Phone Sex-Ed

Beth, 22, needs an answer.

“My question is this: My roommate is a lesbian. I recently broke up with my boyfriend and now she’s interested. How do I tell her that I’m just not into that?”

Welcome to MTV’s “Loveline.” A show where sex, drama and ignorance merge to make 60 minutes of fun TV.

Co-hosts Dr. Drew Pinsky and Adam Corolla sit on leather sofas holding court for the 20-something studio audience. Behind them, huge TV monitors re-cast their images, lending a weird, techno vibe.

Dr. Drew, a California psychiatrist, serves up the heavyweight insight, while Adam plays the guy-on-the-street role, interpreting Dr. Drew’s psycho-talk with a smart-aleck delivery. Diane Farr joins the hosts as a show regular, adding a sensitive and sensible female perspective.

Now back to poor Beth. Can she be helped?

Dr. Drew believes there is hope. He says, “It’s like a guy who wishes that a girl would be willing to have a relationship with him after there’s been a friendship for a while. It’s just not going to happen. Let her know that. Re-establish those boundaries. If she rejects you because you tell her you’re not going to do something you don’t want to do, then the friendship is done anyway.”

Loveline twists the talk-radio format, allowing the lovelorn and sexually lost to find answers to intimate questions — in front of an audience of millions.

John Miller, vice president of original programming at MTV, says the show is catching on among 18- to 24-year-olds.

“It demands that people take responsibility for their actions. It doesn’t preach, it doesn’t lecture,” Miller says. “They don’t judge, which is a highly humanistic approach. It’s about telling people who you are. And sometimes who you are can be pretty dangerous.”

That’s the show — intimate questions, a bit of logic and advice, with lots of applause and showbiz glitz.

Dr. Drew has been fielding such questions on the air for 15 years in California.

“I never had any aspirations or intentions to do the things that I’m doing,” Dr. Drew says during a recent telephone interview from his office in Pasadena, where he is still in private practice. Some friends launched a radio call-in show while in college, but soon realized, based on the questions, that they were in over their heads.

“They called me,” he says.

Fortuitous, indeed. From there, Dr. Drew launched his own radio call-in show, which has become nationally syndicated. Adam joined him on the radio in 1993. In 1996, they began doing two versions of the popular show — one for radio, another for MTV.

MTV’s Miller says the show is “perfect for our audience. I consider it an entertaining service to our demographic. These are issues that are important and it’s difficult for people who are MTV age to have an outlet. The show gives them a forum.”

Issues that range from “should I let my boyfriend talk me into having a threesome” to “I have this weird pimple on my butt. What should I do?”

Dr. Drew and Adam have a humorous rapport. In the interview, when asked to describe his role, Dr. Drew says he plays “parent counterpoint to the impish child.”

Adam says, “Yeah, whatever.”

Although Dr. Drew never envisioned his psychiatric career merging with media, he is “passionately involved with this program. I think we as a society need to look at what’s wrong with our interpersonal relationships.”

Adam, whose grandfather was a psychologist, says, “It’s pretty good. It could be better. It’s good for TV.”

Solutions to the wide range of phobias and dysfunction often send the co-hosts to opposite ends of the intellectual sofa. Even so, they agree on a basic interpersonal pitfall between men and women.

“Women often misunderstand the way that men experience a relationship,” Dr. Drew says. He says women believe that a man is having the same experience in a relationship that they are having. “They can’t fathom that men are having a different experience.”

His advice to women is to “deal with reality on reality’s terms. Don’t cast a play, don’t live in denial.”

Adam approaches the issue of relationships from the man’s perspective.

“Here’s the deal,” he says. “Men don’t do enough examining, and women do too much. They try to read stuff into stuff. They get a little too critical sometimes. Women need to know that guys need a little space sometimes. And when they put the full court press on, guys get weird.”

He says men lose sight of what a woman needs. “Talk to a woman getting ready to drive across country and ask when was the last time she changed the oil. She says, ‘I don’t know.’ You say, the tire looks low and she says I didn’t realize. Point is, most women don’t pay much attention to their cars.

“Men do the same thing with relationships — they go on auto pilot. That’s why men get surprised when they get dumped. If a man treated a relationship the way he treats his car, he’d be fine. All a woman wants is for a guy to pay attention.”

ON TV “Loveline” regularly airs weeknights at 11 p.m.