Talksex With Sue Johanson
Valente Heavener
In January 2002, reruns of the show began to be replayed to American audiences on Oxygen Media.[3] The recorded program was very popular, but American viewers missed the opportunity to call in and ask their own questions.[3] The U.S. version of Sunday Night Sex Show, called Talk Sex with Sue Johanson, produced especially for American audiences, debuted in November 2002 on Oxygen.[3][8]
A full-length documentary about Johanson was released in 2022. Entitled Sex with Sue, the documentary chronicles Johanson's life story, directed by Canadian documentary filmmaker Lisa Rideout.[14]
Johanson's work educating and informing the public about birth control and sexual health earned her Canada's second highest civilian honour after the Order of Merit, appointment to the Order of Canada as Member (CM) in 2001.[19][20] In 2010, Johanson was presented with the Bonham Centre Award from the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies for her contributions to the advancement and education of issues around sexual identification.[9]
Johanson's Sunday Night Sex Show premiered as a live call-in program on Toronto radio in 1984, with a television version of the show airing on W Network from 1996 to 2005. The U.S. spinoff, Talk Sex With Sue Johanson, began in 2002 and concluded in 2008.
On the Governor General's website, she's praised for her decades of work. "Listening without judgment and candid in her responses, she helps Canadians to improve their understanding of sexuality and their ability to make wise health choices."
"Canada has lost an absolute icon. Sue Johanson did more for sex education in this country than anyone. When the government failed to educate the public on the risks of HIV, Sue filled the gap. And she did it with empathy," one person tweeted.
The official Twitter account for the 2022 Sex with Sue documentary wrote Thursday that Johanson paved the way for how we talk about sex and sexuality today, noting she was unafraid of shattering taboos.
Jane Johanson said Thursday she believes it was her mother's sense of humour that clicked with so many people, and recognizing that the topic of sex would make lots of people uncomfortable or shut down.
Emlyn Travis is a news writer at Entertainment Weekly with over five years of experience covering the latest in entertainment. A proud Kingston University alum, Emlyn has written about music, fandom, film, television, and awards for multiple outlets including MTV News, Teen Vogue, Bustle, BuzzFeed, Paper Magazine, Dazed, and NME. She joined EW in August 2022.
In November 2002, the Oxygen Network debuted the U.S. version of Sunday Night Sex Show, called Talk Sex with Sue Johanson. Airing every Sunday night at midnight ET, Talk Sex airs live, offering helpful guidance to U.S. callers on the sometimes uncomfortable topics of love, relationships, and sex.
In 1997, Johanson was inducted into the Janssen-Ortho "Hall of Fame." Her portrait is on display with other pioneers who have contributed to educating and informing the public about birth control and other areas of human sexuality. In 2001, she was appointed to the Order of Canada and won a Galaxy Award for "Best On-Camera Performance."
On June 29, the former host of Sunday Night Sex Show and Talk Sex with Sue Johanson died at the age of 93, according to reports, which prompted many Canadians to share memories of the impact that she had on them.
In both of her shows, Sue answered people's questions about sex in a no-nonsense way and often used dolls, dildos and phallic-shaped objects to illustrate the answers she gave, which was talked about in a recent documentary about her life called Sex with Sue.
"I just called to ask, when my girlfriend and I have sex, either with a dildo or with her fingers, when I'm getting ready to have an orgasm I often have vaginal farts," explained one caller. "I was wondering, is there any way to stop doing that?"
"Now, Lisa, Lisa: think. He is putting his penis in your rectum, right? That rectum has feces in there," she explained. "Feces are loaded with bacteria. Now he's gonna pick up some of that bacteria on his penis, right? And then he's gonna have intercourse with you, vaginal intercourse and he hasn't washed his penis and he wasn't using a condom."
Her media career started in 1984 when she got a slot on Q107, a rock station in Toronto. For two hours each week she would answer sex questions from callers, and she gained a reputation for being honest and unshockable. This led to a television show called the Sunday Night Sex Show which ran from 1996 to 2005 and ultimately aired in 23 countries. In the early 2000s, the show would get 100,000 calls each Sunday with Sue talking to 10 or 12 callers on-air.
By Walker Thornton [This article originally appeared on www.kinkly.com and is republished with permission] September is World Sexual Health month, a global initiative to draw attention to the issue of
Armed with degrees in human sexuality and family planning, Johanson started a birth control clinic in 1970 at Don Mills Collegiate Institute in North York. Her frank teaching style was noticed and by 1984, she moved to the radio waves with a two-hour call-in show on Q107 FM before moving to television a year later. Her show started on community television before it became a nationally-broadcast show on the W Network. The U.S. version of her show appeared on the Oxygen network, who broadcast it in Asia, Europe and South America, and logged up to four million viewers per show.
Even at the height of her career, Johanson was private and shied away from attention and recognition when not in show mode. She has remained largely out of the spotlight for over a decade since her shows wrapped, and now at age 92, lives quietly in Toronto. Her personal life, family and motivations are in part explored with interviews recorded with help from daughter Jane Johanson, who connected with Rideout in 2019.
Sue Johanson is a popular sex educator and former host of the TV program "Talk Sex with Sue Johanson" on Oxygen. In this week's Wisdom Watch, Johanson, 78, talks about her decades-long career as a sex expert, and also weighs in on debates about sex education for kids.
Sue Johanson has been talking about sex and teaching about sex for more than three decades. One of Canada's top educators, she received the prestigious Order of Canada in 2001. Americans know her as the former host of "Talk Sex with Sue Johanson" on the Oxygen network, and she's with us now. Welcome, Sue.
MARTIN: I think people in this country know you mainly as a person who deals with adults and talks to adults about their sort of various issues, but I'm wondering if you think the two are related? Is the reason that there's such an interest in adult sex education is that somehow or other, they don't get it when they're kids? They don't get it when they're younger?
MARTIN: This is still very controversial in the U.S., the idea that teenagers particularly can get birth control without parental consent or any reproductive services without parental consent. (unintelligible) the different attitude?
Ms. JOHANSON: But, you see, the thing is that teens are not going to get parental consent to have sex. If your daughter asked you if she could have sex with Jimmy Joel, would you - would she? No. There's no way. She's out in the back forty doing it and not using birth control or not practicing safer sex. So we've got a problem right away. Anybody who's old enough to ovulate, to menstruate, to be involved in a sexual relationship is old enough for effective birth control. And pulling out, it was not a method of birth control.
MARTIN: But there are those who say that, when you remove parents from the equation, you're giving kids an opportunity to not have the kinds of values discussions that people feel that they really should be having with their parents. If parents should have an opportunity to talk to their kids about what they think sex is for, what circumstances under which they should be happy, just to impart their values, and that when you have clinics and places like that, that kids can have access to without the parents, that gives them an out without having those conversations. What do you say to that?
Ms. JOHANSON: You don't have a conversation. It's very difficult to talk to your own kids about sex. But you've taught your kids about relationships, about love, about intimacy in the way you react to your partner. So if you hug your partner, if you kiss your partner with meaning, not that peck on the cheek, goodbye dear, have a good day kind of a kiss, but a kiss that is a kiss, if you hold hands, that shows kids relationships, how you communicate with each other. That gives them their first idea about love.
And then, if they learned a little bit about sex in school, then they can start to put two together. Now, if you've got a close relationship with your kids, they will ask questions. And maybe some of the questions you would prefer them not to ask, oh, mother, do you and daddy do that? Oh, mother, that's gross.
Ms. JOHANSON: I have no idea. I had no idea that, in the whole of the United States of America, nobody else is doing that kind of explicit sex show, sex information, answering questions very explicitly using medical language but combined with what I call slanguage, which is street terms, not four-letter words, but language that people understand.
Ms. JOHANSON: Well, because it's different. It's the latest taboo. And so many, many women are very uncomfortable with it, very nervous about it, very fearful about it, and so they should be. And sometimes, I get questions from males who say, my girlfriend wants to try this. What do I need to know? I'm scared. Can I get a disease? Does it hurt? Can she get an infection, that kind of thing.
dd2b598166