Podcast review: Sexologist Chantelle Otten releases sex therapy series
Prominent sexologist Chantelle Otten has released a podcast on sex therapy sessions, which includes one couple’s tentative journey towards swinging.
Imagine having the awkward details about your sex life broadcast to the whole world, those flushed pillow conversations heard by an anonymous audience. Prominent sexologist Chantelle Otten has released a podcast with Audible doing just that. Listeners hear recordings from her sex therapy sessions. There’s no names but on the first episode listeners hear a tentative journey to swinging.
They seek guidance from Otten, the director of the Australian Institute of Sexology and Sexual Medicine, on navigating the anxiety emerging as they try to make their fantasy a reality. Otten’s clients ask questions such as: What if they become bored with their vanilla marital sex or it leads to infidelity? If the woman gets cold feet, will her husband be able to forgive her? He says yes but those nagging doubts can be persistently loud. Is it worth the stress? He says he’s happy to put the swinging dream to bed and doesn’t want her to do it for him.
Otten listens patiently and her voice is husky with a high inflection. The music is like an expensive ad for luxury real estate.
Listeners do kind of get invested in the couple, even if it’s uncomfortable. Will they find their third person? Can their relationship survive?
Is the podcast just an ad for sex therapy? It does seem to work for the couple.
To help them on their journey, Otten encourages the couple to go to a sex party with only the intention of watching instead of trying to secure additional parties.
The woman tells listeners the sex party experience was eye-opening and “really open”. “You just walk around and there are people having sex everywhere,” she says. “I was enthralled in it and the fact people are just so open walking around so freely, no body image issues. Men and women … I was really impressed with everybody.”
She sounds confident. They find a couple and are arranging to go on another date. We don’t find out if the foursome have a happy ending.
The podcast is intimate and at times uncomfortable but may make other couples feel less alone on their journey to sexual fulfilment and healing.
There’s certainly audiences who want to know about others’ romantic lives, to which television’s Married At First Sight and The Bachelor are a testament.
And let’s not forget the enduring cultural legacy of the Dolly Doctor section of the now defunct adolescent girl magazine of the same name.
Otten also talks about how consent should be explicitly taught, a topic that has gained prominence after the reckoning of MeToo.
“I like to tell patients to imagine sexual activity like they’re driving a car,” she tells listeners. “I get them to categorise their individual boundaries using a traffic light system before bringing them together.”
Otten’s traffic lights work like this: Green activities have enthusiastic consent, amber activities are under discussion and red activities are a hard no. It’s a better system than the federal government’s widely derided milkshake consent ad.
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