http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/8062

As part of its "Brilliant Peoples" series, Science Blog commissioned author and journalist Luke Ford to interview Dr. Julia R. Heiman, author of Becoming Orgasmic: A Sexual and Personal Growth Program for Women and the sixth director of The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, Bloomington. Below is a transcript of their wide-ranging discussion, which touches on subjects from the sexuality of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegone characters to why we still don't understand prison rape.

I'm proud of you Luke. Great job. I have but one, small complaint with the interview, and that is you didn't start it off with "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up". I felt it could have taken the interview up a notch.

Seriously though, nice score. I especially liked this segment:

Science Blog: "I remember in the 1980s it became a hip thing to say that AIDS does not discriminate, even though the statistics we had for, let's say the United States, showed that AIDS did discriminate."

Dr. Heiman: "Discriminate in terms of gender or sexual orientation?"

Science Blog: "Both. The people most likely to get AIDS are males who engage in male-to-male homosexual [anal] intercourse. Then IV drug users. Then women are more likely to catch it from men than the other way round. That's an example of political correctness flying in the face of facts. I'm curious how often you see PC overwhelm the research?"

Dr. Heiman: "It's too big a question. I don't know. It certainly happens some of the time. It happens in how people talk about their work.

"Coming back to your premise, worldwide, this is a heterosexual disease. Worldwide is where most people are dying. It's women in Africa. It's heterosexual transmission. That's not to say that people in this country can't say, 'It's just these behaviors. It is just those bad people doing it.' If you are in sex research, you see the ghastly toll that this disease has worldwide because you're just connected worldwide. Therefore, when the United States tries to reduce it to its own tiny issue about it discriminating towards men having sex with men, or drug users, therefore, these are just certain elements in our society, so why should we worry about it?

If you want to be ethnocentric about it, and certain people thinking about funding might be, it is increasingly difficult for us to separate ourselves from the rest of the world. When you have 20% of some African countries being wiped out, that is not being wiped out from same-sex transmission, that may be where yes, you are right in a way, when you say you are just being PC about the facts, what facts are people considering? It doesn't make sense.

"Many sex researchers are not talking to any media at all. Because they feel that they can't do it without exposing themselves to intense scrutiny and being harassed. That has happened.

I wanted to start off the interview that way, but did not out of fear she'd think it was weird. So I used some bland questions to make her feel comfortable.