This week, Jennifer Zamparelli debuted her new podcast ‘Just Between Us’ with the Irish Independent. The show promises to cover “all things relationships and sex and all the messy bits in between! No judgement, just open and honest chats for all to enjoy”. Zamparelli’s sneak peek of the show offers insight into the range of topics it’ll cover from sex toys, OnlyFans, to swinging.
“Needless to say, things may get a little explicit,” listeners are told.
The show’s flagship episodes premiered with Graham, a member of Ireland’s swinger community, and sex educator Dr. Caroline West to discuss how to be your best sexual self. Interestingly, the conversations themselves felt somewhat sanitised. During Zamparelli’s discussion with Graham, for example, he corrects her use of the word swinging, for the preferred term “ethical non-mongamy”, a phrase that has a curious precision to it.
When asked about how prevalent jealousy is among non-monogamous couples, he indicates that it’s frequent, and talks about the need to “manage” and “reframe” these emotions , a topic that ironically seems to dominate the content of polyamorous influencers. Though couched in therapeutic language, it asks listeners to purge core human impulses, reducing sex to something transactional.
The result is a commodified version of sexuality. In the case of swinging, Zamparelli’s guest speaks explicitly about swingers events being branded, clubs include entry fees, and apps offering review options “A bit like an Airbnb.” At one point, Graham even describes himself as “merely a living sex toy”
What makes this genre of podcast particularly jarring is that they strive to be edgy and transgressive, yet feel strangely clinical. The genre is dominated with pastel aesthetics and a tendency to discuss sex in a somewhat infantile way, almost in an effort to desexualise sex itself. Despite their affected épater la bourgeoisie approach, the intended audience is unmistakably middle-class, a milieu where individual liberty is already upheld as an ideal. When applied to our sexual and romantic lives, however, this mindset reduces sex to being governed by a market logic that elevates consent and power dynamics as its central, if not only, ethic.
A depressing aspect of these podcasts is that they can never truly create intrigue, since nothing they discuss is actually taboo – those have all been long broken. As the show points out, you can already just buy erotica at Tesco. There are no prohibitions to make these acts provocative, there is little to excite curiosity or imagination. In normalizing every detail of desire and turning intimacy into everyday conversation, these podcasts make spontaneity and risk feel unfamiliar, perhaps stripping sex of its thrill.
For example, on one popular Instagram channel, a couple draws a kink from a hat each episode before going off to try it. Later they review it for their audience in cold and prosaic terms, often providing them with a cost-benefit analysis at the end. The result is, what would normally be a transgressive conversation, ultimately feeling like a diffuse one. As Michel Clouscard observed, “Everything is permitted, but nothing is possible.”
Zamparelli’s show will be entering a growing market of sex-themed podcasts, offering everything from sex advice and therapy sessions to candid stories and confessions. There are many others, yet it’s a strange efflorescence of sexual podcasts for a generation in the deepest depths of a sexual recession.
Zoomers have lower rates of secondary students having intercourse, teen pregnancy rates are lower, they’re more likely to be abstinent and have a lower number of sexual encounters per annum compared to previous generations. As John McGuirk noted in a recent piece, “Young people are more sober, less likely to use drugs, less likely to be having inappropriate liaisons with each other, and more likely to be sad and depressed.”
Dr West brings up the trend of Heterofatalism, where women just give up on the dating scene entirely, but the effects also show up in the data: fewer young people are pursuing romantic relationships, while masturbatory acts are on the rise. Across genders, 45% of young Irish adults report watching pornography, and one in five men under the age of 55 watch it daily. In 2024, OnlyFans subscriptions grew by nearly a quarter. Much like this genre of sex podcasts themselves, these services provide parasocial outlets for sexual desire while dulling individuals’ capacity for genuine sexual connection.
Online relationship advice forums provide no shortage of accounts from young women whose partners are unable to engage in sexual activity without the use of pornography as a crutch. While this represents the more extreme end of porn consumption, research has shown that individuals who regularly view pornography are significantly less likely to pursue romantic relationships and tend to report lower sexual satisfaction due to the unrealistic expectations created by pornographic content.
The irony of this liberalisation, as Slavoj Žižek pointed out, is that pornography is an inherently conservative genre. Highly structured, staged, and codified, it leaves little room for spontaneity. “The price you pay for seeing all, is that it’s sabotaged at the psychological level.” It’s commonly pointed out that masturbation among animals is rare in the wild but frequent in captivity. Cultural openness hasn’t had the effect of liberating desire; but managing and domesticating it.
Sexual openness paradoxically makes general openness more difficult as risk management becomes an integral part of interactions between the sexes, evident both in the promotion of concepts like affirmative consent and in more banal situations, like cold approaches in the street or at bars becoming increasingly rare. Even in homosocial relationships, people feel inhibited about nudity or forming close friendships out of fear of being perceived as gay. The result is a more neurotic sexual culture that fuels isolation and loneliness.
This genre of podcast, while presenting themselves as the cutting edge of the sexual revolution, are a reaction against it, disguised as empowerment. In managing sexuality through an infantile and prosaic lens, they actually temper real sexual desire. Despite its pretence of sexual libertinism, sexual openness is making frigids of us all.
Victorians covered the legs of their furniture with skirts because the curvature would apparently arouse the men. The Can-Can was once a scandalous dance, one that the modern mind, addled with sex podcasts, is numb to. After decades of liberationist discourse, we are drifting towards an era of less connection and a possible sex recession. Perhaps some things should remain Just Between Us.