Everything They Wanted to Know, and Often Asked

A professor remembers when 'hum-sex' was the hot class on campus.

Courtesy Stanford News Service

A meticulously detailed memoir by an intellectual whose life unfolded in Turkey, Lebanon, Finland and the United States could be a trove for many a scholar of the 20th century. But Stanford alumni coming to Herant Katchadourian's The Way It Turned Out (Pan Stanford Publishing), will head for chapter 9, in which the emeritus professor of psychiatry and human biology recalls teaching "the most heavily subscribed class in the history of the university."

Human Sexuality, soon known as "hum-sex," reached more than 20,000 students between 1968 and 2002. At its peak, one in four undergraduates was watching slides in Mem Aud as Katchadourian lectured.

Katchadourian, 79, writes that he "didn't set myself up as a personal advisor" for these students, but some still sought him out. One of the perennial matters was size. "The penis is not a foot and the vagina is not a shoe," he'd answer, "so stop fretting about it."