New York Magazine's Sex Lives

Myisha Battle learned about sex from textbooks censored with Sharpie markers. Today, she's a San Francisco-based sex coach dedicated to helping other women orgasm— and to squirt.

In the horny imaginations of Harry Potter super-fans, Professor Snape is a BDSM sex god and Hermione Granger is a squirter.

He's been telling Americans how to fuck for 26 years, and he's still not done.

Gay marriage has moved to the mainstream, but has wedding culture followed? What parts of wedding culture are worth keeping, anyway?

A listener calls Sex Lives with a harrowing story about accidentally destroying her husband's penis with Lysol.

Yes, it's a thing. Brian J. Moylan reports from the wild world of cosmetic procedures for male sex organs, starting with the time he cryonically froze his penis.

E.J. Dickson, who last visited Sex Lives while pregnant, returns with her two-month-old baby in tow. She recounts taking an Uber to the hospital while her water was breaking, and feeling her uterus lifted out of her body. Motherhood is wild.

Where is the best place in America to fall in love? When Cosmopolitan asked Jada Yuan to find out, she flew to six wildly different locales to look for love in every damn place. She came away exhausted—and more optimistic than ever.

Ella Dawson has herpes, and talking about it is sort of her thing. Ella gets real about dating with herpes, enjoying unprotected sex, and getting her sexual education from Harry Potter fan fiction.

Rachel Kramer-Bussel was a law student in the late '90s when an erotic fantasy about Monica Lewinsky changed her life— by inspiring her to drop everything and pursue a career in erotic literature.

Host Maureen O'Connor tries VR porn for the first time and is horrified. She's not the only one— the technical demands of the new medium has male performers struggling to stay turned on, too.

To balance the myths of hardcore porn with reality, Cindy Gallop founded Make Love Not Porn, a video sharing network that is "pro-sex, pro-porn, pro-knowing the difference."

David France revisits the hope and heartbreak of his youth during the AIDS crisis— and offers lessons from his generation’s hard-won victories.

"You can't play it cool on Snapchat," says Priscilla Pine. And that's why it's the best for flirting.

"I think it's a myth that you can't be a little bit pregnant because I've been a little bit pregnant for about six years," says Andrea Syrtash, founder of the Pregnantish.com.

L is the first letter of LGBTQ, but often remains misrepresented and on the fringe. This week, two generations of queer women discuss the state of the modern lesbian.

To honor the presidential inauguration, Sex Lives assembles a panel of politically thoughtful (and sexually perverse) minds to reflect on the sexual absurdity of Donald Trump and modern politics.

Sure, you're cool with run-of-the-mill porn— but what about cannibal porn? Quicksand porn? Why does that stuff exist, anyway?

Scott and Julie Rising have been leading parallel lives since birth. Each came out as gay after leaving Alaska.

A preacher talks to his gay atheist son.

Every week, Sex Lives invites listeners to respond with their stories. This week, we listen— and call you back.

At 40, Glynnis MacNicol realized she didn't want to be a mother, and didn't need a partner. And then she discovered newly exhilarating sexual and romantic freedom.

E.J. Dickson discusses her new career, her new boobs, pregnant masturbation, and fighting strangers who don't give her a seat on the subway.

Andrea Silenzi, host of "Why Oh Why," discusses honesty, deception, memoir, heartbreak, and why Donald Trump ruined her orgasms.

Christopher Trout, Engadget's executive editor, returns to Sex Lives to discuss family, fertility, why discovering his sexuality meant losing his faith, and how he found peace inside a porn star's anus.

Mona Chalabi first saw her vulva while peering into a hand mirror at a labiaplasty surgeon's office; thanks to filmmaker Mae Ryan—the other half of The Guardian’s “Vagina Dispatches” docs-series team—we get to see Mona seeing it, too.

Could you tell a $10,000 fake penis from the real thing? Karley Sciortino couldn't.

You Don't Know Dick

Former Sex Lives co-host Allison P. Davis— now a staff writer at The Ringer— returns to deliver a master class on manipulating love interests by text message.

Sex Lives visits downtown restaurant New York Sushi Ko to snack on sea urchin and discuss the perils of— and secret tricks for— dining with dates.

Eddie invited Sex Lives into his Brooklyn apartment for a discussion of race, sex, love, death, learning about masturbation from Ghostface Killah.

Ok, maybe a few guys, but most of you are lying to yourselves, says Dr. Emily Morse.

Dr. Chris Donaghue explains how to radicalize your masturbatory life and why he's so over meeting hookups at bars.

New York sex writer Alana Massey felt a little crazy when she bought a house without a family to put in it. During a visit back to the city, she ruminated on the romance of real estate.

French GQ sex columnist Maia Mazaurette was Paris's answer to Carrie Bradshaw - until she came to New York, joined Tinder, and fell in love with an American.

Can I Sleep with My BFF's Ex?

Gossip columnist Rob Shuter - who oversaw J.Lo and Jessica Simpson at their peaks - talks celebrity penis size, Kim Kardashian body hair, and what on earth is Bieber's game? With Maureen O'Connor.

In her mid-twenties, Katie Heaney wrote "Never Have I Ever: My Life (So Far) Without a Date." Today, Katie is in a serious relationship - with a woman.

To bid farewell to her co-host David Wallace-Wells, Maureen interrogates his wife Risa Needleman about his-and-hers manbuns and much, much more.

Jennifer Kaplan and Lindsey Rupp, hosts of Bloomberg's Material World podcast, give a guided tour of America's $15 billion sex toy industry-- and gender politics, free-speech battles, and consumer choices that shape it. With Maureen O'Connor.

Men who grow better with age, how "benching" became the new "ghosting," and the wisdom (or cruelty) of romantic holding patterns.

Recording from Phildelphia during the DNC, New York Magazine's Rembert Browne joins Maureen O'Connor for a discussion of political romance.

Vogue sex columnist Karley Sciortino argues that, in the age of Tinder, hitting on strangers at bars is crazier than an internet-enhanced hookup.

Science of Us's Drake Baer explains a series of scientific studies that calculate what makes a dating market good or painful, and how they explain why dating in New York is so wretched.

A special report from a $400-per-couple Hamptons sex party marketed to "the world's sexual elite."

A quick update on this week's show.

Is sex quantifiable? What counts as sex, and why do we feel so compelled to count it, anyway?

It's real, real weird, and pretty amazing.

We interview Moira Weigel, the author of "Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating," about how crazily recent - and purely American - the whole idea of dating is.

Is the most rational approach to marriage an arrangement?

Or so says Amy Rose Spiegel, who discusses her sexual memoir, Action: A Book About Sex, as well as slut phases, trampages, and which founding father she'd most like to fuck.

This week, a live episode, taped as part of the Vulture festival, in which we go deep into the dating and sex life of Phoebe Robinson of 2 Dope Queens.

This week, we interview the sex- and romance-writer Alyssa Shelasky, maven of New York Magazine’s hugely popular sex diaries.

It's the ultimate sign of straight masculinity: the ability to get a woman off. So what happens when he fails?

Should your boyfriend be your best friend? Are you more popular single, or coupled? Is your social life preventing you from settling down?

We talk to feature film directors Joey Kuhn and Pamela Romanowsky about all the weirdness of directing sex scenes.

This week, everything you ever wanted to know about sex dreams.

Giving the world's least-respected sex act something like its proper due.

Should you be able to register a breakup, like a wedding? Who keeps the friends? Who keeps the cat?

Anna Davies got pregnant during a foreign fling, which is just the beginning of her Tinder-happy version of "Eat, Pray, Love."

This week we bid a tearful adieu to co-host Allison Davis, which we do mostly by talking about dong shots

This week, we talk to data guru Mona Chalabi about just how much noise people actually make during sex, and much more.

Carolyn Yates joins us to talk about Autostraddle's massive recent data analysis, which found period sex to be "the ultimate lesbian sexual indicator," among many other things.

This week we grill cleanup icon Jolie Kerr (of “Ask a Clean Person”) about how to wash a sex toy, launder semen stains, slyly coverup an accident in bed, and lots more.

This week, Stanford psychologist Lauren Howe explains why some people take break-ups brutally and others really blithely.

Chris Trout has seen the future of sex and it is... trippy.

We debate the question at length with Brian Sloan, the veteran of the World’s Most Beautiful Vagina Contest who recently ran a much less attractive sequel with balls.

Amber Rose invented an emoji protocol for discussing butt play-- but is Kanye's relentless slut-shaming of his ex reason enough for her to butt-shame him?

Also, why are we so much more comfortable with public sex than public masturbation?

Last year, over the holidays, the number of searches for incest-themed videos on Pornhub and its competitors spiked dramatically, hundreds of percent in a single month, and only continued to grow all through 2015.

This week we talk with Tristan Taormino about just what kids learn from PornHub—and how some sexually-explicit (and maybe even hot) video could make its way into American classrooms.

This week, a deep-dive into dirty voicemails (and return to racism in sexual preference, among other long-time obsessions). With Allison P. Davis and Maureen O'Connor.

This week, a long talk with Kevin Allison, host of the expansive sex-heavy storytelling podcast Risk, about kink, the retreating horizon of outre sex, and whether having a thing for Asian guys is ok. Also, a new study suggests evolutionary biologists...

This week, we interview, at length, Lisa Hoehn—actually a genuine and full-time professional Tinder Cyrano. We also discuss a new paper arguing that women like being sexually objectified, so long as its by loving partners. Which is a finding...

This week we interview podcast superstars Corinne Fisher and Krystyna Hutchinson about their project to interview all the men they’ve slept with, High Fidelity style. We also talk about the people using airbnb as a hook-up app (and whether...

This week, we talk to Alexa Tsoulis-Reay, who's spent the last year interviewing men who've castrated themselves to "cure" their "sex addiction," women in relationships with their fathers, men in love with horses, and many other human outliers for her...

And we go super deep on it, talking at length with Debra Pascali-Bonaro, who made a whole documentary about it (you may never forget these clips). We also speak about orgasms that make you deaf, with Sophie Saint Thomas, who speaks from experience,...

It's the closest you can get to an orgy with just two people-- but has 69ing gone out of style? Also up for discussion: the joys of lazy sex, the terrors of vagina-spanking, controversial views on lubricants, and the most psychotic...

We’re joined by “Sylvia,” the anonymous creator of the blog “How to Make Me Come,” which is now a podcast as well. She tells us about the impetus to create an online compendium of real women sharing exact instructions for...

You know that thing when you go to a party and nobody talks to you? The same can happen at orgies. Special guest Anna Pulley explains the agony of awkward orgy-going and how to troubleshoot it. Meanwhile, a new 3-D sex movie features a history-making...

Now that Neil Strauss and Tucker Max have found feminism (and grappled with sex addiction) is the age of pickup artistry dead? Or are gender, sex, and love dead -- as a new generation of agender, asexual, and aromantic college activists argue? And...

Will anything ever unseat the eggplant emoji as the ideal cartoon dong? And with all the R&D money at emoji HQ, can’t they do better than a taco for vagina? We also talk about Nantucket’s amazing history of whaling-industry-era dildos...

This week, we talk about the odd phenomenon of men trying to re-stretch their circumcised foreskins, whether post-sex blues says more about the fucking or more about you (it’s you!) and about how millenials (including Allison!) aggressively edit...

This week, Maureen offers what she swears is the absolute last and final word on dating apps (her mantra: the tech doesn’t matter, just the people). We also discuss a new study about the way in which sexual types may be the result of early...

Is dating a lopsided numbers game in which women are screwed? We talk to Jon Birger, author of Dateonomics (who says, yes, totally). We also debate when in a relationship the sex is best (wondering why it takes people so long to figure out how to fuck...

In this episode, we go long with Sex Myth author Rachel Hills, who argues that sex-soaked culture has given us sexual standards that literally no one’s sex life matches up with. With Maureen O’Connor and David Wallace-Wells.  

Is monogamy over? A new Time magazine story says it should be, and we wonder just how much influence Dan Savage has had on our sex lives. We also discuss the (reliable) glories of the pull-out method, and how relationships change birth-control...

When is the best season for boning? We debate the essay “Towards a Theory of Fall Fuckability" by Jamie Lauren Keiles. Also: a new study says the ideal dick for women is only barely bigger than average (Maureen and Allison disagree). And: we...

This week, we go long on sexual stamina—how long is too long, how long is just right, and when did we start taking an egg-timer to bed? The answer: very recently! You know, about the time men started actually caring about women’s pleasure....

How did Ashley Madison build a billion-dollar casual-sex site without actually arranging any actual casual sex? We discuss the company’s insane fembot army and the pathetic gullibility of 22 million male users. Also: a new study says people in...

A new “study” of sext-selfies makes the case that prettiness comes in all shapes and sizes (so long as the selfie, and the vagina, are well-lit). But how much can we trust this study, and how gross do we feel talking about ranking...

Maybe they’re not actually straight? We discuss a new book on the historyof clandestine same-sex coupling and a new dating-app-alarmism classic,“Tinder and the Dating Apocalypse.” With Maureen O’Connor, Rich Juzwiak,Jesse...

It include one with multiple holes in a single wall!

A team of scientists have determined universal penis beauty standards-- but do we agree with their findings? A heated debate about grooming, size, and male locker room culture follows. We also discuss a new study about race and online dating, and...

This week: First you fall in love, then you get naked-- but what if it was the other way around? Maureen learns how nudists flirt, and Allison interviews the stars of her favorite TV show, Dating Naked. Plus, a visit to the Hooters of dicks. With...

This week: How embarrassing is it to still love Sex and the City? Maureen interviews Candace Bushnell about her new book, which is sort of about her wanting to murder Sarah Jessica Parker (also about the weird way she identifies with Nathan...

It grips into place. And that's a good thing.