Dr. Drew Pinsky waited in a small room in the University Union on Thursday before his 7:30 p.m. discussion. He took pictures with UNIQUE Programs student employees, signed individually sealed condoms for others and said Sacramento State isn’t the commuter campus it was when he visited five years ago.

“It feels like a community much more,” Dr. Drew said before going on stage.

Dr. Drew, host of the nationally syndicated “Loveline,” then went on to lead a discussion in the University Union Ballroom in which he encouraged students to question why they often drink alcohol while forming relationships with the opposite sex and urged the audience to recognize that there are differing biological factors motivating men and women.

He told students that his advice was based on observations through more than 20 years of discussions with young people and not always clinical studies.

Students from UNIQUE walked around with microphones to people in the audience willing to ask questions or respond to questions by Dr. Drew.

Freshman biology major Teresa Benavides was surprised by some of the questions.

“I thought it was funny,” Benavides said. “I agreed with most of the things he said. It was very down-to-earth advice. It wasn’t too complicated. He aimed it at our age group.”

Her roommate, freshman art major Viviana Herrera, liked the event despite being unfamiliar with Dr. Drew.

“It kind of made me open my eyes to how guys are perceived differently than girls,” Herrera said.

Dr. Drew began the evening by telling the audience “how the ‘f’ did I get involved in all this stuff.”

He said his career began at what was then a little radio station by the name of KROQ. The station was interested in starting a community service program titled “Ask a Surgeon” and wanted a “real doctor” to talk about sexually transmitted diseases.

Dr. Drew wasn’t yet a certified physician; He was a fourth-year graduate student at the University of Southern California.

“I totally flipped out,” Dr. Drew said, joking that he rushed to grab all of his books on STDs.

He said that, at that time, AIDS hadn’t yet been fully discussed and that it was still being referred to as gay-related intestinal syndrome, or GRIS. Even the term “safe sex” wasn’t regularly used.

“My biggest sort of point was: while everyone was freaking out, at that point, about herpes, my point was, you don’t understand what’s coming,” Dr. Drew said in an telephone interview before his Sac State visit. “I said you’ve got to educate yourself about this because this is a big deal.”

From the beginning of his radio show, and until now, he said, he has noticed that men and women call to ask different things. He asked the audience what they thought men and women ask, first focusing on what men are interested in asking. A man on the left side of the room yelled “anal sex,” while another man on the right yelled “BJ.”

Dr. Drew equated the rise in anal sex among young adults to the increase in evocative images readily available. He said that when he was young, his generation fostered its attraction to women through “Playboy,” whereas boys are now motivated by many other images.

“The whole anal sex thing blows me away,” Dr. Drew also said over a telephone interview and later reiterated on Thursday night. “That became a preoccupation about … eight years ago. … My theory is that, because it’s always the young males hoisting it on the young females, the younger adolescent male gets his sense of what he’s attracted to and sexuality from what he sees. And I think your brain is like putty in the early parts of your puberty years.”

After addressing anal sex, Dr. Drew said the majority of men question, “Am I adequate?” He then asked the audience what women want to know, which is typically advice on relationships, commitment and abuse.

A pattern, he said, emerged: both men and women call about men. He said this troubled him and he pointed to a study by the Independent Women’s Forum, which showed that women tend to be ambivalent about social life. Dr. Drew then illustrated three types of college relationships: hooking up, “friends with benefits” and “joined at the hip.”

Dr. Drew is not a fan of hooking up.

“It’s always fucked up when you do it,” Dr. Drew said.

He said when he once went to a college to speak about these forms of relationships, a student compared friends with benefits to communism: a good, albeit unrealistic idea.

“Friends with benefits looks good on paper,” Dr. Drew said.

He turned the discussion on the audience. “Why must you be so loaded to hook up?”

One man said that alcohol makes him more willing to sleep with an “ogre,” another described alcohol as “liquid courage” and another man pointed out that almost all college, social functions have alcohol.

It prompted Dr. Drew to joke about Sac State: “Mental note: Schools my daughter will not attend.”

Women in the audience offered similar reasons.

One woman said women drink to deal with moral sexual dilemmas and deep-seeded issues. Another said women don’t want to have a “preamble” before hooking-up.

“You drink to manage anxiety,” Dr. Drew said.

Another woman pointed a fear of what her friends think about in the morning.

“Please stop kicking the shit out of your female friends,” Dr. Drew said in response.

Dr. Drew said that when women drink to feel more comfortable, they are medicating their emotions.

“That to me is disturbing,” Dr. Drew said.

He said men and women become aroused differently. Men see something, become immediately aroused and are driven to act on that. That doesn’t happen with women, he said. Women need to talk to feel that way.

Dr. Drew joked to the men: “Pretend to be interested.”

Next up, a woman asked: “Why do guys like the taste of vagina?”

“I’m not sure they do,” Dr. Drew said. “They aim to please.”

The microphone was passed to a male near the front of the room, who drew laughter and applause.

His response: “It tastes like victory.”

Thus, “Victoryman” was born, who Dr. Drew dubbed and later returned to after a woman asked why men seem interested in ejaculating on women. Dr. Drew suggested that men have been shaped by the same evocative images that have inspired interest in anal sex.

The response of Victoryman: “You know how when dogs want to mark their territory.”

To which Dr. Drew responded: “I knew he wouldn’t disappoint.”

The most thrilling moment of the night came when a woman in the back row became the focus. She didn’t use a microphone and asked two questions. She wondered how much sex in a day is appropriate. Dr. Drew said that the average amount of sex for a couple is twice a week.

“You have to negotiate what works for the two of you,” Dr. Drew said.

The woman’s second question drew the most vocal response from the audience.

“How does someone maximize someone’s orgasm if the boyfriend’s penis is too small?” she asked.

Dr. Drew smiled and joked about how the woman “outted” her boyfriend.

“First of all, your boyfriend needs to be put on suicide watch,” Dr. Drew said.

Dr. Drew said all women are wired differently and that her ability to orgasm puts her ahead of most women. His remedy was to find the best way of working it out with her boyfriend, whether through coital or oral sex.

“Men are trying to figure out women like a rubix cube,” Dr. Drew said.

Multiple audience members were recovering drug addicts and asked about the long-term affects of prior use. Dr. Drew encouraged them, no matter how long ago they’ve been clean, to get help and urged students to use the Student Health Center.

“Know that treatment works,” Dr. Drew said.

At the end of the evening, he encouraged women to obtain the morning-after pill. He reiterated that the pill doesn’t affect ovulation.

“Everyone should have it in the medicine cabinet,” Dr. Drew said.

Other people in the audience asked about tantric sex, sex in public, balancing intimacy against celibacy, whether caffeine affects sex, sex with only one partner, hypersexuality following rape at a young age, couples living together before marriage and whether men are biologically wired to cheat.

Junior criminal justice major Ryan Opatz, a longtime listener, enjoyed getting to see Dr. Drew in person.

“It’s interesting to actually see him in person and actually interact with him,” Opatz said. “It’s just cool to hear other people that you know that go to this school, their opinions and their comments. … The type of questions, because it was in such a social setting, were not as provocative as you hear on the radio. Overall though, it was pretty good.”

Alvaro Gonzalez, who has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Sac State, has listened to the radio show since middle school. He said he was interested in seeing how the college community would interact with Dr. Drew.

“I was interested in hearing the problems college students are dealing with today. Adolescents and teenagers are usually the type of callers he gets, “Gonzalez said. “I was pleased with the answers he gave. … He’s more open to hear what people have to say, whereas most other people would not give them a positive answer (and) either steer them away from that type of behavior. Instead, what Drew does is actually listen to them and tells them ‘OK, that’s natural. That’s normal.'”

“Loveline” airs from 10 p.m. to midnight from Sunday to Thursday on KZZO 100.5 FM.

Nate Miller can be reached at [email protected].