Get ready to rise and shine, because in this episode, we're waking up the legendary Canadian sex expert Sue Johanson in all of us! We sit down with award winning Canadian filmmaker Lisa Rideout, who recently finished directing and producing the documentary feature Sex with Sue (available on Prime Video). We get another opportunity to laugh, reminisce, gush, and of course talk about Lisa meeting 93-year-old Sue in the flesh! What did Lisa get after binge-watching hundreds of hours of "Sex with Sue"? Well, besides an appreciation for the importance of safe sex, she also got a pretty good understanding of how to get pregnant! Lisa recently announced the pregnancy of her first child so we jumped on that opportunity to talk about what else - pregnancy and sex! For the rest of you, live by Sue’s words… "Safe sex is great sex. Don't be silly, wrap your willy”.
Lisa and Michelle play Six Degrees of Sue Johanson
Sue’s first birth control clinic at Don Mills Collegiate was where Michelle went to highschool
Michelle and Lisa reminisce about their personal sex education memories from high school
Lisa meets the lovely and still spunky Sue
Pregnancy and sex
Getting acquainted with your vulva after giving birth
[DOCUMENTARY CLIP]: It's called the Fantasy Glide, and you don't bounce up and down with the dildo in your vagina or your anus just like you'd think you would. Uh Uh. Instead, you simply press up and down on the handle.
[THEME MUSIC]
[00:00:23] Michelle: That was legendary sex educator, Sue Johanson in a brand new documentary by filmmaker Lisa Rideout called Sex With Sue on Amazon Prime.
[00:00:33] Lisa: It's one of those films, you know, I haven't had the experience before where you say, oh, I'm doing a film on Sue Johanson, and they'll be like, oh wait, and I'll say the sex grandma. And they'll be like, oh yeah, I know Sue. Okay!
[00:00:46] Sue: So you are wondering what does an old lady like me know about sex toys? The answer? Plenty.
[00:00:56] Michelle: Today, we're speaking with Canadian filmmaker and writer Lisa Rideout. Her award-winning films have screened worldwide and she's directed for Netflix and Vice and Crave. Her new documentary, Sex With Sue received, drum roll, five Canadian Screen Award nominations.
[00:01:16] Lisa: You really feel how wide her impact has been and how special she is to people if you grew up in a certain era, you know, the late nineties, early two thousands, in the eighties as well, and you were a Canadian, you knew who Sue Johanson was.
[DOCUMENTARY CLIP]
[00:01:45] Michelle: the film is about Sue Johnason, the nurse turned sex educator, turned TV personality that had a revolutionary show called the Sunday Night Sex Show with Sue Johanson that impacted so many of us. For me, the film evoked memories I hadn't even thought about in years, such as madly pressing redial on my phone every Sunday night to try to get through, and only once over the years of doing that, I finally got through only to realize I didn't have a question. So what did I do? I created a question for the call screener, which was how old should you be before you start shaving your legs? Yeah, so it didn't get on the show, but I was shaking with excitement anyways, I think it's pretty obvious by now that I have a slightly warped sense of humor.
[DOCUMENTARY CLIP]: But I do believe that sex should be pleasurable. And yes, it should be fun too. If you can't laugh at it, you should not be doing it.
[00:02:51] Michelle: There are interviews with sex educators like Dan Savage and Carlyle Jansen, ethical porn producer Bree Mills, porn star Nina Hartley, comedian Russell Peters, and that's only to name a few. Lisa masterfully weaves together this deeply personal footage captured by Sue's daughter Jane Johanson, between the years of 2016 and 2018, where Jane wanted to capture Sue, remembering these memories before they faded from her mind.
[00:03:25] Sue: Boy. Oh boy, that's a tough one. That was heartbreaking because I had a lot of friends who were gay. Uh, and that bothered me a great deal, but they obviously felt that it was a sin, and that's a shame.
[00:03:49] Michelle: Given that Lisa is around six months pregnant, I wanted to know if she learned anything about sex and pregnancy from Sue.
[00:03:55] Lisa: So many people asked Sue about pregnancy and sex. You know, I don't know if they made it into the film. I don't think so, but I think there is one about a person's husband liking her breast milk.
[00:04:08] Michelle: Oh, yeah. And And he's lactose intolerant?
[00:04:11] Lisa: And she says he better take lactate then. Yeah.
[00:04:17] Michelle: But back in school, before she became a filmmaker, Lisa's own sex education was a little prehistoric.
[00:04:26] Lisa: In grade four, our teacher came out with a puppet on her hand that was a dinosaur I think named Carrie.
[00:04:35] Lisa: It was like this purple creature that was on her hand. And she came out and she sat down and you know, she had a voice for this puppet. And it was like, I'm Carrie and I'm gonna teach you about your bodies. It's so emblematic of how afraid we are to just directly talk about sex, to talk about our body parts, that she had to put a puppet and like a dinosaur puppet on her hand to do it.
[00:05:01] Michelle: Here is my conversation with Lisa.
[00:05:08] Michelle: When I had actually found out that this film was being released and the night of the film I was so excited. My kids were like, what is going on mom? Like, why are you so excited? I'm like, no, this person was like hugely important to me.
[00:05:25] Lisa: You know, she has this incredible quality about her, the information, but she's also just hilarious. So I think that makes for, yeah, easy content to spread her message, but I'm curious what your Sue Johanson story is. You know, like whenever I say I'm making a film about Sue Johanson and people say, oh, she came to my high school, or they have something like that.
[00:05:46] Michelle: Yeah, it's really weird. I started listening to her on Q107, and I was really young and the content, even at that point in my life was sort of way ahead of where I was, but I was really fascinated with it. And then I, strangely, one of my best friends in grade four, her name's Patty Banford, her mom is Jeff Banford, who you interviewed on your show, which is crazy. So it doesn't stop there. And I remember being like, oh my God. Like her mom was a celebrity to me. Right? When I would go over to her house and then, yeah, I went to Don Mills Collegiate. Okay. Which was the first sexual health clinic that Sue opened up. I was taking friends of mine because I already knew who Sue was, and I was like, oh my God, I love her. Like I wanna be her. If anyone has any sex questions, you ask me and like, I wanna be able to like find out what this clinic looks like. And I remember like checking in at the office and I asked, is Sue Johanson in here? No, I don't really need anything, but like,
[00:06:57] Lisa: can I get a signature?
[00:06:59] Michelle: And oh, and then, in my undergraduate Bachelor of Social Work, I did a placement at the sexual health clinic in Toronto, and my supervisor was Kim Martin, who actually passed away in 2019, but she was mentored by Sue and was also Jane's best friend.
[00:07:20] Lisa: Wow. That is levels of connection, right?
[00:07:23] Michelle: It's like, bonkers and then now I'm interviewing you and I seriously am thinking that I'm in like my own video game or something.
[00:07:35] Lisa: Aw, I love that. But I love when, um, it feels like the universe makes things come together in this way.
[00:07:42] Michelle: That's my story. What's your story? You have a connection to Sue too, right?
[00:07:47] Lisa: Yeah, well, you know, I went to Catholic school growing up, so we can get into that later. Maybe what the sex ed was like slash lack of sex education. So I remember Sue from tv from her show and just, you know, no one else was talking about sex in an explicit, I think pleasure focused way. And that always stuck with me. You know, I think years later I watched a documentary about Dr. Ruth. Who's the American counterpart to Sue. And I was on a plane, the plane landed. I thought, has anyone made a film about Sue? And I really thought someone had, I thought that I had saw this film, so I landed, I like went on my phone, I Googled. And I found her very outdated website. It looked like it was from the early two thousands, and I just thought, oh, maybe I'll send her an email and just express my interest in making the film. And my kind of like, I don't wanna say weird connection, but my mom and her at different points in time, cuz my mom's younger went to St. Boniface for nursing school.
[00:09:02] Michelle: That wasn't the convent, was it?
[00:09:03] Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. It was like the nun run nursing school in Winnipeg. So, you know, I think that's kind of like particular, and so I threw that in the email as well. And my mom is a nurse like Sue, so I feel like I grew up in a similar environment as Sue's daughter and Sue's family. So I sent that and I just thought like, no one's ever gonna email me back. Right? You kind of do these things with film where you see what sticks to the wall, sent it out, got, you know, a two liner email back a few days later that was like quite ominous, that said, someone's working on a film, maybe they'll be in touch. I was like, okay, sweet. Again, I thought like, well, that's that. But what was going on in the background was Jane Johanson, Sue's daughter had been filming with her mom for years at this time. They would just kind of capture interviews with her, wait a little bit, go back with the intention that it would be something eventually. And Jane's not a filmmaker by trade, so she was like, okay, I need to bring on a director. And it was just this perfect timing where she was looking for a director. I was thinking about Sue. We met for coffee in the Annex and we right away got along. And then Jane and my past have like interweave in all these different ways. So it just, yeah, it all felt like it was meant to be.
[00:10:32] Michelle: Wow. And so speaking about growing up and going to a Catholic school and how sex was, explained to you. I actually remember part of my training with Kim was we would go into Catholic schools. We always had to speak to the principal before we did the talk, and we had to be reminded that we were not to bring up condoms, unless condoms were brought up by the kids. And so Kim said to me, don't worry, someone always brings up condoms. Yeah. What was your experience?
[00:11:18] Lisa: I was thinking about that this morning and I was like, did I get any sex education? The kind of memory that I have seared into my brain and it must have been impactful cuz I have a very bad memory is we had these books called Fully Alive. I wonder if they still exist in the Catholic School Board. Each year, you got a new one. From what I remember, you're mostly learning about your body. In grade four, our teacher came out with a puppet on her hand that was a dinosaur I think named Carrie. It was like this purple creature that was on her hand. And she came out and she sat down and you know, she had a voice for this puppet. And it was like, I'm Carrie and I'm gonna teach you about your bodies. It's so emblematic of how afraid we are to just directly talk about sex, to talk about our body parts that she had to put a puppet and like a dinosaur puppet on her hand to do it.
[00:12:16] Michelle: Mine was a banana. She took out a banana and she barely could say the word penis. And so when the banana, and we were all like, what the actual F is going on? Because we at that point, we were comfortable with the word penis. She was the one that was really struggling with it.
[00:12:37] Lisa: Oh no. Yeah, it's like the language around it, and I think I, now it's hard to think about not having access to information because we can just Google anything, right? Where does a penis go? What is a penis? What is this? What is that? Yeah, but we had to get it through a source. When Sue was on the air, I don't think I had any other sex education outside of Sue. But we still had exposure to like sexual content. And I was thinking about that cuz you know, I think it's a very common experience where it's like, oh yeah, I found Playboy magazines in my basement and I remember, I don't know if this was just an Ottawa thing, but we had some soft porn channel called, Nuit Bleu, we would sneak that at whatever 1:00 AM I think it was like a fuzzy channel. You couldn't see the full image once in a while.
[00:13:30] Michelle: Yeah. You could see like a little bit more,
[00:13:34] Lisa: yeah, you could see the goods. You got what you needed out of that little clip. After the Sue documentary, went down a rabbit hole of like, oh, should I do a documentary and try to figure out what it was actually called, and my Google searches were like, Porn Quebec, like just like trying to sort out what it was. I did go down like a research route trying to find the next film, and it's something to do with like Baby Blue. They were the first channel in North America that was showing soft core porn. And what I read was that the Americans that were like close to the border, would drive up and like kind of get their antennas out to try to watch the porn cuz they were bringing in like European, like adult entertainment videos. So good for us Canadians. I'm like, oh, we were get, we were spreading those images. And then when I was in high school, it was a big thing as well to call like sex phone hotlines. Like you would be at like your sleepovers and you would call
[00:14:40] Michelle: Yeah. Like the party lines.
[00:14:43] Lisa: Yeah. And then obviously you had the back room, not at Blockbuster, but I remembered at like our local video store. Mm-hmm. It was just this very odd thing where we were exposed to sexual content. Not in the way that I think young people are now. Cuz it's so easy, but you're watching it, but you're getting no information about it. And in particular, I felt like there was not a focus on female pleasure. Right. Like that was absent from the conversation.
[00:15:13] Michelle: I wanna know if you met Sue and if you did, like what was that like?
[00:15:20] Lisa: I did, I did. So it was a bit of a different process for me in terms of the film where typically I film the main subjects. And I get to interview them. And so it didn't work in that way because Jane had done them and Sue wasn't up for interviews anymore. But it was really important to me and to Jane for me to meet Sue. I met her when we were editing this film, so we had been through hours and hours and hours and hours of footage, hours of her show. You know, it's always like a bit jarring when you see someone who you know in like a very specific way to meet them in real life. But she is so, so, so sweet and so small. Oh, I think that what stood out, she's small and she is, you know, much older than what she was on her show.
[00:16:13] Michelle: She's like, what, 93 now?
[00:16:14] Lisa: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So she's still, you know, spunky and funny, and those characteristics have followed her into her nineties.
[00:16:25] Michelle: Oh my god. I would love to, I don't know where Sue's living, but if it's a retirement home, I would love to be like her roommate.
[00:16:36] Lisa: That would be amazing. Or just be like, what I have heard, because I mean it's in the film and you can imagine that people will just like constantly go up to Sue and ask her questions and talk about their sex lives. I think that's died down a little bit. She also is like a good time, right? I think like her personality on TV is who she is as a human being. So it's not like she's turning on a persona. So I'm sure she'd be a great roommate. I'll put in your application.
[00:17:09] Michelle: Okay, thanks. I was just watching the film again that you made, which is so frigging good.
[00:17:17] Lisa: Thank you.
[00:17:18] Michelle: And I was looking at that specific piece actually, how Sue carried herself, whether it was walking onto David Letterman or into a school. She was just like, herself, whether she was in like the, I don't know, the production area or where things were being filmed, she just walked in, it was, she was the, the same person, right? Which I think that's what people really connected to. Yeah.
[00:17:47] Lisa: I think it's rare to have someone that's so authentically themselves. Again, especially now. And Sue, like her intention was not to become a celebrity. You know, I think I knew that she had a radio show, but I definitely knew that she had a TV show. I did not know that she opened the first birth control clinic at Don Mills. I didn't know she had written all these books, so she was very medium agnostic. It didn't matter. She just wanted the information to get out there. And I think that's so different than the way that some sex educators at this point use social media or just like, yeah, we have a lot more around celebrity and fame and being an influencer, and that didn't exist. And so Sue was just like the sex lady that wanted everyone to know how to have good sex, how to have safe sex. And it didn't matter how she got that message out there. And I think that's why people love her so much.
[00:18:44] Michelle: Yeah. When you were filming Sex with Sue, were there any challenges or even, were there any pieces from that experience that you'll really take with you just the specialness of it.
[00:19:00] Lisa: I mean, yes.
[00:19:02] Michelle: What for you stands out? Like, and I don't know where I saw this, but, oh, I don't know. It was some background. It was a camera on you doing the directing of the film, and you had all of these dildos in your hands. Yeah, and I was like, this would be really interesting because you're a director, so it's not like you are a sex educator or have been like around sex toys your whole life. And I wondered what that would be like for you.
[00:19:32] Lisa: Yeah, no, for sure. It's definitely different to be directing and like holding dildos, but I would say I'm a pretty open person and progressive. I'd like to think I was like that before I went into the shoot, into making this film. But you start talking about sex really explicitly with people you don't know, it challenges your boundaries. So I would say I've definitely, I'm much more open around sex now, the language around it, and I definitely learned so much from Sue because, you know, we caught her show every Sunday. Maybe you watched a little bit of it, you were secretly watching it. But to now go through hours and hours and hours of Sue's advice. I think has definitely improved my sex life and it's opened up how I can talk about sex and even, you know, how I will talk about sex with my future children. I've completely changed as a person in that regard.
[00:20:29] Michelle: Well, speaking about sex and future children, you're pregnant!
[00:20:36] Lisa: Yeah. Yes, I'm pregnant. I am the past six months pregnant with my first child.
[00:20:42] Michelle: Oh my God, that's so exciting. Was there like anything that you learned from either listening to those hours and hours of footage? Anything that you've taken into your experience of being pregnant in terms of like sex and sexuality?
[00:21:03] Lisa: Yeah, you know, I don't know if they made it into the film.
[00:21:06] Lisa: I don't think so, but so many people asked Sue about pregnancy and sex. I think there is one about a person's husband liking her breast milk.
[00:21:17] Documentary Clip: I'm pregnant right now. And I plan on breastfeeding my child after I have it. And I was just wondering, um, my boyfriend really likes to like suck on my breasts during love making. And I was just wondering, um, he's lactose intolerant and I was just wondering if my breast milk could hurt him.
[00:21:33] Sue: Well, he'll certainly have to start taking lactate, won't he?
[00:21:39] Lisa: So that was one that got in there, but there were so many questions about like, what are the best positions when you're pregnant? And I think what I took from it was, your sexuality doesn't end, your sexual desire doesn't end when you get pregnant slash you have children. But I think the representation that we get in terms of sexuality is very much focused on youth to begin with, I was also thinking like, you know, sex is kind of represented as this like hot thing that happens as like a one night stand or a you come in from like the date and you rip off your clothes and you have sex on the kitchen table or something. It is not necessarily this long-term thing, right, where you're with a partner for 10 years. What does sex look like then? I don't know if I've ever seen sex represented when someone's pregnant, like in mainstream media. Maybe a little bit, but so that's to say that I feel like Sue normalized anybody can have sex, everyone can have pleasure. Doesn't matter what stage you're in in your life, and it doesn't stop when you're pregnant.
[00:22:45] Michelle: So yeah, like I remember when I was pregnant, I was like on fire, like I had sex on the brain and I hadn't had any representations of pregnant people having sex. And like I was training to become a sex therapist. I stumbled upon. The like pregnancy genre, porn.
[00:23:10] Lisa: There you go.
[00:23:11] Michelle: It's a thing. There was just something about like, you know, being pregnant and then like seeing somebody pregnant have sex and it kind of validated my experience. I obviously, it's like different, I mean, that's how I felt when I was pregnant, that doesn't mean. And it's certainly not what I see in my practice that everybody who's pregnant is like, you know, wanting to hump a tree.
[00:23:37] Lisa: Totally. And I think it's just, you know, like even talking about the different experiences during pregnancy, in terms of sexuality and having sex because you don't think about it till you get pregnant and then you're there and then you're trying to figure it out. And if you don't have a group of people that are open talking about their own experiences, yeah, you're going to pregnancy porn to see what's up. So, totally.
[00:24:04] Michelle: And also you hear, I don't know if this is for you as well, but you hear so many stories from so many people about what they've heard either about sex during pregnancy or what happens to your body after you have a baby. And oftentimes these stories aren't very nice and they're actually quite scary. And I, I see that a lot in my practice where people are coming in and they are terrified, number one of getting pregnant cuz they've heard about all of these stories about what happens to your body and what could happen once you have a baby and, and how everything can change and how it totally fucks up your sex life and your relationship, and it's really about saying to people, okay, look, there are these stories out there, and those are those people's stories, and you have no idea what your experience is going to be and whatever comes to you, you will kind of move through it and you will be okay. Don't get too caught up in all of the fears that other people are telling you about. Do you find that ever. People coming and saying, oh my God, like, get prepared.
[00:25:35] Lisa: You know, I think there's just been like an absence of the conversation for me a little bit. I think something too that I had to switch my brain or just had not thought about before is you spend however many decades trying not to get pregnant, and so you're avoiding getting pregnant, avoiding, avoiding, avoiding. And I found, oh, okay. I'm, we're gonna start to try just the lack of information that I even had about my body, where I was like, I can only get pregnant a few days a month. What have I been stressing about for like all of these decades? And I consider myself a pretty like, progressive person that should have this information. So that was a bit odd for me. And I think you, again, you're not really talking to people about it until you get there. You're not like preemptively finding that information. And then, yeah. I think there's a lot of fear around, especially your first pregnancy, hurting the baby, like having sex and hurting the baby, is that very common? How do we do this and it's safe and trying to navigate that by yourself or like as a couple is a bit challenging. And then I do think, like speaking to this fear of what happens after, kind of coincides with this idea that I think is getting better, but that moms aren't sexual beings. So I don't even, for me, it's not even fear. I've just had this really awful ingrained thing in my head that like, your sexuality kind of dwindles away when you become a mom, and I'm so happy that right now that feels like it's going away in mainstream media and you can still want sex and be hot and all this stuff after you have children that, yeah, there's definitely a fear that is like, oh, is this all gonna go away after I have a child?
[00:27:22] Michelle: Yeah, I think a lot of people struggle with this loss of identity, right? Where maybe they would've seen themselves as sexual beings and this fear that now there's gonna be this little child that is going to take that all away from you and, and look, I think in the first couple of years you're like, yeah, they do. Well, no, I mean, realistically speaking, when you're not sleeping, if it's between sleep or sex, you're very likely going to take sleep. It usually takes they say about a year. I'm doing some me-search here, right? Like this is very experiential in terms of like people that I see in my practice, but I would say it takes closer to two years for couples after having a baby to kind of get back to where their baseline was before.
[00:28:19] Michelle: And I think that that totally has to do with sleep. It doesn't mean that you can't be close or connected and feel intimacy with each other. It really depends on sleep. The way that sex starts. There might have been more of a spontaneity to it before where yeah, you'd be like watching TV and then, oh, like something happens and you end up by having sex. Whereas with a kid, you, you really do have to think about it and be creative about planning that time together. And it's one thing that is a bit of a trap that I see coming into my practice is once the kids are a little bit older and you can put them to sleep, one parent will typically fall asleep. Because you know, like you're just, it's comfortable and you're, you're putting your kid to sleep and then you fall asleep and then you're done for the rest of the night. And that would be typically when maybe parents will come together and connect and talk and possibly have sex, right?
[00:29:29] Lisa: Yeah. So it changes the whole dynamic where when you were able to connect before, you're just not able to. And I can imagine the sleep deprivation, like what that does to people in general. So it's like the pyramid wears it where your needs are met. I'm sure sleep is above sex.
[00:29:46] Michelle: Oh god. I'm sure it's like somewhere there with like shelter and food. I think it's really helpful for people when they realize that maybe they're not going to want to be having sex on the kitchen table. And as you said, like that's not real. Like, I mean, certainly maybe at the beginnings of relationship in the limerance phase, which is the actual chemical reaction going on in your brain where you just like sex on the brain, the chemical reaction is so strong that you forget about all, you know, the bills and the responsibilities that you have. And so yeah, having sex in a more spontaneous way can happen more likely, but the chemical reaction stops within a few months to a year of a relationship starting. So you really do have to then transition into like more responsive desire where you're thinking about why you wanna have sex, right? Instead of, oh, I feel horny and now I'm gonna go have sex. It's more like we should probably connect. We haven't had sex in a long time and like I know that when we have sex, we feel better and we don't fight as much or something to that effect.
[00:31:01] Lisa: Yeah, totally. Once you do it, you're like, oh yeah. Right. That was great. And I feel like too, that's what Sue was so good about, just normalizing sex, figuring out a way for it to be pleasurable, like in the confines of your life because like you said, relationships, they change. Like it's very different from the beginning of a relationship to later. Then you add on responsibilities, you add on children maybe, and you still want to be having sex. It's just gonna be different in those different stages.
[00:31:34] Michelle: Yeah. And one other piece of information that was really helpful for me when I was pregnant was I remember my obstetrician, she was amazing. She said to me, I just want you to know that after you have the baby and if you have a vaginal birth that your vulva, she's like, my vulva was like, very swollen. So just know that that's okay and it's gonna go back to where it needs to be. And I like, I remember after pregnancy being afraid of having intercourse because I, I don't know, like a part of my body was like, it was felt like it might have been different, and I was legitimately scared to look at myself. So I think it's even becoming more familiar with your body by actually allowing yourself to look at it after. You know, if you're orgasmic, like to see what an orgasm feels like, because maybe it'll feel a tiny bit different. So it's just to get yourself more comfortable and confident and just move slowly until you're ready to have sex with your partner.
[00:32:42] Lisa: You put that so well in terms of not being afraid of looking at your body. And for me at least, I think the kind of incredible slash challenging thing about pregnancy, and I'm sure this is not everyone's experience, has been being forced to connect with my body and not just, you know, in a sexual way, but in this way where you are trying to take care of another life. So often, most of our life were in our heads. Like everything is what our heads, especially when you work a lot, you're thinking about work, work, work. And I've had to be like, oh, I have to take care of my body. I have to learn about my body, the different parts of it, you know, and that includes like your vulva and different parts and like where the baby's gonna come out of. So, you know, and the idea that like your body could rip and all these different, like embarrassing things can happen to your body in front of people that we're not used to and haven't done before.
[00:33:42] Michelle: Yeah, totally. And like the thing is, yeah, maybe those things will happen and in the actual moment, You're not gonna really care.
[00:33:52] Lisa: It's so hard for me to wrap my head around as someone who was easily embarrassed. Yeah. I'm not vulnerable in public, but I do. I believe you.
[00:34:01] Michelle: You're not really gonna care. I remember they asked, they're like, do you want me to put a mirror over there? Whatever. I was like, oh, I, no. Like, just let me get through it.
[00:34:14] Michelle: What projects are you working on right now? Where are you now that Sue, the film is out? What's next in store for you? Other than, you know, keeping a little human alive?
[00:34:27] Lisa: So I've been thinking about the next documentary idea. Sue was such a perfect film to make. It's gonna be hard for me to find that next idea because, It had an incredible woman at the center of it who was talking about sex, who was funny, and then all of the other people that we included as well. And the social context I think as well. Like she had a huge impact over decades and we talked about, you know, very important social events. That's just to say it was this gem that was layered. I never got sick of the subject matter, so I'm trying to find something that is similar, which is a bit of a challenge, but I'll get there.
[00:35:11] Michelle: It sounds like what you learned from this experience was you learned some conditions of satisfaction for you in like what you really want and the experience that you want in a project moving forward, which is actually a lovely thing.
[00:35:27] Lisa: Yeah, for sure. And there were so many subject matters related to sex that we couldn't include in the film. At one point, wanted to include more stuff about sex tech. Which I find very interesting.
[00:35:39] Michelle: Me too.
[00:35:40] Lisa: Because I always thought like including the other voices in the film, we were thinking about who's the new Sue? In terms of like progressive sex education and also access to, you know, pleasure toys, et cetera, et cetera. What is now the progressive thing that's happening? So sex tech, for me, I was like, wow. Yeah. Couldn't find a way to get it in the film. And then also the ongoing access to abortion. We, at one point I think we're chatting with someone who had an organization that were giving access to Americans, to the abortion pill. So I think there's lots of subject matter that comes out of that. We had, like Nina Hartley was in the film and she's really amazing and she makes adult entertainment that is educational. I don't know if you've seen it, where she like, this is how you give a blowjob and then shows you how to do it. And I just thought, oh, that's so cool that she's making these guides, but they're quote unquote titillating. So it like makes people interested in this subject matter.
[00:36:48] Michelle: It is so important to have somebody like Nina Hartley out there and with people that I work with, the clients that I see, many of them have not had a lot of sex education, and sex is a very narrow idea of like penis in vagina. And they end up by hitting roadblocks because, well, let's just say they can't have intercourse for some reason, whether it be pain or something else. And then, They're like, okay, well if we can't do that kind of sex, then we'll just stop having sex. Because the idea of doing these other kinds of sexual things feels really shameful depending on how they grew up and, and those belief systems. And so you get people that come in to see me and it's really cool because they wanna get past the shame. They wanna understand, they wanna understand a little bit more about what is oral sex and how can you think about oral sex in a way that isn't dirty or trying to find the right kind of either literature or videos where they're like, well, how do you give a blowjob? How do you go down on a, a woman like I, I don't even know where the clitoris is. Like this is still happening.
[00:38:06] Lisa: Yeah, like when we were making the film, we were talking about being ace or like asexual and like what that means in terms of this entire conversation. So it is really nice. I think that it's opened up and we're talking about this and there are people like you to keep Sue's legacy going in a different context than the nineties, early two thousands because there's still so much work to do. I think it's. Kind of the one topic that we all shy away from.
[00:38:38] Michelle: Yeah. No, I agree. And Lisa, I wanted to say thank you so much for doing the work that you do and waking up the Sue inside of us, to relive our youth and to just remind us about the importance of the work that we do.
[00:38:59] Lisa: Thank you. Aw, well, you're so welcome and no thank you. I have the easy job. I'm just making the film. You're the one that has to keep spreading the information, so no, I appreciate what you do. I can't imagine It's an easy job.
[00:39:12] Michelle: So you know what, it is surprisingly an amazing, amazing job and in some weird way, like it is kind of easy once you're able to come to terms with like your own sexuality and open your mind up to thinking in different ways, and to see the impact it can have on people who have lived with so much shame. It makes the work so easy. And so fun and really meaningful.
[00:39:45] Lisa: That's awesome.
[00:39:46] Michelle: Thank you, Lisa.
[00:39:47] Lisa: Thanks for having me.
[00:39:52] Michelle: That was my conversation with Lisa. This show is produced by Katie Jensen at Vocal Fry Studios. If you have show ideas or even a confession that you want me to answer in an episode, email me at michelle@getsome.ca. And don't forget to follow me on Instagram @getsome_podcast. You'll get great ideas around sex and sexuality as well as to see what's happening between episodes. Thank you for listening.