At a conference last year, she presented a paper called “Gender stereotypes at crotch level: Cultural discourses about genitalia.” For a recent campus performance of “The Vagina Monologues,” [the professor] portrayed a dominatrix obsessed with the different ways women moan during sex.
-- From "For Maryland professor of the year, human sexuality courses engage beyond books" by Daniel de Vise, Washington Post 4/21/11
Students walked into Deborah Stearns’s classroom at Montgomery College . . . They were in for an engaging afternoon. Stearns, 43, earned the honor Maryland Professor of the Year in November for a distinctive brand of teaching, alternately rigorous, inspirational and playful. And this was her signature course: human sexuality.
Some of her early scholarship dealt with morality and the balance of power in relationships, particularly among same-sex couples. In recent years, Stearns has ventured into the cultural trappings of human sexuality.
In her human sexuality class on a recent day, Stearns led a lengthy discussion of sex acts, gathering opinion on the boundaries between healthy and unhealthy, normal and abnormal. She said her students are often surprised, even liberated, to learn their wildest bedroom proclivities are not really that unusual.
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