Hilda Hutcherson wants women to have better sex.
By “better,” the gynecologist isn’t talking about the kind of racy, bed-shaking theatrics seen mostly on cable television.
Hutcherson’s goal is simply to help women stop feeling ashamed about their bodies and start thinking of satisfying sex as another part of a healthy lifestyle.
Don’t think of sex as dirty, says Hutcherson, ’76. It’s doctor’s orders.
Hutcherson, an ob/gyn professor and associate dean for diversity at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, has made a career of promoting the positive aspects of human sexuality. She frequently reminds patients that good sex is linked to longevity, improved immune function, healthier hearts and stronger marriages.
She’s written prescriptions for sex toys and touted the health benefits of going sans panties. (It decreases the risk of yeast and other infections—the doctor suggests kicking them off as soon as you get home.) She often hands her patients a mirror and encourages them to, well, have a look.
“Sexual satisfaction is your birthright,” Hutcherson declared in her first book, What Your Mother Never Told You About S-e-x (Perigee).
She peppers her sexual health advice books with case studies like the 73-year-old patient who wanted to have her first orgasm. (The hormone therapy and vibrator that Hutcherson prescribed were a success, but the woman was “mad as hell” that her ex-husband never told her what she was missing.)
Hutcherson, 52, has parlayed her warm and disarming approach into three books, regular columns in Glamour and Essence magazines, and appearances on Oprah, Rachael Ray and nearly every other talk show on the tube.
“She demystifies women’s sexuality,” says Elana Katz, a New York-based family therapist whom Hutcherson has consulted for her books. “Information is power . . . and Dr. H. provides a long-overdue humane and thoughtful access to this kind of power.”
Hutcherson’s sex tips are down-to-earth: Accept your body as it is. Know how it works, and how your partner’s does too. Communicate. And remember that the mechanics of what goes on between the sheets aren’t nearly as important as how you feel about it.
“Whatever you’re doing, it should be done because you want to do it,” Hutcherson says. “And in the end, it should be pleasurable to you as well as your partner.”
Hutcherson knows firsthand that the negative messages many women get about sex as children can follow them into adulthood. She grew up the oldest of five children in Tuskegee, Ala., and says the sexual education she got could be boiled down to a single sentence: don’t do it until you’re married. “We didn’t talk about it in Alabama,” she says.
She knew early that she wanted to be a doctor. The “gory pictures” in the medical books that her father brought home from his job as a nurse’s aide fascinated her. After graduating from Stanford, she went on to Harvard Medical School. She met her husband, an anesthesiologist, in a labor room during their residencies at Columbia. (She would give birth to each of their four children, now ages 19, 16, 14 and 12, in the same room.)
It wasn’t until she started practicing in 1985 that she realized that her education had some serious gaps when it came to women’s needs. Her wake-up call came when one of her first gynecology patients asked her if it was safe to have anal sex.
Hutcherson realized two things: First, she was blushing. And second, she didn’t know the answer.
One after another, patients came to her with deeply personal sex questions. Though she cringed with embarrassment at the most explicit ones, she could tell that it was just as painful for the women to ask. As a doctor, she felt she owed them answers. It became clear that to really connect with her patients, she would have to face her own taboos.
She hit the bookstores but found most popular sex books crass and unhelpful. She started scouring medical literature, attending conferences, asking sex therapists for advice—anything she could to fill the gaping lack of information most women had about their bodies and sexuality. Bit by bit, an expert was born.
What Your Mother Never Told You came out in 1999. Oprah Winfrey read it and invited Hutcherson on for an entire show about the book. In 2005, Hutcherson wrote Pleasure (Perigee) in response to readers’ requests for a “spicier” sequel.
Hutcherson defines “natural” sex as “anything that two adult people engage in and find mutually pleasurable.” That message often puts her at odds with conservative sexual mores. When she talks on the air about, say, oral sex or same-sex partnerships, critics sometimes call in to accuse her of encouraging promiscuity or endangering women’s morality.
Hutcherson responds that she’s not trying to get people to behave in any specific way. She just wants women to be safe and smart with their choices.
More advice books are on Hutcherson’s to-do list, including ones for men, older women and adolescent girls. And she wants to keep educating people on why it’s good to get it on.
“I’m a doctor and I say it’s good for you,” she says with a laugh.
CORINNE PURTILL, ’02, is a freelance journalist at work on a book about Cambodia.
