Pillow Talking with Venus in Furs: An Interview with the Host of Satisfied.

Until this week, the last time I had listened to the radio was probably in high school, when my dad would turn on the classic rock channel in the car. Thankfully, I soon got my license and returned to the 21st-century world of curated playlists. It is with great shame that I admit to overlooking this form of media until recently, when my roommates acquired a vintage radio for our apartment. I thought that we might as well try it out, you know, for the aesthetic. So, we turned on UofT’s own CIUT 89.5 FM at 1 a.m. on Wednesday, hoping to get a good Instagram story out of it. Instead, we were blown away by their newest show, Satisfied. 

This is my plea for the UofT student body to start tuning in with me every week, because Satisfied is familiarizing Gen Z with two areas this generation is seriously ignorant—sex and the radio. 

My friends and I tuned in just as host Venus in Furs was reciting the show’s tagline:“if you turn us up, we’ll turn you on, because we’re the show that keeps you satisfied.” Immediately, our interest was piqued. The show is basically an eccentric sex playlist with a different theme each week, featuring the occasional quip from Venus. This week’s episode, “Golden Coast,” featured a mix of ska, garage rock, and funk unique to the Californian and Australian coastlines. What followed was the soundtrack to an erotic beach day straight out of 1995. As Venus described it: “This is for the girls who love sex on the beach and don’t mind a little sand between their cheeks.”

When the show concluded at 2 a.m., I was left with so many questions. For starters, was the objective of Satisfied to be a sex-themed show, or were we really supposed to smash to it? Much of Venus’s commentary seemed to be encouraging the latter: “let’s keep those hearts pumping and hips humping, because we’re not finished, and neither is your girl.” For anonymity purposes, Venus’s real name cannot be revealed; however, I was able to track her down for an interview. In a conversation over text, Venus answered, “You are meant to have sex to it! Except for when you don’t because I’m doing an interview or something. To be honest, she (Satisfied) is evolving, but that was the original concept.” 

When I asked about the process of creating Satisfied, she told me, “I thought it would be interesting to see if it (the show) would be picked up in the first place. It was kind of like an experiment in censorship.” When she and a friend were “shooting the shit” about ideas for a new radio show, Venus had finished reading Audre Lorde’s 1978 essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” This was when she came up with the thesis of Satisfied, “I was really into the idea of the erotic as creative energy. That was the ethos of the show, the erotic as a force for creativity and creation. The erotic as something that should be expressed.” 

Venus goes on to tell me about a Substack article she recently read called “Your phone is why you don’t feel sexy.” If our phones are making us feel less sexy, I ask, is listening to the radio the antidote? “The radio is absolutely making you sexier,” Venus answers, “For a multi-prong approach, it is a kind of physical media that you engage with on a physical sensorial level. It is also live, which adds an element of intimacy: when you tune into my show, it is basically me and the listener in a room together, and that’s how I speak to them.” In addition to the medium being  more intimate, the formatting of the show is conducive to intimacy between listeners, Venus  says, “The show is an hour long, and I actually do format the show to have a foreplay, a peak,  and the end of the show is modelled to facilitate pillow talk.” When I ask what viewers should  expect to get out of the show, Venus responds, “Number one: orgasms and number two: that sex should be fun!” 

If your media diet is lacking in eroticism, you need something to fuck or laugh to, or you just want to hear some cool new music—tune into Satisfied this Tuesday night (or technically Wednesday morning) from 1-2 a.m.

More about Satisfied