'Sex with Sue': How Canadian Sue Johanson revolutionized sex education

The Canadian woman who revolutionized sex education, Sue Johanson, is now the subject of a new documentary Sex with Sue (premieres on Monday, October 10 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on W Network).

From the 1980s to the 2000s, through her radio and TV shows, Johanson filled a massive gap in how people in Canada, and the U.S. learned about having safe and enjoyable sex, answering questions the public had about their own personal sex lives.

“Between 2016 and 2018 Jane Johanson organized a series of interviews with her mother, Sue Johanson,” text at the beginning of the documentary reads. “The purpose was to capture Sue’s fading memories.”

The Sex with Sue documentary is a combination of interviews with Johanson herself, people who worked with her, celebrities who watched and listened to her, and other people who were impacted by Johanson’s teaching, in addition to archival clips from the Sunday Night Sex Show.

“[I remember] her giving a hand job to a cucumber and how to hold it for a blow job,” comedian Russell Peters says.

Much of the feedback is similar, with people connecting to Johanson's kindness and honesty, while being completely unassuming, as she’s giving people lessons on using sex toys, which ones are the best, providing advice to satisfy different people’s fetishes and other essential sexuality lessons. She looked like your grandma and made people comfortable to ask her their most intimate questions.

“Sue was straightforward, honest, non-judgemental [and] met people where they were at,” another sexuality educator, Dr. Nadine Thornhill states in the documentary.

'I wasn’t promoting abortion I was trying to prevent it'

Looking back at her life and her journey to become Canada’s prolific sex expert, Sue Johanson admits that she didn’t know anything about sex when she was young, but got the sense that it was considered a “no no.”

Johanson was a nurse who trained with nuns at St. Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg, who Johanson describes as “uncomfortable” ladies who never talked about sex.

Fast forward to Johanson getting married and having kids, her daughter Jane said her mother never taught her about sex but her friends, who knew her mother was a nurse, wouldn’t hesitate to ask any question they had.

Johanson saw a deficit in her education and professional training around sexuality, and decided to go back to university to fill that gap. There was a specific turning point when a friend of her daughter’s got pregnant in her teens, terminating the pregnancy, and Johanson realized there wasn’t a place for teenagers to get advice and education on how to not get pregnant in the first place.

“I wasn’t promoting abortion I was trying to prevent it,” Johanson says in the documentary.

Johanson then opened a clinic at Don Mills Collegiate in Toronto in the 1970s, when teen pregnancy was occurring at a particularly high rate.

“I got fed up with parents who said parents should be the sex educators for their own children, and then they were heading anywhere but talking about sex.”

Americans were 'further back in their development'

When the 1980s came around, Sue Johanson started taking her advice to a broader audience on the radio, just as the HIV/AIDS epidemic was rising. A frightening time in history, but it did change conversations around sex.

As Dan Savage, sex advice columnist describes it, discussions shifted to be about “the sex people were actually having, as opposed to the sex we all publicly agreed to pretend everyone was having.”

It also made Johanson’s advice even more important as a way to educate people on safe sex, no matter what type of sex they were having.

An interesting moment in the documentary comes as Johanson’s show reached outside of Canada and into the U.S. on the Oxygen network, which allowed her to answer questions from American fans.

As producer Julie Smith recalls, when the American version of the show started they didn’t realize how “ill-educated” Americans were about sexuality, with camera operator Germain Wilson adding that their questions seemed like they were “further back in their development.”

Smith also noted that after the Janet Jackson, Justin Timberlake “nipplegate” incident, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S. sent a list of words they could not use on the show, which received particular pushback from Johanson who wanted to ensure that the appropriate terms were used, regardless of this list of banned words.

“I didn’t give a damn, I walked in and I owned this place, and I can do this,” Johanson says to the camera while raising her glasses with her middle finger.

As time progressed Johanson, admittedly, couldn’t keep up with the societal and technological advancements, marking the end of her public career as the sexpert who appeared on popular talk shows like The Ellen DeGeneres Show, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and was even parodied on Saturday Night Live.

But one thing this documentary solidifies is that, even if she’s not on our TV screens anymore, she taught entire generations about their own bodies, sex and sexuality, while having fun too.