The Up on It podcast was designed with the purpose of influencing the future landscape of sex in two ways. Firstly, this podcast aims to create a future where conversations around sex aren’t considered taboo, particularly from the perspectives of women and people in the LGBT community. My aim to achieve this was by creating a women-led sex podcast which would then normalise women creating conversations about sex. Secondly, the Up on It podcast also aimed to predict the future of sex tech, sexual practices and societal norms regarding sex, and discussed how these changes might impact our society.

The Up on It podcast began as a collaborative project between my friend Lizey and I as I thought if the audience was listening to two women discussing sex would encourage the normalisation of women talking about sex. I considered the first episode to be successful for a first-time podcast run by uni students and it currently has almost 70 listens combined on our two platforms. These listens have also been steadily achieved overtime, meaning that people continue to discover and find interest in the podcast. Through the discussion of teledildonics we also caught the attention of an open source sex-tech enthusiast who sends tweets through a butt plug, which will be of importance later.

I received a lot of good feedback from the first podcast episode, mostly involving audio quality (which we were aware of) and the fact that we went on a lot of tangents and didn’t stick to the topic of sex consistently. With this feedback in mind Lizey and I attempted multiple times to record a second episode of the podcast together to no avail, and Lizey decided that it would be better if I continued this project on my own.

From this point I decided that it would be a good idea to have a new guest on most episodes of the podcast. I made this decision as normalising discussion about sex between two people is an important aspect of this podcast. I also think that getting fresh perspectives of sex in every episode will only make the podcast more enriching for myself and the viewers allowing us all to learn more. However, these podcast episodes do require a lot of research on very niche topics so I will be recording some episodes by myself where I can really geek out about sex with my audience, without having to prepare someone else with my extensive notes.

For the second episode of the podcast ‘The Future of Sex in Gaming’ I asked my friend Maccy to guest star. I thought that Maccy would be a good choice of special guest as he is an avid gamer and would also provide a gay man’s perspective which is something that I cannot do. Furthermore, the podcast hadn’t touched on a lot of LGBT sex conversation yet, and that was one of my aims.

The second episode of the podcast was only released yesterday however, I have already gained a few new followers on our twitter page. Notably, @buttplug.io created a twitter thread sharing podcasts who discuss sex tech/teledildonics and my second podcast episode was first on the list. This in itself I feel is a great achievement, and it could potentially bring a larger audience to the podcast.

Overall, I have had many struggles and successes in producing this podcast. I feel that the change to online learning during COVID ended up inadvertently affecting the direction of the podcast a lot. I also feel that if I had produced more consistent episodes of the podcast that I genuinely might have a small audience by now. However, I am still extremely passionate and proud about this digital artefact, which is not something that I have experienced with any of my previous digital artefacts. I plan to continue this podcast as I do believe that it has potential to positively impact the way we think and feel about sex in our society. My next step is to put the podcast on platforms that will be more conveniently accessed by my audience, including SPOTIFY which is a consistent request. Please follow if you are interested in seeing the future of this project.

Episodes one and two can be found here: