Sex.Life’s Morgan Penn talks sex advice, education with Paula Bennett - Ask Me Anything

Morgan Penn’s new Sex.Life podcast is available now. Listen on iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts.

Last year, NZME’s Sex.Life podcast became a smash hit from the moment it went live. Hosted by somatic sexologist Morgan Penn and comedian and radio host Hayley Sproull, the series was inspired by Penn’s experiences at a sex school in rural New Zealand, and the strange things she learnt on the nine-day course.

The series became the most popular new show on Apple Podcasts for 2023, and spawned a second season that is now live.

Penn has no desire to revisit the sex school that formed the basis of the first season, though.

“It’s an international school, but it’s based here in New Zealand. And some of the things I’d heard that they had done there, I was like, ‘that is wild and unsafe. I need to get down there, experience it for myself and see what the hell’s going on’,” Penn told Paula Bennett on her NZ Herald podcast, Ask Me Anything.

Attending the school required people to live on site, eat what food they were given, go to sleep and wake up when told, and experience their version of sex education. Penn said each day, things would escalate. “The first day we were literally humping the earth; it was wild, initiation by fire, but then it just got more and more wild.”

She never intended to record a podcast about it, but doing Sex.Life helped her to integrate her experience and process what she went through. But Penn has no intention of going back, and does not recommend anyone else should go.

Sex.Life features Morgan Penn and Hayley Sproull. Photo / NZME

Instead, Penn is soldiering on with the second season, exploring different kinks and relationships around New Zealand. Topics so far have included going to a swingers ball, the country’s oldest sex club, and trying out a rope-tying course.

While it may make for some R18 level conversations on the podcast, Penn is committed to getting people to open up about sex, sexuality, and to talk about what they want.

Having studied a form of sexology that focuses on our relationships with our body, Penn told Bennett the main thing people can do to work on their sex lives and be less prudish, is to be more open in their communication with each other about their desires.

“Quite often people don’t even know what they want because they’re disconnected from their bodies and they think they should almost have like a menu, ‘oh, I like this and this and this’. But when we are in our bodies, we realise that our body wants different things every day.

“And if we can communicate - which is one of the biggest issues people come to me for - we have the capabilities to share what we’re desiring and for someone to hear it without taking offence or to think they haven’t been doing it right for so long and a willingness to do something different.”

She said it’s rare for two people in a relationship to be on the same page at the same time when it comes to desires, frequency and different acts, and we need to start normalising these conversations - particularly making people feel comfortable in discussing what they do and don’t like from an early age.

Penn said New Zealand had got to a good place with sex education in schools, but it felt like the country is going backwards with the Government’s proposed curriculum changes.

“It’s really sad because we’d moved into a place where inclusivity was really being pushed and people being celebrated for who they liked, what they liked, normalising a lot of things that people were struggling with alone.”

Listen to the full episode for more from Morgan Penn on her career, and her sex tips and advice.

Ask Me Anything is a Herald podcast, hosted by former Deputy Minister Paula Bennett. New episodes are available every Sunday.

You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.