The Good Sex Project

Five writers. Five letters to their libido. Equal parts filthy, funny, and unexpectedly profound - a bonus episode to balance out this week's heavier one.This is a bonus episode with a different shape: five writers - Nadine Hura, Sam, Joseph Trinidad, Emily Writes and Melody - read the letters they wrote to their libido for TGSP's live launch event. Inspired by Jessie Casson's Letter to My Libido project, these are funny and tender pieces of writing about desire, identity, faith, grief and reclaiming your own body.

Sexual trauma doesn't end when the event does. Its effects ripple forward - into how we see ourselves, how we move through intimacy, how we flinch or freeze or dissociate in moments that are supposed to feel safe. This episode explores the long aftermath of sexual trauma: the ways it reshapes identity, trust, and the body's relationship to pleasure, sometimes for years or decades. We speak with Jimanekia Eborn, sexual assault and trauma expert, who brings both clinical insight and deep personal honesty to the question of what survival actually looks like and what it takes to move beyond it. This isn't an episode about victimhood. It's about the slow, nonlinear, often surprising work of reclaiming yourself.

New Zealand's Gender Attitudes Survey shows a sharp rise, particularly among young men, in adherence to rape myths and the belief that gender equality has gone too far. Rebecca Stringer, associate professor in gender studies at Otago University, joins Melody to make sense this troubling trend, and unpacks why this isn't as new as it feels (hello, 90s political correctness backlash), what's different this time around (the monetisation of misogyny by people with real skin in the game), and why disenfranchised young men are directing their very legitimate economic anxieties in entirely the wrong direction. They also get into what it takes to counter far-right rhetoric in the classroom, and how the left might actually win some of these guys back.

Divide your age by two and add seven. It's the rule nobody made up officially, yet somehow everyone knows it. But where did it come from - and does it actually mean anything? This episode pulls apart the age-gap conversation: when a difference in years is genuinely a red flag, when it's simply nobody's business, and how the calculus has shifted across generations and cultures. We look at the power dynamics that can quietly distort relationships with significant age differences, speak with a couple who have navigated the raised eyebrows and the real challenges, and ask what we're actually worried about when we worry about age gaps - and whether those concerns are always applied consistently, or only in certain directions.

Madelaine Thomas had her intimate images leaked without consent while working as a dominatrix -  and couldn't find any technology that would have helped her identify the culprit.  So she built it. A bonus conversation about Image Angel, deepfakes, the shame that lingers even when you did nothing wrong, and funding an anti-abuse startup with sex work.

Sex work is often called the world's oldest profession. It’s survived moral panics, technological leaps, a global pandemic, and endless political debate. This episode looks at the state of sex work in Aotearoa New Zealand - one of the few countries where it's fully decriminalised - and asks whether legal protection translates to real safety, dignity, and wellbeing. We hear from workers about the realities of the mahi: the parts that are misunderstood, the parts that are genuinely hard, and the disruption to old models of working. And we examine how stigma, even in a decriminalised environment, continues to shape workers' access to housing, healthcare, and community - and what it takes to live a full life when your work is still, for many, unspeakable.

Social Psychologist and author Bella DePaulo is 72, single by choice, and has spent decades proving that single life isn't a consolation prize. In this conversation she shares the research on why married people aren't actually happier, how single people get quietly punished, and why "growing old alone" is her fantasy, not her fear.

From Bridget Jones to #SoloGlowUp, the story of singleness has had a rebrand. But is it liberation - or just a better-looking waiting room?Melody Thomas meets two people sitting with that question. Beth is 42, an extrovert, and someone who loves hard - sometimes too hard. After a five-year relationship that slowly stripped away her sense of self, she's reassessing what she actually wants from a partnership. Then there's Scott - non-binary, gay, and seven years into single life. Not always lonely, but not untouched by it either. Comparison creeps in. So does the ache of going without touch.And threaded through both stories: the question of whether our structures - social, legal, cultural - are quietly penalising people for being on their own. Psychologist Bella DePaulo has a name for that. She calls it singlism. And she has an entirely different way of thinking about love.