Sue Johanson, the blunt, bawdy and beloved Canadian sex educator and host of the long-running call-in TV show “Sunday Night Sex Show” and its American counterpart, “Talk Sex With Sue Johanson,” died June 28 at a care home. branch in North Toronto. She turned 92.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter Jane Johanson.
Sue Johanson dressed understated, often wearing a blazer and metal-rimmed glasses, but she had the timing and instinct of a comedian, defusing the hot-button topics she covered. (During demonstrations, she had a way of stretching condoms—she was an evangelist to them—reminiscent of a clown making balloon animals.)
And just like dr. Ruth Westheimer, Holocaust survivor and former Israeli sniper turned sex therapist, Mrs. Johanson, a licensed nurse and mother of three who had run a birth control clinic at a public high school for nearly two decades, became a middle-aged media star.
“I wasn’t young,” she said in “Sex With Sue,” a 2022 documentary about her directed by Lisa Rideout, with Jane as her mother’s interlocutor and the film’s creative consultant. ‘I wasn’t pretty. I had no bodacious tatas. I was a mother with a wealth of information.”
Is it weird to smear body glitter on your boyfriend’s testicles? Is it safe to have sex in a hot tub? Can a Ziploc bag act as a condom? If condoms are left in a car and they freeze, are they still good? Answers: No. No (chlorinated water is too harsh for genitals, especially women’s). Absolutely not. And yes, once they are thawed.
Every Sunday evening the questions poured in about straight sex, gay sex, masturbation and all kinds of fetishes, fantasies and fears. At the show’s peak, in the early 2000s, nearly 100,000 calls were handled and screened by operators, though only 10 or 12 made it on the air on any given night.
Sex toy manufacturers sent their wares in boxes full. Mrs. Johanson distributed them to her young crew for road testing — “The Unofficial Sex Toy Testing Facility of Canada,” she called them — and showcased their features at her desk, reaching into her “hot stuff” bag, a black tote bag decorated with flames, to bring out the latest offers. “The good, the bad, and the ugly,” she liked to say. (Makers tended to gild the lily, such as the company that made a vibrator with a camera on the end. “It gives a whole new meaning to ‘I’m ready for my close-up,'” Ms Johanson said deadpanned .)
As a child of the Great Depression, she was thrifty and price-conscious, often presenting homemade alternatives. Why not set your cell phone ringtone to vibrate, tuck it into your underpants and let your friends call non-stop?
“I remember her pulling off a cucumber,” Canadian comedian Russell Peters said in the documentary. “I’ve never looked at a cucumber the same before.”
Mrs. Johanson began her radio broadcasting career with a wildly popular show on a rock station that lasted more than a decade. “Sunday Night Sex Show” first aired on Canadian television in 1996. In 2002, the Oxygen network commissioned a US version, which ran directly after the Canadian show, so that US callers could try their hand at it. American audiences were more shy and naive than their Canadian viewers, Mrs. Johanson told Mireya Navarro of DailyExpertNews in 2004; they seemed to have no basic knowledge. Many young female callers wondered if they could get pregnant from oral sex.
“Ms. Johanson said she couldn’t ride the subway or stand in a grocery store in Canada without being approached to answer the kind of question that would make even the frozen chicken blush,” Ms. Navarro wrote. the United States, a much larger market, seems almost embarrassed but mostly grateful to her growing fan base. “I think Americans are so polite and so respectful that recognition is great,” she said. “People will look at me and say, ” Hello, I love your show.” And that’s where it ends.”
However, she was celebrated on the American talk show circuit, performing with Jay Leno, Ellen DeGeneres, David Letterman and Conan O’Brien, terrifying them one night with the contents of her hot-stuff bag: it contained a vibrating rubber duck. , a dildo she tied to her chin, and a handmade hand-held vibrator she’d fashioned from a can of bubble wrap and a tubular sock.
“You’re like a perverted MacGyver,” Mr. O’Brien said in shock.
“I consider sex a gift from God,” Ms. Johanson told Ms. Navarro. “We’re the only ones who can really enjoy sex, so we have an obligation to learn about it and enjoy it.”
Susan Avis Bailey Powell was born on July 29, 1930 in Toronto. Her mother, Ethel (Bell) Powell, was a housewife. Her father, Wilfred Bailey Powell, was in the Royal Canadian Air Force and held a number of jobs. Her mother died when Sue was 10, and she was raised primarily by an aunt.
She met Ejnor Karl Johanson, an electrical inspector, on a blind date just before entering nursing school at St. Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg; they married in the early 1950s and moved to Toronto to take over her aunt’s real estate business.
Mrs. Johanson opened her birth control clinic in 1970, after a friend of her oldest daughter got pregnant in high school and had an abortion, which was largely illegal in Canada at the time. “Children get involved in sex without their parents’ consent,” she told a reporter in 1983, “which is why they should be able to get contraceptives without their consent.”
Throughout her career, high school and college students have been her main concern. She was a tireless speaker, a regular at college freshman orientations each fall and at hundreds of high schools each year. Her husband, said Jane Johanson, was a reserved, private man, the opposite of his gregarious wife, but he handled her career and fame with grace and “took it like a champ.” He died in 2014.
In addition to her daughter Jane, Mrs. Johanson is survived by another daughter, Carol Howard; two grandchildren; and a great-grandchild. Her son, Eric, died in 2021.
Ms. Johanson also wrote a magazine column and was the author of three books: “Sex, Sex and More Sex,” “Sex Is Perfectly Natural but Not Naturally Perfect,” and “Talk Sex: Answers to Questions You Can’t Ask Your Parents.” ”
In 2000, she was awarded the Order of Canada, the country’s highest award for pioneers in their field.
Ms. Johanson’s Canadian show went off the air in 2005, and the US version in 2008. It was about time: The Internet had become the go-to source for questions about sex. As Dan Savage, the sex columnist, put it in the Ms. Johanson documentary, there was a Wikipedia page for every device and every sex act, and Ms. Johanson felt like she couldn’t keep up with the times. At 77, she was ready, but sad to call it quits.
“There will be a very big hole in my heart,” she said as she introduced her final episode in May 2008, her voice breaking. “I love doing this show.”
She added: “I close with the same condom quickie we ended the first show with 174 episodes ago: Sex will be sweeter if you wrap your peter.”
