The Birds and The Bees

Melody Thomas leads a frank and often-entertaining exploration into sex, sexuality and relationships - starting at the very beginning with 'The Birds and The Bees'. Featuring everyday kiwis reflecting on their experiences of 'the talk', young parents now on their struggles when it comes to discussing sex and sexuality with their kids, and Sex Therapy NZ's Mary Hodson with some practical advice.

With the release of new podcast series Bang! Melody Thomas reflects on making the series.

When you spend six months talking about nothing except sex, a few things happen.

The first is that the topic becomes absolutely normal. Or at least your recovery time after that initial embarrassment is significantly lessened.

In the past few weeks I've hit the streets to ask strangers how 'The Talk' went down in their households, ventured into a high school to quiz students on sex education, called an old primary school friend to explore an incident from our childhood we never addressed... and last week my mother and I talked at length about her intimate experiences.

Not only did I live to tell the tale but I actually feel better for it. Despite the fact that the whole reason for making this series was to normalise these kinds of conversations, I live in a constant state of surprise at just how fast the process is.

And that normalisation is contagious. As the weeks go by I have noticed friends and family start to open up and share their experiences. Even strangers move quickly from shocked to open book - sometimes they almost seem relieved at being given permission to share this stuff without judgement.

Is there anything besides sex that is so widely practised and so resolutely ignored? Where does the shame come from? In episode one of BANG! I speak with Sex Therapy NZ's Mary Hodson about ways to talk with young children about sex - but I started the interview by asking her about this.

"I think it probably stems back to.... 2000 years of religious domination of human sexuality, particularly female sexuality... Women died in child birth, poverty was extensive... and if a girl got pregnant and had a baby she may not even survive. There were good reasons for controlling sexuality," she says.

The contraceptive pill became available to New Zealand women from 1961 - though unmarried women would have trouble accessing it for the next decade and until 1989, it was illegal to discuss birth control with people under 16. Slowly but surely, we began to acknowledge that sex was about more than making babies, but decades on we still struggle to talk about what else it is for. …

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details