Chatting up Playboy's sexpert

By Julia Allison | Special to amNewYork

January 22, 2007

Since 1960, Playboy's Advisor column has promised to answer "all reasonable questions from fashion, food and drink, stereo and sports cars to dating dilemmas, taste and etiquette." However, this is Playboy, and despite the magazine's dogged insistence that "a person interested only in sex isn't very interesting," most of their readers are very interested in sex indeed.

Unsurprisingly, at least 60% of the Advisor questions center on relations between men and women from orgasms to affairs, STDs to swingers, getting hitched to rejoining single life after divorce.

Does that make Chip Rowe, the official Advisor for the past 12 years, an omniscient sexual guru? After all, he's read and answered more than 100,000 questions (about 700 a month) since he nabbed the job in 1994. If being able to intelligently respond to that many queries doesn't make one a sexpert, I'm not sure what does.

Not so much, Rowe insists. He's a journalist -- "not a doctor or academic" -- and as such doesn't pretend to know everything.

"My skill is that of a perverted reference librarian," he explains in the introduction to his book, 'Dear Playboy Advisor.'

That may be true, but when I interviewed the loquacious and affable Rowe last week, it was readily apparent that he'd picked up a fair amount of wisdom (not to mention sex tips) along the way. "I've got it all figured out," he laughed, "but only because once you have thousands of case studies, you start to see themes developing."

Like what?, I wanted to know. "It's like I'm a priest!" he laughs, "They want to know they won't be judged." Rowe explained that by far the most common question is "Am I normal?" (followed closely by "does she want me?"). The answers, almost inevitably, are 'yes' and for the parenthetical, 'probably not.'

At least in the realm of sex and dating, it seems that we desperately long to be in the middle of the bell curve (although I'm sure no one would mind if they were exceptionally attractive or possessed an unusual prowess in bed). Concerned that our dating dilemmas and sexual fantasies confirm strange atypical tendencies, we reach out for reassurance that we're not alone.

Half amateur psychologist, half menschy big brother, Rowe offers that reassurance with his clever and often hysterical responses. Alternating between earnest and snarky isn't particularly easy, especially when reader queries range from whether a woman should be jealous over her boyfriend's exes, to which cities are best for singles to why so many women in porn wear shoes.

For the first, Rowe wisely answered, "You can't have a guy's past -- only his present and, if you're lucky, his future." For the second, he actually conducted a survey to ranks towns with the most available women (coming in first place -- shock! New York). And for the last, he wrote, "Would you walk around barefoot on a porn set?"

Now that's good advice.

Email Julia@JuliaAllison.com