Cybersex 101

He calls himself "A1sexy," and he has the chiseled, rippling torso to live up to his screen name. Seated in what looks like a black lawn chair, wearing nothing but a hat, he smiles warmly into the camera. Every few seconds A1sexy's grainy black-and-white onscreen image reloads, each time revealing a slightly different from-the-waist-up view of the young black man and, behind him, a rumpled bed.

"Show us your cock!" exclaims the teacher at the front of the classroom, where she's flanked on either side by A1sexy's giant, hunky image. The instructor proceeds to type this order into her keyboard. "You don't hear that in every class," she says aloud as an aside to her ogling students.

I have seen the future of online learning, and it is a fluorescent-lit, brick-and-mortar classroom in a downtown San Francisco high-rise, where students engage in live sex chat with exhibitionistic strangers, while the teacher shows them how it's done.

In Exploring Cybersexualities, a very-adult education course offered by San Francisco State University's Multimedia Studies Program, students get initiated into the technologically mediated sexual underworld with step-by-step lessons in the juicy thrills (and unique boredoms) of cybersex. It's $100 for a two-day course on how to get off with a chip, a kind of guided tour of techie sex toys and smutty sites, many of which have been around for years. And whatever the course's limited academic pretensions -- alas, it's not for credit -- the syllabus is a whole lot more voyeuristic than scholarly.

In this alternate scholastic universe, shouting out in the middle of class -- "Tell him to show us his ass!" -- is not only acceptable, but an encouraged form of class participation. And don't bother being furtive about checking out sites like Jail Babes, a personals site for female inmates. The URL for that naughty diversion is right there on the virtual reading list.

Who could have guessed that pedagogical instruction in the finer points of sex chat occurs in the same office building that houses buttoned-up companies like AT&T Global Network Services? Granted, the course work in the Multimedia Studies Program usually runs to such tamer fare as "Advanced Web Applications with Perl" and "Macromedia Flash II." But now the school proudly boasts that it's "the first institution to add the stimulating subject of cybersex to its curriculum."

Whether that's really something to brag about isn't at all clear on the morning of the first day of this supposedly first-ever cybersex class. Just four students and two reporters drag themselves out of bed (or away from their sticky keyboards) on a rainy Sunday morning, the day of the National Masturbate-A-Thon; it prompts the obvious question: What if you gave a cybersex class and nobody came?

The ringleader of this eye-popping effort to bring triple-X porn sites and cyberdildonics into the classroom is one Mary Madden, the multimedia program's webmistress. It's soon obvious that Madden, who holds a master's degree in social psychology with a concentration in female sexuality from San Francisco State, should be awarded the first Ph.D. in surfing for smut.

The 30-year-old webmistress -- at 6-foot-1 -- is quite striking, in a hip, pointy-glasses, webmistress-ish way. She comes across as disarmingly reserved for a cybersex radical, making her pleasingly professorial. Discreetly, she never reveals her own proclivities to her pupils, although she does mention that she engaged in flirty online chat with a preteen sysop when she was only 11. Since then, she's assembled an extensive body of knowledge on everything from CyberSM to the Real Doll, which takes the form of seemingly endless naughty links.

Madden has assembled much of the material for the class in the form of detailed notes and links posted to the course's in-depth Web site. Hearing this, one student grumbles: "I could have saved $100 and bought porn videos with it."