Ep. 136 – Misunderstandings and Myths About Female Sexuality: Enjoying Better Sex as You Age with Susan Bratton

We are excited to welcome Susan Bratton back to the podcast today. (Her first podcast was Episode 64, from September of 2019.) Susan is our go-to expert on intimate wellness, sexual regeneration protocols, and ageless sexuality. She loves talking about all the misunderstandings and myths about our female sexuality and aging because, at the age of fifty-nine, she is having the best sex of her life!

Susan Bratton is an expert in intimate wellness, sexual regenerative protocols, and ageless sexuality. She is a best-selling author and publisher of lovemaking techniques, bedroom communication skills, and sexual vitality advice that include Sexual Soulmates, Relationship Magic, Revive Her Drive, Ravish Him, The Steamy Sex Ed™ Video Collection, Hormone Balancing,  The Pump Guide, and Thrust-In-Time serve as examples of the exciting variety of her 34 books and programs. Be sure to listen in today to find out what Susan has to share about intimate wellness and having better sex as you age.

“I’m excited to talk about all the misunderstandings and myths about our female sexuality and aging.”

Susan Bratton

IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:

• Susan talks about the benefits of douching with nascent iodine.
• Taking care of your vaginal microbiome.
• Susan talks about some of the things that can happen to the vagina that people might assume are unrelated.
• Women from different ethnic backgrounds have different cultures in their vaginal systems, and there are lead bacterias for each of those ethnic categories.
• Most women don’t realize that semen is full of serotonin, testosterone, and all kinds of luteinizing hormones that help to regulate menstrual cycles.
• You do have some control over how your aging process goes. Susan discusses what she learned from the journey of vaginal restoration treatments and protocols that she started on when she was about fifty-five.
• Susan shares a trick she learned about overcoming vaginal atrophy and having better orgasms.
• How the vFit device works, and how women can benefit from using it.
• Some products and therapies will aid holistic vaginal rejuvenation and help you have great sex for your whole life.
• Susan talks about bio-identical hormone replacement therapy.
• The benefits of having an O-Shot.
• What you need to have good, exciting sex for your whole life.

Connect with Susan:

On her website     

CEO, The20, LLC.

LinkedIn

@Do.The.20

@SusanBratton

Better Lover

The Sexual Soulmate Pact

Relationship Magic 

Links to the free gifts, products, and sites Susan mentioned on the show:

FLOW organic nitric oxide supplement

Hormone Balancing

Hot To Trot (great pic on page 12 of women’s erectile tissue system)    

Pump Guide for Men and Their Partners

vSculpt At-Home Vaginal Rejuvenation Device (Canada)    

vFit At-Home Vaginal Rejuvenation Device 

Fun Factory Susan Recommended Pleasure Tools for Solo and Couples (USA)

Susan’s videos and articles:

Better Lover Videos

Personal Life Media – Be A Better Lover Articles

Connect with Cynthia Thurlow

• Follow on Twitter, Instagram & LinkedIn
• Check out Cynthia’s website 
• Check Out Dry Farm Wines: www.dryfarmwines.com/cynthiathurlow

About Everyday Wellness Podcast

Welcome to the Everyday Wellness podcast with Cynthia Thurlow! Cynthia is a mom of 2 boys, wife, nurse practitioner, and intermittent fasting and nutrition expert. She has over 20 years experience in emergency medicine and cardiology, but pivoted to focus on food as medicine. She loves to share science-backed practical information to improve your overall well being and is grateful to be interviewing leaders in the health and wellness field.  Her goal with Everyday Wellness is to help her listeners make simple changes to their everyday lives that will result in improved overall wellness and long term health. 

TRANSCRIPT

Presenter: This is Everyday Wellness, a podcast dedicated to helping you achieve your health and wellness goals, and provide practical strategies that you can use in your real life. Now, here’s your host, Nurse Practitioner Cynthia Thurlow.

Cynthia: Today, I am truly excited to bring Susan Bratton back to the podcast. If you haven’t watched her first podcast, it’s Episode 64 from September of 2019. She is my go-to expert in intimate wellness, sexual regeneration protocols, and ageless sexuality. Thank you for getting up early to connect with me this morning. I forgot that you’re on the West Coast. My apologies. It’s so nice to have you back.

Susan: I’m so happy to be up at 8 AM and hair and makeup, drinking my dairy-free coffee. I’ve just gone dairy-free, and I’m feeling great and happy to be here, and excited to actually talk about all of the misunderstandings and myths about our female sexuality and aging, because I, at 59, Cynthia– I’m 59 now.

Cynthia: You don’t look a day over 40.

Susan: [laughs]

Cynthia: It’s amazing.

Susan: At 59, I’m having the best sex of my life. I’m having the best orgasms of my life. My vagina is in great shape. Although, this morning, I got up and I took a little Garden of Life raw women’s probiotic, and I opened the capsules, sprinkled it in my palm of my hand, I took some Kathy’s healing lotion, and I just [unintelligible [00:01:32] it around and made a paste out of it. Just before I inserted that paste into my vagina with my fingers, I had taken a vaginal irrigation bottle, you call it a douche bottle– People have a negative opinion about douches. I don’t think you should douche with a douching solution, but what I douche with is nascent iodine. Nascent iodine is the element, and when you put a little of that in water, it’s a beautiful antibacterial that kills good but not bad bacteria in the vaginal and oral mucosa, in your vagina and mouth. So, I irrigated my vagina and then I made this little paste, and I stuck it up there because I’d had a little sex with my husband this weekend, and maybe there was a little bacterial introduction, and I thought, “Well, I’ve got to nip this in the bud,” and that’s my little home recipe. Then, if I think, “Oh, maybe it’s bacterial vaginosis,” or “Oh, maybe it’s Candida, maybe it’s a yeast fungal,” then I’ll go with either Nystatin and type of a thing or– Ones for vaginal, we’ll keep them in our cabinet, anti-yeast and anti-bacterial type of thing, I’ll mix that with the probiotics. I have never had a problem nipping stuff in the bud with that little homemade formula.

So, having the best sex ever also does include having to deal with– I saw the funniest meme on Instagram. It was like, “He was so not worth me disrupting my vaginal microbiome for the sex I had.” [laughs] Now, luckily, my husband is totally worth disrupting my– and he seldom does, but [laughs] I just thought that was so cute. We have to guard our vaginal microbiomes with our life because they are our life. If our vajayjays are not happy, we’re not happy. [laughs]

Cynthia: Well, distractingly so. I remind people that when something is not as it should be, your whole focus is on whether you have a urinary tract infection, something feels off. It’s very hard to think about other things. I love that you’re already touching on natural ways to think about how we can support our bodies, and I believe many listeners think about the gut microbiome, because we talk about it quite a bit. But they’re probably not thinking that there is actually this microbiome in the vulva or in the vagina that is so critical that it’s all about homeostatic maintenance. We want to make sure things stay as they are meant to be. So, let’s pivot and let’s talk a little bit about what are some of the things that can actually happen to the vagina that people assume are unrelated. I know we were talking about this before we started recording, but even medications, we assume every medication we take, there’s no way that it’s going to have an impact on our vaginas, and yet, it can, and significantly so.

Susan: Everything we do impacts our vaginal mucosal system and our microbiome. We have a breast microbiome, we have a mouth microbiome, we have a gut microbiome. We have so many microbiomes in our body, and it’s interesting. I’ve recently read some research where there’s a professor, I think, at the University of Virginia who is studying and culturing– He has this thing where he’ll send you a swab kit and you send him a swab of your vaginal microbiome and he’s collected all these microbiomes and he’s discovered that Caucasian women versus Latin American women, Latinas versus African American women have different bacteria cultures in our vaginal systems. There are lead bacteria for each of those ethnic categories.

That just got me thinking about the fact that with pre-2020, with Tinder hookups going crazy, and everybody having sex with everybody in a way that had never been done before, and online dating, making matches of people of different ethnicities spike. More children are now born of mixed ethnicity than the same ethnicities. We used to date in our neighborhood. Now, we date all over the world. I was thinking about how as women, we may be sleeping with partners, who are sleeping with other partners who have different vaginal microbiomes than we do. Then, you get into the sperm, the semen of the masculine, where we’ve been taught, “Yew, sperm is disgusting and you’ve got to stay away from it, you’re going to get pregnant,” like that. [laughs] We’ve made sperm this enemy when women don’t realize actually that the semen itself is full of serotonin, testosterone, which we need for confidence. All kinds of luteinizing hormones that really help regulate our menstrual cycles. And also, zinc, which is really important for us for cognitive function. So, you get into that whole world, and then you get into women who are like, “When my boyfriend’s semen is in my vagina, every single time it bothers me. What do I do? Am I allergic to my boyfriend or my husband?” It just continues to unwrap itself when you put all these forces together of the penis and the vagina and all of the biomes and [laughs] the chemicals that happen. Not to mention the chemicals of orgasm, and connection of oxytocin, and prolactin, and serotonin, and dopamine. [laughs] It’s just a fascinating stew. [laughs]

Cynthia: It truly is, and you touch on some of those things that make us feel good. Oxytocin is the mother of all hormones, and when we’re bonded, whether we’re hugging our significant other children, or our dog, or cat, we release oxytocin, and I think given how 2020 has played out, I think a lot of people are probably leaning heavily on those that they live with to get some of that oxytocin boost.

Now, we were talking about ways that we could expound upon healthy sexual energy, healthy sexual aging. I think sometimes there are people who fear– they’ll remain nameless. I won’t call them out from social media, but people who really fear aging and fear how that’s going to impact their sexuality, their ability to connect with their partners, even some of the things that well-meaning healthcare providers will say to us, can really set some anxiety in motion that, “Oh, my gosh, things are going to change in a very negative way and therefore, I’m not going to enjoy this process.” I always say the only alternative to aging is to no longer be living, and so that’s not an option. So, we might as well educate ourselves, get inspired, and understand that we do have control over a lot of how this goes.

Susan: Yeah. You and I were talking before the beginning of this podcast, and you were watching some of my videos on betterlover.com last night. When I was about 55, I started on a journey of vaginal restoration treatments and protocols. The entrance to my vagina hurt during sex, and that is a very, very common place for painful sex because the opening to your vagina is called the introital sphincter and it’s a circular muscle. As you age and your estrogen goes down, the collagen production, and the thickness of the skin of the vagina, including that introital sphincter gets thinner and what they call more friable. Just doesn’t have the resiliency, the bounce, the plumpness, the tumescence, the blood flow. You were watching my Better Lover videos. On those videos, I went through an entire vaginal restoration experience over about a year of all kinds of treatments and I filmed everything, down to the moments when she was putting needles in my yoni where I blurred everything.

My husband came with me into the treatment room and he took pictures of everything, because I wanted women to see what this stuff is really like. I went through that whole journey, and then I realized that almost half of what I did was totally unnecessary, wildly painful, and horrible things, and half of what I did was totally worth it, and great, and I continued to do it. The thing that wasn’t good was doing those laser treatments and RF treatments intravaginally that did subcutaneous damage to the vaginal mucosa, to re-collagenate the tissue. It was way too harsh. It was like doing a Fraxel laser on your face, but on your vaginal tissue.

Cynthia: Ouch.

Susan: I also upped my hormones, but that didn’t seem to help much. What I learned was that, it’s not actually your hormones that create a lot of the atrophy or create a lot of your libido and desire, it’s actually blood flow. At the same time that your hormones are declining, your nitric oxide production is declining. Nitric oxide is the signaling molecule in your body, it’s a gas actually, that dilates and constricts your blood vessels. Your body sends blood to your brain when you’re working, to your tummy when you’re digesting, to your genitals when you’re making love. It does that, but it loses tone over the years as your nitric oxide declines and you’re not getting enough blood to the tissue. That’s called engorgement or tumescence.

I stitched that together because one of the things that I had realized, when I was in my mid-40s, my husband and I almost got divorced, and I attributed all to the fact that I wasn’t having orgasms from intercourse. I had never been able to have orgasms from intercourse. I just got tired of having intercourse after a decade of doing it without having orgasms. I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I really stopped having sex with my husband. I would have mercy sex, and that was no way to live, and it ruined our intimacy, it ruined our relationship. We thought about getting divorced. Instead, we decided to work on our sex life, and we decided to try to learn how to have orgasms from intercourse.

We went to a lot of sex workshops, and we learned a lot of techniques, and it lit our sex life on fire. I learned how to have orgasms from intercourse, and I began to have all those great orgasms, and the trick for me was having enough foreplay and blood flow to be able to feel the sensation, so that my tissue got plump enough, that there was enough surface area to have sensation that sent the triggers to my brain that I could feel something. My vagina felt dead before I got enough blood flow. When I got enough blood flow and stimulation, my vagina became alive. When I realized that a lot of the issue was simply loss of nitric oxide, not necessarily loss of hormones, I really began to understand the concept of atrophy, vaginal atrophy, and how that begins to hurt us as early as our late 30s, definitely into our 40s, and it becomes a real problem by our 50s.

Today, what I have today to offer to women that I didn’t have as a recommendation even five years ago, because technology has been so good, is a product called the vFit, which gets rid of you having to go and traumatize your vagina in outpatient visits with someone who sticks a laser up your vaginal canal and burns you, and then you have to recover from it. It’s hormesis. It’s like damaging it’s going to make it stronger, but good Lord, you don’t have to do that anymore, because there’s now this technology called the vFit. I have one here to show you on our video. Basically, it’s a small white device that’s curved that you put inside your vagina that has three things. It has red light therapy, it has a warmth to it that brings collagen to the vaginal mucosal tissue, and it has vibration that is like Kegels done for you. This particular device, it’s at joylux.com.

What I love about it is that you do it every other day for 10 minutes in bed while you’re scrolling Instagram, and it feels good, and instead of having to go in and do this massive, brutal treatment to try to get your vaginal mucosa to be strong and resilient again, and to bring blood flow, what it’s really doing is it’s bringing blood flow and the red light is stimulating the mitochondrial production of ATP to create more depth of vaginal mucosa. If you do your VFit, and you take nitric oxide supplements– I don’t make the vFit, I just am a champion of the vFit and I tell all women about it because it really changes your life. It also helps create a better microbiome. I had a woman tell me, “I always had a bit of a smell down there and there was never anything wrong with me, I just didn’t like the way I smelled.” She said, “I could smell myself on my husband’s face after we made love and I just didn’t like it. I got the VFit and that smell went away.” It does so many things including prevent or reverse incontinence, which so many of us women suffer from because our bladder sling the muscles that hold up the bladder, they begin to get old. [laughs] We’re getting old. We’re fighting against gravity. [laughs]

This vFit, this in combination with nitric oxide supplements taken at night. I’m a CEO of two companies. One of the companies I have is a supplement company that has libido and blood flow supplements and my little, Flow F-L-O-W, which you can get on Amazon. It’s an organic, Whole Foods, nitric oxide supplement to top up your nitric oxide because you lose nitric oxide stores just like you lose hormones. So, what I love about this is, you take this, it gets more blood flow to the pelvis. You use the vFit, it gets more blood flow to the pelvis, and you spend more time on foreplay. You can reverse all these things that have happened as you’ve aged. It’s no longer thousands, and thousands, and thousands of dollars and tons of pain, and weeping tissue, and just miserable.

But I do also want to tell you about the O-Shot, the orgasm shot. If you want to hear more about that, because that’s the other piece of it that I think has been really, really good for a holistic vaginal rejuvenation so you can stay young with your vagina and have great sex your whole life.

Cynthia: This is so exciting because the conventional allopathic mindset is the reason why your vagina is atrophied, and dry, and sex is painful is because you have this loss of estradiol, loss of estrogen, predominantly, and that’s been the prevailing mindset for so many reasons. Would you recommend these therapies for women as they’re in the beginning of perimenopause, so way before menopause so that they can ward off the issues that come up, I have a wonderful family member who’s actually an OB-GYN, and she was saying to me that she said, I was really, really hesitant to go on x, y and z, but sex became so painful, I felt desperate. Here’s an OB-GYN saying, I felt like this is the only option.

So, I think for so many women and certainly women that follow me, they’re looking for proactive ways to offset some of the changes that occur with aging. But yeah, I definitely want to hear about the O-Shot and for the benefit of those that are listening, we’re talking about the O-Shot plasma-rich protein, and sometimes you’ll hear this being used in joint spaces, people that are trying to avoid surgeries, and so, I don’t want to detract from what you’re planning on sharing but really interesting. So, they’re actually injecting the PRP. I’m assuming into the vaginal tissue, I’m guessing probably.

Susan: Yeah. I want to say one thing about bioidentical hormone replacement. I’m a huge proponent of it. Dr. Lindsay Devaki Berkson, whom you probably know, just came out with a paper called Estrogen Vindication, which is basically that initial Women’s Health Initiative Research that scared all the doctors away from giving us estrogen because all our moms used to take estrogen all the time, they were using a non-bioidentical estrogen, and that’s what was creating problems, and it was a flawed study. All of that has been debunked, but none of our doctors who’ve come up through the medical ranks today know anything decent about hormone replacement therapy. Really, the only people who are actively studying it and really have a lot of clients, I think, are the functional medicine category of doctors. You’ll find a few MDs and OB-GYNs here and there that are studying it, but generally they don’t.

I personally use Biest that is compounded. There’s three kinds of estrogen, and what you want to do is you want to take the two good ones, estriol and estradiol, and you want to have a ratio of more of those two than the estrone, which is the breast cancer one, the cancer estrogen. When you take bioidentical hormones, you’re increasing your ability to push away cancer, and you’re increasing your cognitive function, you’re increasing the look and health of your skin, it has heart-protective, neuroprotective capabilities of estrogen. I like it compounded in an organic shea butter cream from my compounding pharmacy because I don’t like to use things that have petroleum basis. So, check the base that your pharmacy is using it in and put it inside your vagina every day. Then, also, add testosterone into the mix. Put a little testosterone in cream on the clitoral area of your vulva every day when you’re putting the estrogen inside. It’s just a little bit too, there’s hardly any. It absorbs within 40 minutes right into the vaginal tissue.

Your vaginal mucosa is like a big sponge. It sucks up anything you put in there, which is why it’s very important to also use a very, very healthy lubricant. Nothing that you buy in a tube that’s manufactured, that nothing you buy at CVS, or Walmart, or Target, or anything like that. I recommend organic sweet almond oil, avocado oil, jojobo oil, but not coconut. Because coconut is antibacterial, and that could potentially mess up your microbiome. So, using a good nut oil, and if you use condoms, use polypropylene condoms with it, because they’re the ones that are not susceptible to being broken down by oil, so you don’t have to worry about that. You can use those together, or you can use a polypropylene vaginal barrier, a vaginal condom instead, if you don’t want to use a penile condom. So, those are really important things.

Then, the last thing I’ll say about bioidentical hormone replacement is that oxytocin, which we started out talking about, you can get oxytocin suspended in a nice gel or cream, and you can use that intravaginally, and that will also plump up that tissue. So, if you don’t want to go the hormone route with estrogen, for some reason that your choice is not to take estrogen replacement and fill your tanks back up, then consider oxytocin as a possible way to also plump that tissue up. That’s also very good. So, you can use your vFit, you can use a lot of manual pleasuring from your partner, if you have one or solo pleasuring, and you can use the oxytocin cream, and then that is a good combination.

So, now, let’s move on to the O-Shot. I just really wanted to know like I–

Cynthia: So much good information. Oh, my goodness.

Susan: I know. I wanted to finish that off, because it’s important. I have an eBook that goes through all these things. It’s free. I think it’s at hormonebalance.com. You can always go to my website, betterlover.com and look up hormones, and you’ll see a series of video and under all the videos, there’s always links to my free eBooks and things like that. Everything’s recapped in hormone balancing, but the O-Shot is incredible. The O-Shot is you know as we age, basically, we desiccate, we dry up, and we cave in. We get shrink. We’re shrinking all the time. When our growth hormone begins to decline in our early 20s, we don’t grow much after that. We change but we don’t necessarily grow. You can supplement with growth hormone, subcutaneous injections, and that also helps stave off aging and continue to fight against sarcopenia, which is muscle loss, muscle wasting, but you’re also losing tissue in your vulva, and your male body partner is losing tissue in his penis as well.

Just as an aside, I highly recommend vacuum erection device for him. If you’re going to get your vFit, get your husband or your male body partner, a vacuum erection device. The one I recommend is called the Whopper and I have a book on it called Pump Guide that is at pumpingguide.com that explains how to use it, and it really helps reverse male atrophy from aging. Because what happens is as we age– this is the crappiest thing in the universe. This is one place where Mother Nature didn’t quite think it through, because as we women age and our vaginas atrophy, and the walls get thinner, and the tissue gets smaller and shrinks, it actually pulls apart our vaginal opening and we get laxity which means our vaginas lose their grip, which means it’s harder to orgasm, and they lose– let’s say, roomier in there, for want of a better word.

[laughter]

Susan: At the same time, this really stinks. At the same time, our male body partner, his penis is shrinking. So, now what used to be a nice fit is like, “Are you in? Did you put it in yet?”

[laughter]

Susan: You know, that’s the last thing a guy ever wants to hear or a girl ever wants to say is, “Is it in?” [laughs] But it sucks to have that happen, and it’s happening to all of us right now. What can you do to reverse that? You can do the vFit, you can use a lot of manual stimulation, stimulation with good toys, I can tell you about some toys I recommend. I think every woman should have as many toys as she has pairs of shoes. [laughs] We have too many shoes and not enough solo pleasuring toys and toys for use during lovemaking. I do a lot of primary research in the sexuality space and one of the things couples tell me is that, on the bottom of their list, one of the things they’re the worst at is integrating pleasure toys into their lovemaking, and I’m like, “Good Lord, people. You’re leaving so much pleasure on the table. Just start playing with some toys during lovemaking, have more orgasms, different kinds of orgasms, better orgasms.

Cynthia: [laughs]

Susan: You don’t have to do it all yourself. There’s no one looking and nothing to prove.” There’s technology available. I personally have an Instapot, a Cuisinart, espresso maker, what’s in your bedroom doors you should have? The Instant pot, the Cuisinart, and espresso maker in your bedroom too. [laughs] The idea is that you keep the tissue plumped, and that’s where the PRP comes in. This is one of the best things that you can possibly do highly recommended treatment, totally synergistic in the sexual biohacking stack with the vFit, and the self-pleasuring, and the nitric oxide, and the hormone replacement is O-Shots, orgasm shots.

You’re a doctor, and my favorite is Dr. logo Robyn Benson, that’s who I go to. If you ever want to have her on, she’s fabulous. She takes a little blood, a vial of blood out of your arm just like a blood draw. No big deal. She has a special machine. She puts it in the centrifuge. She centrifuges off the red blood cells and what’s left is called the fibrin-rich matrix. That’s a PRP, platelet-rich plasma. That’s the stuff that your orthopedic sticks in your joints, and your neck, and your back. Well, what Dr. Robyn does is, she injects it into your clitoral and vaginal structures. Your vagina, imagine your vagina as the center of the bullseye. You actually have erectile tissue completely wrapping your vaginal canal, We think about erectile tissue as being the clitoris, and we think about the clitoris as being that little spot above the opening to our vagina. But in fact, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. That’s the 5% of our clitoral structure that’s showing, there’s 95% that what I like to call buried treasure. All wrapping around our vulva, there’s the clitoral shaft, there’s two little arms that draped over the top of the vagina, there’s two little legs called the vestibular bulbs that are underneath the pubic hair on each side of the opening to your vagina, and then on the top of the roof of your vaginal cave, if you will, there’s your urethral sponge, often mistakenly called the G-spot. It’s not a spot. It’s a very long area of spongy erectile tissue. On the bottom of your vagina, there’s a perineal sponge between the bottom of the vagina and the rectum. So, literally, completely surrounding the opening to your vagina is all erectile tissue. Yet, women only get 5% of it stimulated.

When you start thinking about and learning all these pieces of your vagina, you can start stimulating it all. What the doctors who do O-Shots do is they essentially, they numb you so it doesn’t hurt at all. It’s a very small needle. It’s a very small amount of PRP. But what they do is they inject it into that clitoral spongy tissue, and they inject it any place that there’s damage or problems. I had a little tear at the opening to my vagina, the introital sphincter, a little tear at the bottom. Some women have certain parts of their vagina that have gotten crushed from horseback riding, or falling on a bike bar, or an accident, or rough sex, childbirth, incontinence. So, what the doctors do who do these O-Shots is, they not only recut– Basically, they inject the PRP into the spongy tissue, the spongy tissue soaks it up, and it holds it in there, and then over the next three to six months, it grows new tissue. It replaces the tissue loss. Whether that’s up inside and the sling where your bladder is to hold up that musculature so you reverse in continents, or you’re fixing a little spot from a tear, they just do the whole thing wherever you need it. It’s all custom done.

What I can tell you is that, I’ve had five O-Shots now over the last four or five years, and I’ve been rebuilding all that tissue. That little spot on my introital sphincter, no longer hurts me at all. I have nice padding back on each side of my vulva. My clitoral shaft is demonstrably larger and more meaty than it’s been really in my whole life. She’s really turbocharged my clitoris. I remember the first one I had, I thought, oh, I didn’t notice that much from it. Then, I had my second one. By the way, you can get one, you can get five. It’s really nice money and interest. It’s really what you do with your time and interest. It’s not that you need to get more than one. I just keep doing it because everyone that I get makes it even better.

Cynthia: [laughs]

Susan: The first one I got, I was like, “Oh, no, I don’t notice that much.” The second one I got, I was like, “Whoa.” I am having orgasms that feel like the orgasms I had when I was 30, and I’m 56. I didn’t realize how much sensation loss I had forgotten. I just didn’t know. That’s the thing. You decline and it’s so slow, you don’t even know you’ve lost it but you have. By the fourth one, I was really building up and feeling incredible pleasure, and the fifth one, I just had three months ago, and it just builds on itself and it really reconstitutes that tissue. They are absolutely wonderful, those O-Shots or orgasm shots. I have interviews with the inventor, Dr. Charles Runels, explaining what it is, and how it works, and what PRP is, and how he invented the whole thing.

There’s also P-shots, which are for your male-bodied partner that work fantastically at a stack with GAINSWave treatments, which are like the vFit for a man where it sends sound waves into his penis to stimulate new tissue growth, and then you inject the PRP in there, it’s numbing, they use a numbing cream, and when you inject the PRP in there after that tissue damage, it stimulates all the healing, and all the growth factors, and really reinvigorates that penile tissue, and then you combine that with nitric oxide, and the penis pump, and he’s going to have a penis that looks like he’s 18 again, he’s going to wake up with a baby arm under the covers. My husband wakes up and he’s like, “Look at this.” I’m like, “Behold–” We call his penis ‘His Majesty.’ [laughs] Behold ‘His Majesty.’ He’s so proud of that gorgeous penis that wakes up in the morning in full salute. That’s because he’s 56, and he is having really nice erections from all this type of really positive sexual biohacking type of treatments.

So, do not worry. Everything’s going to be okay. Your vagina is resilient, his penis is resilient. There are things you can do, and your sex life can get better and better as you age, as your children grow up, as you reconnect with your partner, as you slow down, as you make love, as you learn new things together. Good sex is knowledge, learning new skills together, keep sex in the bedroom exciting. So, health is one part of it, communication skills is the second part of it, and the third is techniques. Learning new techniques, having different kinds of orgasms, using sex toys, doing all those things together. Very important to keep your sex life getting better what I like to call getting on the upward pleasure spiral where sex just keeps getting better your whole lifelong.

Cynthia: I think it’s so important for women and men to have this information, I feel as a healthcare provider, I can say this with great certainty. When I was in my nurse practitioner, my nursing programs that was back when you were referring to that study back in the late 1990s, where women were just getting unopposed estrogen, progesterone. My mom was taken off of estrogen, and now, we see this sequela of a whole generation of women who have really suffered because they didn’t have the appropriate degree of support that they really needed.

But I love to see full circle that as we’re becoming more knowledgeable, we’re able to share more of these techniques and what you’re really advocating for are things that are very reasonable, things that everyone can do in the privacy of their own home to really improve not just the structure and function of their body, anatomy and physiology, but also the physiology of what goes on with their bodies, empower them so they can then say to their partner, or say to themselves, “I’m willing to make this investment in myself,” I love that you use the term biohacking, because so much of this podcast is really bringing on disruptors and people that are bringing cutting-edge information to us. So, in terms of– I did get some questions that I wanted to quickly ask you. What are your thoughts on jade eggs?

Susan: I love them. I recommend Saida Desilets jade eggs specifically. She bought a giant piece of jade from Canada, from a mine, and they make all her eggs out of this beautiful piece of jade, and she is the master at teaching you how to slip it in, release it. Your vagina has the ability to– I can literally make love to my husband holding totally still, literally just manipulating his penis with my vagina as he’s inside me and take him up to the edge of pleasure and back down again over and over and over with the musculature control that I have. What’s great is the more muscular control that you have, the better your orgasms. The bigger the contraction, the better the pleasure. So, the contraction is very important. Keeping the vaginal muscles toned and strong is very important for keeping your pelvic floor high, and your orgasms super good. [laughs]

Cynthia: Are you a fan of Kegels, or do you feel like you need to do a couple different strategies for improving that vaginal tone?

Susan: I think the best thing to do for vaginal tone is intercourse. That really gets the vagina a good workout and you get all the pleasure of it, too, and I want to say something. That is that, there are a lot of women who think to themselves, “I’m just not the woman who can have an orgasm from intercourse.” I want to let you know, “Yes, you are. Yes, you are, girl. Yes, you are.” It’s a learned skill for most people. Some women come by it naturally the lucky ones. It’s a minority. On my betterlover.com website I have a whole series called how to have an orgasm from intercourse or how to have a penetration orgasm? I recommend you watch those because it’s almost always a couple of different things that a woman didn’t learn or is missing from her sex life that is going to be the bridge, what I call crossing the gasm-chasm. You’ll finally get over that. Because it’s great to have orgasms from your vibrator on your clitoris, it’s great to have an orgasm from oral, but I think master the holy grail of heterosexual monogamous relationships, which is what most of us are in, which is having reliable, consistent, nonperformance anxiety orgasmic pleasure from intercourse, you’re going to not have the sex life you deserve nor will your partner. So, you need to agree as a couple to cross that gasm-chasm together.

Then, when you have intercourse, you’re really exercising your vaginal muscles a lot and you’re having a lot of contractions. That’s really the best thing for you. You don’t necessarily need to do Kegels. Also, I’m lazy, and so, I like the vFit because it’s Kegels done for you. I like to just slip that warm vibrating red-light device up inside my yoni and scroll Facebook for 10 minutes while I drink my coffee every other morning, and that’s enough for me. [laughs]

Cynthia: Well, I think it’s so helpful for people to know that there are things other than Kegels. I think we’ve been conditioned to believe that that’s what we’re supposed to be doing. Kegels all the time, Kegels while you’re in your car, no one knows that you’re doing them, but it sounds like this vFit device is a really fantastic, multipronged approach to-

Susan: So good.

Cynthia: -vaginal health.

Susan: Women owned, women created.

Cynthia: Oh, yeah. [crosstalk] Of course. Well, Susan, it’s always a pleasure to have you and today just like the first podcast I had with you, you are just such a wealth of information. Everyone needs to check out your website, Better Lover, which I was mentioning to you before we started recording, what I loved is that the videos are not an hour long. Most of the videos are fairly short. So, I binged on them the other night, watching multiple ones, trying to get a sense for what direction to take the podcast. How can we connect with you? How can my listeners reach out to you and get more information about all these wonderful things you talked about today?

Susan: You know that saying, ‘all roads lead to Rome’? I like to use my main website. personallifemedia.com. That’s my publishing business. I like to use that website because any question you have about sex, you can type into the search box. I’ve been doing this for 15 years. This is my second career. I’ve been running this business for 15 years, and I’ve written thousands of articles, and shot hundreds of videos, and written 34 books and programs, most of which are free, and it’s all at personallifemedia.com. So, whatever your thing is, any word I said, anything we mentioned, anything that’s on your mind, just go type it in the search box and you will get led into the rabbit hole of what I like to call, transforming, having sex into making love.

Cynthia: Well, such an important distinction. Thank you, again, for getting up early to connect with us. I know that we are going to be releasing this in February. So, it’ll be perfect for Valentine’s Day.

Susan: Good.

Presenter: Thanks for listening to Everyday Wellness. If you love this episode, please leave us a rating, and review, subscribe, and remember tell a friend. If you want to connect with us online, visit the link in the show notes.