Before you spend four bucks per minute on a 900 call, you might want to check out some upper-level courses in the humanities.

You may not have realized it, but some professors are talking dirty to each other. Yes, beneath that respectable veneer of khaki, tweed and oxford cloth lies a vocabulary that might make a sailor blush.

It's all part of an academic movement to make meaning out of anatomical cues. The cues can reside in literature, films, speeches - or almost any form that uses words or pictures.

Let's look at a few examples all of which are authentic.

First, the penis. Sorry guys, but the penis is largely passe today. Freud and his cohorts domesticated it many moons ago.

But there has been recent groundbreaking research on how college students name the penis. Check out the article "Naming of Parts: Gender, Culture, and Terms for the Penis among American College Students." Here you can find nearly 250 terms of endearment and what they mean politically and culturally.

When the penis gets talked about, it usually represents the mighty signifier of oppression.

There's simply no such thing as a liberated penis -- unless, of course, you cut it off.

For an article on the politics of castration, see "The man without a penis: libidinal economies that (re)cognize the hypernature of gender." Or, consult "Waiving the Phallus." Lorena might not have realized the ideological grounds for her Ginsu antics.

And if you're really keen on examining the theoretical relationship of literature, politics and castration, check out "Eunuch Hermeneutics."

But the penis, when it is still attached, always harbors subversive designs.

The male-dominated language is known as "phallocentric" and the male-dominated political order is "phallocratic." If you use the English language in traditional ways (you don't speak in tongues or nonsequiturs) or if you're a believer in traditional democracy, well, you're guilty.

Females who participate in either domain are the unwitting tools of masculine hegemony. Translation: You don't realize that you're being oppressed, but, of course, you are. Butt-head apparently speaks for many: "The penis rules."

Many scholars have attempted to loosen the penis' mighty grip on our collective consciousness. You can no doubt guess at the featured anatomical parts.

For many, the vagina is the biological alternative. Check out, for example, "Virginal Sex, Vaginal Text: The Fold of Frankenstein" (and I always thought that Frankenstein was a guy). Or you might explore "Vaginal Wolf and the Crustacean Complex."

For the more morphologically adventurous, I would recommend "The Vagina Dentata in Stephen King's Christine." Some vaginas, as the title suggests, house deadly incisors.

Other scholars "valorize" the clitoris in reading texts. There's even a growing academic circle committed to "clitoral and ovarian hermeneutics."

If you consult a recent issue of Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems, you can read about "The Clitoris, Culture and the Law." (Maybe O.J. could change his plea to "temporary clitoral insanity.")

Some scholars have chosen to "privilege" neither the vagina nor the clitoris. Such a move, after all, is politically incorrect since it "encourages a false sexual binary."

So, instead, there are alternatives such as "Hole to Whole: Feminine Subversion and the Subversion of the Feminine . . ."

Still other scholars have strayed from strictly gendered categories -- their critical lens is that enigmatic organ, the anus.

If you're a Hitchcock you should explore "Anal Rope, to find out about the film Rope's latent anal eroticism. The author concludes that "the anus is an underrepresented site of signification." Translation: The anus means more than you think.

Even that bastion of innocence we know as Disney isn't safe from sexualized readings. If you thought that Mickey Mouse was just a helpful rodent, you wrong. Refer to "Of Mice a Men: An Introduction to Mouseology Or, Anal Eroticism and Disney" -- an article not authored by Richard Gere.

So, the next time you need a cheap thrill, think twice about blowing off class or avoiding Pattee. Sexuality hangs out in strange places these days.