Sue Johanson, the blunt, bawdy and beloved Canadian intercourse educator and host of the long-running tv call-in program “Sunday Evening Intercourse Present” and its American counterpart, “Discuss Intercourse With Sue Johanson,” died on June 28 at a care facility in North Toronto. She was 92.
Her dying was confirmed by her daughter Jane Johanson.
Sue Johanson dressed demurely, usually in blazers and wire-rimmed glasses, however she had a comic’s timing and instincts, which defused the hot-button subjects she addressed. (In demonstrations, she had a means of stretching out condoms — she was an evangelist for them — that recalled a clown making balloon animals.)
And like Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the Holocaust survivor and onetime Israeli sniper turned intercourse therapist, Ms. Johanson, a registered nurse and mom of three who had run a contraception clinic in a public highschool for almost 20 years, grew to become a media star in midlife.
“I wasn’t younger,” she mentioned in “Intercourse With Sue,” a 2022 documentary about her directed by Lisa Rideout, with Jane as her mom’s interlocutor and the movie’s inventive marketing consultant. “I wasn’t lovely. I didn’t have bodacious tatas. I used to be a mom with a load of data.”
Is it bizarre to place physique glitter in your boyfriend’s testicles? Is it protected to have intercourse in a sizzling tub? Might a Ziploc baggie function a condom? If condoms are left in a automotive they usually freeze, are they nonetheless good? Solutions: No. No (chlorinated water is simply too harsh for genitals, notably ladies’s). Undoubtedly not. And sure, as soon as they’ve been defrosted.
Each Sunday night time, the questions poured in about straight intercourse, homosexual intercourse, masturbation and all method of fetishes, fantasies and fears. On the present’s peak, within the early 2000s, almost 100,000 calls have been fielded and screened by operators, although solely 10 or 12 made it on the air on a given night time.
Producers of intercourse toys despatched their wares by the boxload. Ms. Johanson would divvy them up amongst her younger crew for street exams — “The Unofficial Intercourse Toy Testing Facility of Canada,” she referred to as them — and display their options at her desk, reaching into her “sizzling stuff” bag, a black tote emblazoned with flames, to tug out the newest choices. “The great, the unhealthy and the ugly,” she appreciated to say. (Makers tended to gild the lily, like the corporate that made a vibrator with a digital camera at its tip. “It provides an entire new that means to, ‘I’m prepared for my close-up,’” Ms. Johanson deadpanned.)
A baby of the Nice Melancholy, she was thrifty and cost-conscious, and she or he usually introduced home made options. Why not flip your cellphone ringer to vibrate, tuck it in your underpants and have your pals name nonstop?
“I keep in mind her giving a hand job to a cucumber,” Russell Peters, the Canadian comic, mentioned within the documentary. “I by no means checked out a cucumber the identical.”
Ms. Johanson began her broadcasting profession in radio with a wildly in style present on a rock station that ran for greater than a decade. “Sunday Evening Intercourse Present” first aired on Canadian tv in 1996. In 2002, the Oxygen community commissioned an American model, which ran proper after the Canadian present, so American callers might have their shot. The U.S. viewers was shyer and extra naïve than her Canadian viewers, Ms. Johanson informed Mireya Navarro of The New York Instances in 2004; they appeared to lack primary data. Many younger feminine callers puzzled if they might get pregnant from oral intercourse.
“Ms. Johanson mentioned she couldn’t journey the subway or stand in a grocery line in Canada with out being approached to reply the type of query that might make even the frozen hen blush,” Ms. Navarro wrote. “However in the US, a a lot greater market, her rising fan base appears virtually bashful however principally grateful. ‘I discover that People are so well mannered and so respectful that being acknowledged is great,’ she mentioned. ‘Folks will take a look at me and say, “Hello, I like your present.” And that’s the place it ends.”
She was, nevertheless, feted on the American talk-show circuit, showing with Jay Leno, Ellen DeGeneres, David Letterman and Conan O’Brien, whom she terrified one night time with the contents of her hot-stuff bag: It included a vibrating rubber duck, a dildo she strapped to her chin and a home made, hand-operated vibrator that she had usual from a tin can fitted with Bubble Wrap and a tube sock.
“You’re like a perverted MacGyver,” Mr. O’Brien mentioned, horrified.
“I regard intercourse as a present from God,” Ms. Johanson informed Ms. Navarro. “We’re the one ones that basically are in a position to get pleasure from intercourse, so we now have an obligation to find out about it and luxuriate in it.”
Susan Avis Bailey Powell was born on July 29, 1930, in Toronto. Her mom, Ethel (Bell) Powell, was a homemaker. Her father, Wilfred Bailey Powell, was within the Royal Canadian Air Pressure and had a lot of jobs. Her mom died when Sue was 10, and she or he was raised principally by an aunt.
She met Ejnor Karl Johanson, {an electrical} inspector, on a blind date simply earlier than she entered nursing faculty on the St. Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg; they married within the early Nineteen Fifties and moved to Toronto to take over her aunt’s actual property enterprise.
Ms. Johanson opened her contraception clinic in 1970, after a buddy of her eldest daughter grew to become pregnant in highschool and had an abortion, which was principally unlawful in Canada on the time. “Children become involved with intercourse with out their mother and father’ consent,” she informed a reporter in 1983, “and subsequently they need to be capable to get contraceptives with out their consent.”
All through her profession, highschool and school college students have been her largest concern. She was an indefatigable speaker, a daily in school freshman orientations every fall and at tons of of excessive colleges every year. Her husband, Jane Johanson mentioned, was a reserved, non-public man, the alternative of his gregarious spouse, however he dealt with her profession and fame with grace and “took it like a champ.” He died in 2014.
Along with her daughter Jane, Ms. Johanson is survived by one other daughter, Carol Howard; two grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. Her son, Eric, died in 2021.
Ms. Johanson additionally wrote {a magazine} column and was the writer of three books: “Intercourse, Intercourse and Extra Intercourse,” “Intercourse Is Completely Pure however Not Naturally Good” and “Discuss Intercourse: Solutions to Questions You Can’t Ask Your Dad and mom.”
In 2000, she was awarded the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest honor for pioneers of their area.
Ms. Johanson’s Canadian present went off the air in 2005, and the American model in 2008. It was time: The web had turn into the go-to supply for intercourse inquiries. As Dan Savage, the intercourse columnist, put it within the documentary about Ms. Johanson, there was a Wikipedia web page for each piece of kit and each intercourse act, and Ms. Johanson felt she was unable to maintain up with the instances. At 77, she was prepared however unhappy to name it quits.
“There shall be a terrific large gap in my coronary heart,” she mentioned as she launched her closing episode in Might 2008, her voice breaking. “I like doing this present.”
She added, “I’ll shut with the identical condom quickie that we ended the primary present with 174 episodes in the past: Intercourse shall be sweeter, when you wrap your peter.”
