‘Fearless look at sexuality’

Who among us can resist the allure of the face-eating tumor? The lady with lobster claws for hands?

As the baritone announcer says: “Science fiction? Think again!”

Yes, it’s another episode of “Medical Incredible” from the Discovery Health Channel (DHC), which features, literally, a descendant of circus freaks.

Available in 57 million homes, DHC (digital cable channel 220 in Spokane, 105 in Coeur d’Alene) is TV that offers the kind of voyeuristic fix you usually have to visit sick relatives in hospitals to attain.

Its lineup includes shows such as “Archie, the 84-lb. Baby,” “The Man Who Slept for 19 Years” and “Plastic Surgery Beverly Hills.” It’s health class gone wild.

“Those do extraordinarily well from a ratings perspective” says DHC general manager Eileen O’Neill, who bills her network as “TV That Matters.”

The network has grown 25 percent in prime-time viewing this year (it’s now in 40th place and averages 229,000 pairs of eyeballs on a weeknight).

“We are positioned,” O’Neill says, “to take the network to the next level.”

And, naturally, that position would be sexual.

Because the network that brings you “Birth Day Live!” – featuring 10 hours of “live human births” (cue to announcer in hushed voice: “She’s fully dilated and ready to go,” and then Dr. Wong urging “push, push, push, push, push”) – is going to tell you where those babies come from.

Tonight at 9, DHC will premiere “Strictly Sex With Dr. Drew,” described as “a fearless look at sexuality with frank talk and honest answers … exploring America’s favorite pastime.”

Discovery Health has done sex before with “Berman & Berman,” featuring the sex therapist/urologist sisters (now canceled). But that show, and a lot of DHC programming, skews toward a female demographic.

The corporate thinking is that Dr. Drew might bring in more guys.

His first show? “The Orgasm.” Future episodes are titled “Was It Good for You?” and “Sex: What Scares You?”

O’Neill has high hopes for Drew Pinsky, and so she’s on hand to watch her Pasadena, Calif., sexpert tape an episode of the new talk show.

Pinsky, a working internist who daylights at the Las Encinas psychiatric hospital (specialty: addiction medicine), is famous in some circles from his two decades doing the late night call-in radio show “Loveline” (and the now-canceled MTV show of the same name).

He also played himself in “New York Minute,” the Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen vanity flick from 2004.

Apparently, becoming a sexpert does not require board certification. Pinsky became one when, as a 24-year-old third-year medical student, he was asked to show up at a Los Angeles rock radio station to do “Ask a Surgeon,” which quickly morphed into “Loveline.”

The first thing you need to know about Dr. Drew is that he drives a cherry-red BMW. The second thing: He’s married with triplets who play Little League (he whips out a family photo from his wallet).

Trim and silver-haired, bright-eyed and California casual, Pinsky comes across as more suburban doc than pervy tipster.

Asked if Americans, always branded as repressed but oversexualized puritans (especially by the French), are ready for another live sex show, Pinsky says: “Actually, I don’t see it. Where are the Puritan attitudes? How can people keep saying that? I think it” – he means sex in the media – “needs to be more contained.”

For example, Pinsky thinks sex ed in schools is generally a good idea, “but abstinence should be the goal,” and that too much “plumbing lesson” too soon could be traumatizing to younger children.

As for teens, “what they want is real,” he says – the straight dope.

“And they need a parent, too, who shapes their values and behaviors to get them safely through adolescence to become a productive adult,” he adds, and not the kind of parent “who wants to be their best buddy.”

This is some serious public health message from a man whose radio show (co-hosted by Adam Carolla, most recently of “The Man Show”) featured guys asking about three-ways. But Pinsky says that every question about sex is almost always a question about relationships.

Asked what will be different about his TV show versus his radio show, he smiles and says: “Well, there’s no Adam Carolla now, thank God.”

He says he hopes the show will serve as an adult antidote to the twaddle served up by men’s and women’s magazines.

“What the women’s magazines teach is that their job is to make men happy,” Pinsky says. And the laddie rags? “That women are sexual objects.”

Pinsky and O’Neill say “Strictly Sex” will be “clinical” in the sense that the discussions about sex will be offered by a medical doctor.

“We know the FCC has concerns about the show,” Pinsky says. “They’ve put everyone on notice that they’ll be watching.”

This frustrates him because, he says, “I want to be more Catholic than the pope,” but the FCC stubbornly refuses to say what is out of bounds when it comes to community standards for cable sexpert shows.

Pinksy excuses himself to prepare for the taping. When it begins, it’s funny, but for all the show’s titillating potential, it is rather chaste.

In one segment, Pinsky quizzes the co-authors of “The Hookup Handbook” about the popularity of no-strings-attached make-out sessions among the twenty-something generation. He is clearly skeptical. The co-authors, a pair of New York gals, believe it is all just flirty fun.

Next meet Dave and Becky, a regular-looking couple (she’s in shorts with black socks and sneakers) in the Barry White stage of marriage. “We’re never very far out of the mood,” she says.

Then Pinsky brings out a psychoanalyst to explain to Romeo and Juliet that their physical ardor may wane, and that it’s only natural.

Next we learn that Becky is now preggers, and there ensues helpful information about how her body will change and that Dave needs to be sensitive and cool about that.

It’s all very nice, very normal. Not kinky at all. There is no need to avert one’s eyes.

“It’s about being a human being,” Pinsky says. Strictly sexually speaking.