Chrissie Swan has a few choice words about her supposed 'sex addiction'.

Headlines this week claimed Chrissie had a ‘sex addiction’. What is the truth? Chrissie was keen to set the record straight…

‘So today I woke up to my phone ringing next to my bed in the wee hours. The calls were from radio stations in Melbourne and Sydney asking me to comment on my sex addiction. For a second I thought they had the wrong person but then I remembered a podcast I’d recorded this week for Show + Tell with my dear friend Monty Dimond where we were discussing a new service for single women who wanted a police check conducted on potential suitors.

Chrissie Swan said she had a “sexual awakening”. And she thinks you should, too.

I said in the podcast this was a bad idea given my experiences nearly 15 years ago when I was single and dating. I, like millions of women in their late 20s would’ve had that police check hotline running off the hook because news flash: women have a few sexual partners before they find the one they settle down with. Imagine checking every single one?

Because this was a podcast, and we knew we were only speaking to subscribers who want to hear us, we happily laughed about our sexual exploits in our younger days. Egged on by my friend, I joked that I had a borderline sex addiction. We laughed. We took it as far as we could. We were joking about those heady days of idiot one night stands and frivolous fun. Then we moved on to talk about c-sections, true crime, keeping secrets etc etc. It was a 40 minute podcast between two girlfriends for a very small crowd of people who had actively chosen to listen in. It was funny. We moved on.

Now, one joke within that 40 minute podcast has been turned into a headline about my sex addiction. The ridiculousness of this astounds me. When did we lose our sense of humour? When did news websites get so desperate for ‘clicks’ that they knowingly spin an innocent joke into a story designed to humiliate and misrepresent the person who told it? Anyone who listened to the podcast would know I was joking. That it was a throwaway line to make my podcast partner and subscribers have a laugh.

On a deeper level this sort of thing is a frightening step back for women in the media. I can tell you immediately that it made me want to shut up and never make a joke or divulge any amusing anecdote about myself or my life. Is this what we’ve come to? Women can’t make a joke about anything for fear of being taken out of context? Stories like this are a form of media terrorism, instilling fear in women who have stories to tell and laughs to share. I fear a world of vanilla presenters wanting to avoid the humiliation of being taken out of context. But that’s the way it’s going. Things like this rob the public of so much.

Chrissie Swan’s most honest interview yet: “It was hard to take.”

No one wins when jokes are reprinted without the laughs and context around them. The teller feels shamed and the listeners miss out on a little chuckle for the day. Laughing is wonderful, so to miss an opportunity for it, especially today with all the doom and gloom around, would be a great shame.

The whole thing is ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. Can we please just move on?’

This post originally appeared on Show + Tell and has been republished here with full permission. You can find it here.