A 'grandma you can talk to'

"Let me get my dollies," Johanson begins as she reaches for visual aids. "We're short one dolly. We only have two."

It's the rare moment when Johanson is caught short.

Eight hours a week on cable's Oxygen network, she presides over some of the frankest, most edifying talk on television. It could be the most thoughtful call-in TV this side of C-SPAN's.

For the men and women who consult her, Johanson tackles practical questions about size, frequency, compatibility, gadgetry and strange rashes (plus an old favorite, the "G Spot").

Here's Marie, a 43-year-old Boston woman who, admitting to minimal experience with sex, asks for help enjoying it solo.

And then along comes Courtney from Reno with her threesome inquiry -- the sort of problem (however mind-expanding Johanson's solution) you will probably never face.

It's all the same to Johanson, who treats each caller with respect and good cheer.

"I'll never say you should or you shouldn't," she explains. "I offer alternatives. It's about being safe, healthy and comfortable with your body -- and never doing anything you're not comfortable with."

This philosophy has steered Johanson through her long career as a nurse, educator and on-air adviser in her native Canada, where she has talked sex for 20 years.

Since 1996, Johanson has taken questions on a weekly hour aired live by Canada's W Network. It is called, with her typical directness, "Sunday Night Sex Show."

But last November her outreach was extended, courtesy of Oxygen. "Talk Sex with Sue Johanson," accepting calls exclusively from U.S. viewers, airs Sundays at midnight EST -- right after "Sunday Night Sex Show," which is simulcast by Oxygen live at 11 p.m.

Monday through Friday at 11 p.m., Oxygen airs previously recorded editions of "Sex Show." Then Saturday at 11 p.m., "Talk Sex" from the previous Sunday is repeated.

Though originating from different sets in the same Toronto studio, both shows are highly similar in format -- and similarly fun to watch, thanks to Johanson's no-flinch, no-blush, no-bull approach. She makes sex a subject neither salacious nor lewd (despite the "explicit language" warning attached to both shows). Nor threatening.

"My age is a definite advantage," says Johanson, while refusing to pinpoint it. "If I was cute with big hair, I wouldn't have a great deal of credibility. I'd be seen as a sexy chicky-poo. And I'm not. I'm the grandma you can talk to."

It's a role she's prepared for since childhood, when she decided she wanted to be a nurse.

Johanson was trained at a French Catholic hospital in Winnepeg, where, she couldn't help noticing, the curriculum added little to her limited knowledge of sex as gained from a pamphlet written for pubescent girls by a sanitary-napkin manufacturer.

Even so, when she married electrician Ejnor Johanson in 1953, "I had the rhythm method down pat. There were no children for three years. Then we had three children, born 10 months apart." As her children reached their teens in the midst of the 1960s sexual revolution, Johanson realized this new generation didn't know much more about birth control than her generation had.

Then, in 1969, a friend of her daughters had an unwanted pregnancy and, afraid to tell her own parents, came to Johanson for help.

A year later, she started a sexual health clinic at her youngsters' school -- the first to be established in a high school in North America, she says. She ran it for 18 years, while returning to school herself for graduate training as a counselor and sex educator.

In 1984 she was invited to be host of a sex call-in show on a local radio outlet. Referring to the Toronto station's hard-rock format, she cracks, "It was me, Guns N' Roses and Van Halen." Soon, a national network was carrying her show.

Meanwhile, she expanded to television on Toronto's public-access cable, where she was a fixture until her W cable show began.

Johanson's energies in recent years have been split between television and in-person sex-ed presentations for high school students "from Vancouver to Newfoundland," she says.

But whoever her audience, the message is the same: Sex is part of life, even for those who think they aren't sexually active.

"You are sexual from the day you're born," says Johanson, "and you're sexual until the day you die."<