Unless you identify as asexual, you can’t deny mankind’s fascination with sex and all things sexual in general.
In fact, back when the Drive-reduction theory was first proposed, it was believed that thirst, hunger and the desire for sex were the most innate biological needs and primary drives that led everyone’s passions and maintained the cyclic balance of life itself.
Personally, I don’t think much has changed since then as we’ve evolved into beings that are constantly bombarded with the idea of commercialised and casual sex from one end; and the moral reasoning, teaching and standards of conservatism from the other.
Regardless of your moral stance and beliefs on sex and sexuality, it’s inherently a deed that’s demands everyone’s raw and undivided attention and fascination.
Obsessing Over Interesting Subjects
Jeannette first started working at a newspaper as a pullout coordinator after graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Biotechnology. She later worked as a journalist and after about five years, she decided that she wanted some corporate experience so she moved to the corporate responsibility department in a bank and she discovered that she also had a high interest in corporate responsibility, governance and social enterprises.
Last year, she quit her full-time job to pick up programming and after that, she set up content and web-development agencies, as well as a vape startup called VapeClubMy.
“A couple of years back when I was a journalist, some colleagues and I were talking about podcasting. One of them asked what I’d want my podcast to be about and I said sex because it’s a subject that I’ve been fascinated by for the longest time,” said Jeannette Goon, the founder and host of The Sex Beat.
“One reason is because there are so many ways to think and talk about it. If you look at it from a physiological/scientific point of view, there are some pretty specific physiological phases in the sexual act, each with its own set of chemical responses in the body. Then when you bring social aspects into it, different individuals with different personalities and unique experiences and add all of it into the mix, sex becomes this very complicated thing that’s also quite simple at the same time.”
She described herself as a person that becomes quite obsessive when she finds a subject that sparks her interest. She’s the kind of person that likes to find out as much as she can on the subject of interest by reading anything and everything that remotely mentions the topic. Over the years, she found inspiration and tidbits from random things like reading books like “The Joy Of Writing Sex” by Elizabeth Benedict.
One thing that particularly stood out for her from that book is that good sex-writing doesn’t always involve good sex. “I think that really made me truly realise that sex can be this complicated thing. Or even some line in a British television series, where one of the characters who was dating a girl said ‘I’m not a lesbian. I just happen to love a girl’, or something to that,” she mentioned.
To her, such things are very interesting.
The Sex Beat
And her fascination with this subject matter, eventually motivated her to start her own series of podcasts about sex, sexuality and gender called The Sex Beat. Speaking about The Sex Beat, she said, “Don’t really have a concrete plan for it yet. I’m doing this mainly out of intellectual curiosity. But at the same time definitely wanting to delight listeners by telling stories that they would want to hear. I would love to publish more fiction/stories about sex, etc., on the text portion of the website or even the Tumblr that I’ll be setting up soon. I would also love for more people to be willing to come on the show and talk about their personal experiences.”
For now, she’ll update the series with new episodes every fortnight due to time constraints and she’ll use it as a platform to discuss a range of sexual topics—from lighthearted and fun ones like anal, threesomes and badly-written sex stories, to ones that are more serious, educational like transgenderism, STIs, legalities of marriage, and more.
“At this time, I can’t think of anything that I wouldn’t talk about. For topics, that I may not truly understand, for example, transgenderism, I would definitely want to get someone with experience to come on the show as well,” she added.
In preparation for each episode, she usually brainstorms and notes down her ideas especially when she’s on the move. This also happens to be the time she usually comes up with a lot of ideas, so once she comes up with a good number of them, then she tries to select a topic that she can try and tie into something current, either to what’s happening in the world (if relevant) or to something that she might have done recently. “From there, I do some research (read or contact experienced people) and build further on that topic,” she added.
While the podcast has only been updated twice over the course of the past three weeks, she mentioned that she’d like to update the podcast more frequently and it might eventually end up becoming a weekly podcast.
Entertaining Episodes
Although both episodes were relatively short in length (no pun intended), they were quite fun, engaging and they lived up to my expectations. The pilot episode was released on Valentine’s Day and Jeannette read out some tips especially dedicated to the adventurous couples out there that are open to getting their anal regions explored. Here’s a spoiler, it had something to do with sticking it in when your partner is breathing out, with their consent, of course.
The first episode of the podcast was much longer and it featured the story of a Asian woman who went over to Australia, identified the common fetish that white guys have for Asian women, and took advantage of it by becoming an escort. It gave you a sneak peek into her thought process and also the lives of the people that she was involved with.
The episode ended quite abruptly in my opinion, I felt more time could have been spent discussing things like people’s motivations for engaging in transactional sex, race-based fetishes, and the difficulty for an escort to transition back to civil life (if that is something relevant to her).
However, I do realise that the podcast is still in its infancy and that there’s plenty of room for growth and improvement both in its structure and the content of discussion. Jeannette did mention in our interview that she’d like to limit each episode to about 15 minutes as she personally finds that it’s hard to listen to long podcasts even when it’s one that sparks her interest.
For now, she’s also contemplating about reading erotica on the podcast, and if this is something that you’d like to hear, you can drop her a message here.
