the range of behaviors they feel comfortable exploring. The problem is, they still don't understand the consequences."