In November 2016, Chelsea Beck left her job as an assistant curator at The Broad Museum in downtown Los Angeles to pursue a one of a kind “personal project” — a book about female masturbation. Now, I am sure when you think about a person leaving their job to pursue a "personal project" a book about female masturbation is not what comes first in your head. Soon after, over brunch, she told three friends about the project, and they started sharing their own masturbation stories. Women often swap sex tales, but conversations like this happen much less often.

"Ménage à Moi", a unique podcast about female masturbation launched by Beck is gaining popularity. It dawned on her during the brunch she was going to do it. It would be researching for the book and a chance to share stories that don’t get shared. “There’s not the body of work that women can refer to about masturbation,” she explains. “What’s available is instructional or about trying to achieve things.” Google “female masturbation,” and plenty of Cosmo and Glamour how-tos pop up as do clinical articles. It’s harder to find in-depth chronicles of the evolution and variety of women’s experiments in self-pleasure. Beck feels quite proud when her guest speakers say, ‘I’m saying this out loud for the first time’.

The podcast is all set to launch its second season in April. The new season explores the relationship between masturbation and motherhood. Beck acknowledges that sex is portrayed often in various media, but there’s little room for discussion about the principles of pleasure. “Sex is everywhere right now, but I don’t think that means people are any better at talking about it,” Beck says.

After actress Natalie Portman spoke at the January 2018 Women’s March in Los Angeles, media outlets, like Time and CNN, led with headlines about how she called out “sexual terrorism.” She did use that term, describing early experiences with harassment, but she also called for a new focus on desire: “Let’s declare loud and clear, this is what I want,” Portman said. “Let’s find a space where we mutually and consensually look out for each other’s pleasure.” In a recent essay for The New York Times, critic Nona Willis-Aronowitz tried to pinpoint where pleasure got lost in feminist conversations about ending violence: “Protection from violence became the narrow, defensive definition of feminist sexual politics,” she wrote, “and the concept of pleasure became synonymous with narcissism and self-indulgence.”

But Ménage à Moi was not at all conceived with the post-Harvey-Weinstein wave of frankness and call outs in mind. But it does bring conversations about pleasure unabashedly to the forefront at a moment when journalists, feminists, and activists are figuring out how to address rampant sexual assault without making discourse around sexuality more puritanical than it already is.

Each episode of the podcast begins with sexy, ethereal music followed by a 20- to 25-minute story about one woman’s experience. The first episode, with an academic affairs officer named Jessa who also responded to Beck’s Nextdoor post, set the stage for subsequent episodes. “I don’t know what women do or what women don’t do,” says Beck. “I don’t necessarily feel like female masturbation has a stigma,” responded Jessa. “I just get a sense of absence.” Beck agreed and then, as she always does, started delving into her guest’s early experiences, learning about the washcloth a very young Jessa would request from her parents before bed. “If you haven’t tried balling up a towel and humping it, let me tell you, it feels really, really great,” said Jessa.