Meet the hosts of hit podcast The Hotbed Collective who are revolutionising women's sex lives, one orgasm at a time

It's time to talk bedroom politics 
Sex education: Anniki Sommerville, left, and Lisa Williams host The Hotbed Collective podcast
Natasha Pszenicki

It is 11.30am on a Friday morning in the atrium of the Evening Standard’s west London offices, and Lisa Williams — journalist, podcast presenter and, alongside writer Anniki Sommerville and the television presenter Cherry Healey, one third of The Hotbed Collective — is quizzing me about the clitoris.

“Would you recognise a picture of it?” Williams asks, curiously. Somewhere in my eyeline a colleague bustles past; the escalator delivers a stern elder gentleman in a navy suit, a newspaper tucked under his arm. I demur, with a squeaky giggle, that I’d like to think I would.

“But it’s tricky,” she says, a touch sympathetically. “It was only discovered in 1992. It’s exciting, though, because I think: what else is there to find out?”

Whatever there is, The Hotbed Collective will be talking, frankly, about it. Williams, 37, Sommerville, 46, and Healey, 38, launched The Hotbed Collective in 2018 with a mission to “make life better, one orgasm at a time”. They started a podcast, The Hotbed, which has made a name for itself — not to mention a cult following — with episodes focusing on topics including hormones, feminist porn, conception and pregnancy.

It has coined terms such as “maintenance shag” and featured guest appearances from the actor Rose McGowan and Westminster girl crush Jess Phillips MP (specialist subjects: sex education and fantasising about the Red Hot Chili Peppers). Their dream guest would be Oprah — wouldn’t everyone’s? — though they’d settle for Ellen DeGeneres or Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

And now there is a book too, More Orgasms Please: Why Female Pleasure Matters, co-written by Williams and Sommerville. It is part manifesto — the clue’s in the name — and part instruction manual (or, as the blurb quips, “Couch to 5k for orgasms”). Chapters have titles such as “Orgasms are a feminist issue”; “Porn: Feels so right, seems so wrong”; “The Pelvic Floor: Bear With Us”; and “The Surprising Power of Sexual Fantasy”. The tone of the book — which is pitched at heterosexual women — is authoritative, unintimidating and the right side of “university welfare rep”.

While a few anecdotes recall the Mizz magazine problem page (RIP), there are also extended passages quoting Gloria Steinem, statistics from The Journal of Sexual Medicine and recommendations for relationship counselling services. It is frank but not gratuitous, realistic but never grim. Its Tequila Sunrise-coloured cover is very Instagrammable (the Collective has almost 13,000 followers), and the book launch took place at the zeitgeisty new female erotica store, Sh!, in Hoxton.

The Hotbed Collective's book is part manifesto and part instruction manual

The book, and the Collective, are of the moment. Female sexuality has had a tumultuous time. In theory, we are supposed to feel (mostly) liberated from our patriarchal oppressors; the body-positivity movement is two fingers up to a prescriptive aesthetic that exists as another form of control. We are permitted to talk about masturbation and watch feminist porn, and #MeToo has given a generation of women voices. On the other hand, this liberation skews to white and Western, and the digital age has normalised dick pics and enabled revenge porn.

“I think we’re living in confusing times,” Williams says. “Just because we’re talking about consent and horrible sexual-harassment cases doesn’t mean that women all want to be in The Handmaid’s Tale,” Williams continues. “There’s a new way women can go, which is taking control of their bodies and having really good sex.”

Or just enough of it. Sommerville says a “big theme” that worries their listeners is a “sex drought”: couples falling out of the habit. Often, this happens after children: “You turn into two co-parents. You’re functioning on a team level but [there’s no] real intimacy.” She is wry about familiarity being the enemy of desire. “One of the funny things we talk about is the text messages you send your partner. In the beginning stages of a relationship they could be quite sexy, but typically they do evolve into ‘pick frozen prawns up from Lidl’,” she laughs. “There’s very little room there to put something surprising or erotic. Our relationships become very functional.”

It is cross-generational, too. Recent research shows that millennials are having less sex than ever — and certainly less than the generations above them at the same age. Have Gen Y been ruined by Tinder and Netflix? “I do wonder sometimes, before we had Netflix, did we have more sex?” Sommerville muses. “For my parents it would have been really boring stuff on telly. And that was probably the point at which they said, ‘Let’s go and have a hump’.”

Disregarding the disturbing visual, the point about modernity stands. Williams rattles off a list, eyes rolling: “To be brilliant at your job, to have a banging body, to be a great friend, a great daughter, to be in a book group, to be achieving all the time.” Perhaps ’twas ever thus, though the public bragging on social media can make it all seem (even more) oppressive. Plus, much of this anxiety disproportionately affects women, who will often run households on top of everything else. Which adds insult to injury, because when sex becomes part of a to-do list, female pleasure is often sidelined in favour of men’s. Sommerville says this starts in puberty, when male desire is normalised — or celebrated — while female desire is absent from the narrative. “From a very early age we’re taught it’s OK if we don’t orgasm, as long as the men orgasm because otherwise they’re going to explode,” she says.

“A lot of our tendencies are about pleasing men. I didn’t realise how much I’d been influenced by that until we started working on the book, and I found it quite a revelation. I spent a lot of my sexual past thinking about the other person and how I look to that other person — am I pleasing them, do they like me, will they want to see me again?”

The Hotbed Collective is part of the an intelligent, engaged movement around female sexuality
Natasha Pszenicki

Unsurprisingly, both think that modern sex education is woefully inadequate — or “s**t”, as Williams puts it, adding: “I don’t know anyone who said, ‘mine was brilliant.’” Though both are heartened by the new Relationships and Sex Education Bill, which has been championed by Jess Phillips.

They also note that The Hotbed Collective is part of an intelligent, engaged movement around female sexuality that includes London-based app Ferly (sort of wellness, for sexuality), and Dipsea, audio erotica pitched at women, which The New Yorker notes has a “hot yet tasteful aesthetic”. It has raised more than £4 million in venture capital funding.

The body-positivity movement — which is huge on Instagram — is also doing its bit. “Good sex breeds body positivity and vice versa, so it’s quite a nice little cycle,” says Sommerville. Plus, it’s easy. “We did a survey and we asked women how long it took them on average to have an orgasm,” says Williams brightly. “And it’s not that long. With practise it can be four minutes.”

Listen to The Hotbed on Apple Podcasts and Podtail

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