Rewire's This Week in Sex Puts Pleasure on the Curriculum

Rewire News Group turned its most-read beat into a standing column this month. On October 15, the nonprofit newsroom announced the launch of This Week in Sex, a multiplatform sex column anchored by biweekly pieces from veteran columnist Martha Kempner and pleasure-and-wellness creator Vera Blossom. The content will run across TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, podcasts, and a dedicated zine-themed vertical on Rewire's site, an explicit attempt to meet Gen Z and Millennial audiences where they already scroll.

The timing answers a real problem. Younger women are making health decisions in a feed full of misinformation. KFF's Women's Health Survey found that about half of reproductive-age women have seen or heard the false claim that hormonal contraceptives harm their health, while more than four in ten have encountered the incorrect claim that those hormones limit future fertility. Meanwhile, most Gen Zers who follow health influencers have followed health advice from a creator even when it contradicted their doctor, according to EMARKETER's US Digital Health Survey. Rewire says This Week in Sex pairs journalistic rigor with a voice that treats pleasure as coequal to health.

What the column will actually look like

This Week in Sex is not a written column with a new coat of paint. Rewire says the formats will include video commentary on columns, reader-question segments, and live sessions where the hosts answer questions in real time, with podcast extensions planned later. The approach was road-tested over the summer, when a Rewire fundraiser featured a "kissing booth" themed advice station hosted with Blossom. Sexual health is Rewire's most consistent performer, the newsroom reported, holding an eighty-two percent engagement rate over two years, with standout stories reaching ninety-eight.

Who is behind the column

Kempner and Blossom come from different corners of the same fight. Kempner is a writer and sexual health expert with nearly three decades in the field, whose work has appeared in Yahoo Health and Bedsider; she also writes the weekly newsletter Sex on Wednesday, covering sexual health, politics, and culture with humor, a little snark, and zero patience for misinformation. Blossom, a Filipina American transfemme writer, covers desire, pleasure, gender, and death in a steamy confessional newsletter, and co-founded the food blog Snack Report. The pairing is the column's thesis in miniature: rigorous enough to trust, irreverent enough to actually read. Accurate information keeps failing to reach the people who need it, like the twice-yearly HIV prevention shot most people have never heard of, and Rewire is betting that This Week in Sex is the delivery mechanism that fixes that.

Alongside the launch, Rewire named its first podcast sponsor: Euki, a period tracking app built around rigorous data privacy. "People deserve accurate information about their bodies and the freedom to manage their health without worrying about who's watching," Ana Maria Ramirez, Euki's executive director, said in the announcement. Euki is itself a tech nonprofit building accessible, private, and secure digital health tools for people facing barriers to care. The partnership gives This Week in Sex a sponsor that shares its politics, which matters for a newsroom that keeps its reporting free. Clinical innovation keeps arriving in this space too, from a sildenafil cream that cleared a major safety trial to new contraceptive options, and the column will have plenty to cover.

Why the feed needs it

Mallory Johns, president of Rewire News Group, summed up the stakes in the announcement: "The quality of sex education shouldn't depend on which corner of the internet you happen to land in." This Week in Sex exists because, right now, it does. The column is intentionally inclusive and stigma-free, written for teenagers looking for answers and the parents of teenagers, according to the newsroom, and it treats pleasure as part of health rather than an afterthought. For a generation navigating a dating economy that keeps getting pricier while absorbing medical advice from strangers' videos, a free source of answers in the same feed is closer to a public-health project than a lifestyle column.

The franchise math is straightforward. Rewire says its sexual health archive holds search traffic and engagement long after publication, which makes the vertical a durable asset rather than a news-cycle spike. Planned extensions into podcasts and live events suggest the newsroom wants This Week in Sex to grow into something bigger than a column. In a year when classrooms keep shrinking what students may learn about their own bodies, a zine-styled, stigma-free feed of answers has an obvious audience. The open question is whether rigor can outrun the disinformation machine on its home turf. Rewire's bet: it can, starting on TikTok.