Radio: The Hot Hot-Line

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Obsession with sex can range from titillation to the repellent. On Kansas City's Counsellor's Corner, the Rev. R. Lofton Hudson found himself counseling a woman who complained that she was being "pressured" into a neighborhood wife-swapping group. Bob Raiford, on Washington's WTOP, waded unblinking into a discussion of aerosol contraceptives. And when New Orleans' WSMB's Larry Regan asked one deviate caller if he had considered going to a psychiatrist, he got the reply, "Go to a psychiatrist, hell. I go with one."

Occasionally such lurid dialogue performs a public service. An agitated mother told Speak Up in Durham, N.C., that two strange women had just tried to recruit her junior high school daughter to "date men for money." No sooner had she hung up than a second mother called in to say, "And I thought I was the only one." Then came a third and a fourth parent and, finally, the chief of police himself. The next night, as he promised, the prostitution ring, including a 13-year-old, was broken up by the cops.