Episode 48: Sexual Agency
with intimacy expert Susan Bratton
Amy is joined by publisher and sex educator Susan Bratton for a tell-all discussion about sex under patriarchy, the power of pleasure, and practical steps towards liberation in the bedroom.
Our Guest
Susan Bratton
Susan Bratton is co-founder and CEO of two companies serving the direct-to-consumer intimate wellness space. She is a manufacturer of supplements and a publisher of online courses focused on having a great relationship your whole life long. Her expertise is in ageless sexuality, sexual biohacking, libido supplementation and sexual regenerative therapies that roll back the clock on aging. She is a sought-after speaker from the stage, has been on countless podcasts, radio shows, and television segments worldwide. Her weekly email newsletter has nearly a half a million readers. And she is beloved as the "trusted intimacy wellness expert to millions 💋."
Susan believes that shame-free, frequent sexual pleasure is every man and woman’s birthright.
Amy Allebest: Five years ago, I read the book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan for the first time. The book was published in 1963, and it was nothing short of revolutionary, helping to launch the second wave of feminism in the United States. You are probably familiar with Friedan's main points. Perhaps you remember chapter titles such as “The Problem That Has No Name”, “The Happy Housewife Heroine”, “The Crisis in Women's Identity”, and “The Forfeited Self”. I talked about many of these chapters in my episode on The Feminine Mystique in Season One. But one chapter I didn't talk about in that episode was called “The Sex-Seekers”, and one thing that shocked me about The Feminine Mystique that I didn't mention on the podcast was the number of times Friedan talked about women's orgasms. For me, at the time I was reading it, I couldn't really see how women's orgasms were related to women's liberation. And also I thought that that was way too taboo of a topic to discuss on Breaking Down Patriarchy. Fast forward to today, and women's sexual health is one of the most important topics that I think about and talk about, and I am convinced that it is integral to women's overall health and thriving, and yes, to women's liberation from patriarchy. It also leads to men's happiness too, by the way. So I am thrilled to welcome Susan Bratton today, who is known as an intimacy expert to millions and is a champion and advocate for all those who desire intimacy and passion for their whole life long. Welcome, Susan, I'm so excited to have you here today!
Susan Bratton: Amy, I'm super psyched to be here! I may be the most excited guest you've ever had, because boy have I been talking about how to jettison ourselves out of the cultural miasma around patriarchal sexuality. I mean, everything we see is through the male lens, through what feels good to the penis, not to – and I'm going to throw a word out right away because I find this to be a really good word for having conversations about sexuality – women's genitals. A lot of women call it the vagina, and I feel like that's a patriarchal word because “vagina” is actually a Greek term that comes from the word “sheath”. Like it's the thing that the penis goes in, the sword goes in. And not only that, but it's not really where the clitoral structures of pleasure reside. We literally don't have a word in our vocabulary other than the anatomical words of the clitoral, urethral, perineal, erectile tissue structures to talk about the pleasurable aspect of our vulvovaginal system. Vulva is the external, vagina is part of the internal, and we don't have a word for it. So here's the word I like: Yoni. Y-O-N-I. Yoni is my favorite four-letter word after the F-word, haha, because I'm in my “I don't give an F” era. And what I like about it is that it comes from tantric lovemaking, it's a reverential word, it's inclusive, and it has a psycho-spiritual aspect to it, which I find pleasurable as well. It's holistic, it's comprehensive, it's not medical, and it's not crass. So I really love that word. And for those of you who would like the commensurate word for the male penis, prostate, testicle package, it's lingam.
That is one of the very first things that I'd love to remedy, is this notion that the vagina is what gives us pleasure. And one of the other things that's going on that's so frustrating is that I have a girlfriend who runs a nonprofit because had a labiaplasty, because she thought there was something wrong with her labia at 18 years old, and her plastic surgeon cut off too much stuff because they didn't know what all the components of the urogenital system were. And she's essentially scarred for life. So now she has a foundation to essentially embarrass textbook companies and medical institutions into putting actual true-to-life illustrations of female genital anatomy in their textbooks. To this day, they're still incorrect. And we just got an update on the fact that the clitoral tip, the glands part of it, actually has more like 10,000 nerve endings, not the 8,000 that everyone quotes everywhere. That was a porcine study. That's a pig clitoris. So we are making progress, that's for sure. But I'm so happy to be here talking about what sex looks like through the female lens when everything we've ever seen in our whole life is informed by repression and patriarchy.
AA: Wow, what an introduction! That was absolutely fantastic. My long-term listeners will know that I'm always saying before we even start a conversation on something, I want to define the terms and make sure that words are defined correctly. So I love that you started out with an anatomical explanation and defining the terms of the body parts that we're going to be talking about, and that even those have patriarchal origins. It's just incredible. And I can't believe that happened to an 18-year-old. It's just devastating.
SB: Because all you see are little tiny girl labia and pornography instead of what we usually all have. I like to call my labia the hanging gardens of Babylon. Hahaha! I mean, they are just luscious and I love that about them. One of the things that I teach, and I'm really glad that when you did the intro you got right into orgasm, and I love Betty Friedan. One of the interesting things is that I have been calling myself an orgasmanaut for a couple of decades. What I think I do better than anybody else – now, I'm not a therapist, I don't sit in a room with a person and solve their sexual problems – I attract, and here's what's so interesting about what you said in your intro, sexual seekers. Out of every hundred people, you just do a random sampling of a hundred US adults, only about 15% of them will be what I call sexual seekers. People who have a growth mindset realize that everything is mastery and that sexuality can be mastery too, and that they've gotten through what I would call that default thinking. The default world of sex as intercourse, and that's religious patriarchal repression. Because when you focus solely on intercourse, you are focused on procreation. Basically, people aren't having sex, they're actually just practicing making babies. It's just inserting a penis into a vagina with an ejaculatory release– Aren't you so glad you invited me?
AA: I love it! Keep going.
SB: But it's so interesting, because one of the biggest things I do to unwind patriarchal sex, in addition to teaching people about all the genital structures, the fact that women have as much erectile tissue as our male-bodied partners, but often we've been penetrated so soon that we've never gotten our full arousal. And that's why we don't want “sex” anymore, because everybody just thinks sex is intercourse. It's rushed to intercourse. That's not what serves the female body. And we just kind of opt out of it after a while, like it's just so disillusioning because it's so crappy for us. And yet, women walk around thinking, “I am not the kind of person that can have an orgasm, but other women can. They're lucky, but I just can't.” Or, “I can't have one from intercourse, I can only have it this certain way.” Or any of these kinds of things that keep them stuck in terrible sex, and they don't understand that their arousal takes 20 or 30 minutes, not two or three like the fast-acting blood flow of the male partner. And it's not the guy's fault. I'm not doing a blame game on men either. They're stuck in the same soup with us. We're all rolling around like fish in water, we can't even see all the stuff that has harmed us.
“A lot of women call it the vagina, and I feel like that’s a patriarchal word because “vagina” is actually a Greek term that comes from the word “sheath”. Like it’s the thing that the penis goes in, the sword goes in. And not only that, but it’s not really where the clitoral structures of pleasure reside.”
And part of what I like to do is I like to explain what the issues are, but I also like compensatory mechanisms. I like coping mechanisms. I like giving you alternative ideas for what might be good so that you can get your fish out of that fishbowl and into a whole new world of possibility and pleasure. That's, I think, the most important thing. I want to tell you one more thing and then I'll shut the hell up and let you ask me a question. But I got an email from a guy today, and it was so sweet. He had written to me before and I gave him a couple of ideas because his wife wasn't wanting sex with him. They were in their 60s and he still had a good libido and he was still wanting her and desiring her, and she was just like, “I don't know, I'm not in the mood.” And I said, “Well, why don't you offer her unlimited yoni massages and stop pressuring her for intercourse and just drop in and connect with her and pleasure her and give her the time to get fully engorged? Let the little sponges that are in her yoni learn how to fill with blood and get them working.” They're like a muscle. They're slow at first to fill with blood, but the more you do it, the more they plump up easily. And then there's this surface area that sends more signals to your biggest sex organ, your brain, and really helps her start to feel the pleasure that she's never really gotten to before. And he's like, “Okay, I'm going to try it.” He wrote to me today and he is like, “My wife has decreed that she loves unlimited yoni massages and that she wants them all the time. Our sex life has never been better. It was a game changer for us, and now I want to know what I should do next.” It’s like, “Oh, yay! This is so good.” When you drop back to the feminine body and what she really needs, everything gets better for everyone.
AA: Incredible. There's so much I want to ask you, and that was such a great introduction. I want to first back way up and hear a little bit about you and what brought you to do this work. And then I'll already cue you to the next question I'm going to ask, is to go to that water that all the fish are swimming in. The patriarchal constructs that we all grow up with. So first tell us a little bit about you, and then we'll go to the structure.
SB: Sure. Well, like any good US American woman, I was raped by my stepfather at six, and this is how the story starts. It's just un-freaking-believable.
AA: Oh no.
SB: I was date raped, and I've been slut shamed, and I got pregnant using this thing in the ‘70s called Encare Oval, which was this little thing that was like a suppository you would put in and it was supposed to protect you. It was supposed to kill the sperm in the vagina. I got pregnant the first time I lost my virginity, and I had to have an abortion. Thank God I could get one. Thank God I could get one. I never for a moment regretted it. And now I have a beautiful daughter that I had timed when it was right for me and it was absolutely perfect and she's absolutely perfect. So that was good. But I've had every offensive thing that can be done to a woman done to me, like most of us have. And one of the things that I think is unique about me is that there's nothing unique about me. There's one thing, and that is that I've had a white woman's access to education, and I'm 64, so I had access to an inexpensive good education. I grew up in that era. Now our kids today, they're saddled with debt and the minimum wage hasn't risen, and they're much worse off than I. So I've had a lot of benefits of being a white, well-educated woman, and I get that, and that's why a lot of what I do is spend time lifting my people up, my sisters of all colors, in many different ways of things that I do all the time. I'm very premeditated about my focus on taking the gifts that have been given to me and helping others.
But I was lucky in some ways that I was very early into a Silicon Valley tech career. And at the time it was mostly a meritocracy. If you're smart enough and gung-ho enough, you can rise through the ranks. And there were so few women back then that I rose and I was the only woman with a seat at the table in boardrooms. And that was quite an interesting experience for me. I had the confidence in the hutzpah to be there. I noticed how men were so territorial, and I noticed all of the ways that men had tried to kick my feet out from under me, keep me down, suppress me, beat me, abuse me, gaslight me. Everything, it's all been done to me. I am indomitable, I am uncontrollable, increasingly more so. I love it so much. It feels so good. I just love my sixties. I love the wisdom, I love the power, I love the strength. I love my energy, I love my loving heart. There are so many things that I love about the age that I am right now. I could not have imagined in my twenties, thirties, forties, even fifties, feeling so powerful. God, it feels good. I love it so much. And I never get to say these things because the audience is not prepared to hear this from someone like me. Nobody likes it when you say these things out loud. I hope to hell this is a safe space to do it.
AA: Oh, I'm thrilled to hear it.
SB: If I can't say it here, where am I gonna say it? This is where it needs to be said. So that's quite interesting. And I was saying before that I'm not a therapist, I'm actually an author of passionate lovemaking techniques and bedroom communication skills and intimate wellness information. So I publish the work of my mentors whose lineages I carry on, like the expanded orgasm practice, which is essentially a more complex version of yoni massage. It's a clitoral stroking technique that allows the female body to begin to not just become orgasmic, but to become multi-orgasmic, massively multi-orgasmic. To extend the moment of orgasm, and then to expand the intensity of orgasm to the point where the women who have this practice with their partners write to me breathlessly, talking about how they just came for an hour and they felt like they touched God, or Source, or Gaia, or conscious connection to all living things. That kind of experience is one of the two things that makes sexuality what people want to repress to control you. If you can touch God and feel connected, palpably connected to all other living things, what else do you need? When you have that experience in your body and you can feel it through your orgasm, that's just incredible.
And the other thing that's really powerful about having great sex that gets better till the day you die, that those sexual seekers, the 15-percenters are hungry to know about, is that it keeps you living not only longer, it literally extends your health span, it extends your lifespan. Every 10 years you continue to have sex gives you two more years of life, roughly, according to studies, which are mostly on men. And I can only do what I can do, but it doesn't make you just live longer, it makes you live more healthfully, but it also makes you happier. It makes you more confident. It imbues you with vitality, with energy, it literally stimulates mitochondrial production, it lowers inflammation, it releases natural killer cells, it's a vascular reboot, it's a cascade of hormones. I think one of the reasons why in my sixties I have this incredible love that bursts from my heart and I'm in a sense of awe about being alive is the oxytocin production that I have because I have skin to skin contact and so much of it. I'm held so beautifully, my nervous system is calm. It's the benefits of sex. I mean even just pelvic musculature and everything. It's having great sex.
But there's literally zero information about how to have an orgasm. So what I've done for 20 years is I've written step-by-step instructions and I've systematically gone to the far reaches of outer space, of the orgasmic outer space as my orgasmanaut, which of course she wears a silver lamé jumpsuit guaranteed, it's unzipped and it's very boobalicious because you gotta be sexy, which I love. But when I learn how to come in a new way, I write the steps down and I perfect them. And I tell all the people who follow me, “Try this,” they try it, and it works because we have the same operating system. We're all running the same operating system, we all have the same computer. And there might be different programs on our computers, but we can all have all the orgasms. And when you realize, oh my God, I can have this massive amount of pleasure, I can train my body to have this massive amount of pleasure, it's life transforming. It's confidence building, it's vitality generating, it makes you uncontrollable.
I like the word “agentic” instead of “sovereign”. “Agentic” for me feels very modern. We’re living in the age of agentic software, right? It's learning itself. But also, “sovereign” feels alone. It feels above. And sure, I like to be a queen, but I don't really. I don't want to be a queen, I just want to lift everyone up. I don't want to be above. I want to lift, not reign. But what I do want is to be agentic. I want to feel completely capable of all of my own decisions. I want to own my body. I want to decide what my body needs at every moment, especially during sex. And those are some of the coping mechanisms that I go right to with women, to teach them: Here are my coping mechanisms, these are the things that I found work for me. Use them as starting points for what you need, for the software you are running on, your operating system. Because you're going to have different experiences and have a different need-state depending on who you are, your dynamics, your relationship, your history, the things you know. But here are some coping mechanisms for you to get out of the patriarchal, repressed era of our sexuality and into this agentic ownership of your sexuality. And to feel confident knowing what you want and asking for it.
AA: Hmm. I love this. I also want to thank you for that detailed introduction. I feel like something that stops a lot of women from even seeking this is that if they do have a history of sexual abuse, that they'll feel like, “Well, that's great for other women, but that can't be true for me,” because of the amount of maybe sexual shame or the amount of trauma that they're carrying. So for you to so openly just get that out there, that that's happened to you and it hasn't stopped you from going on this journey and achieving so much joy and self-fulfillment and realization. Thank you for sharing that and for being so open about that. And also thank you for your joyful and exuberant thoughts about being in your sixties. I need that so much. We don't have that modeled for us as we get older, so I take it deep, deep into my heart anytime I see a woman aging joyfully and with more and more power and more and more flourishing in her life. It is profoundly helpful for all of us, I think. So, thank you for that example. Is there a way to, in a short time, be able to say how you got from, for one thing, a Silicon Valley businessperson to then someone whose career is based on sex as a publisher and educator. How did you make that leap? That might be too long a story, but then with so much sexual trauma, how did you get from so much sexual trauma to so liberated in your sex life? Is there a way to talk about that quickly?
SB: Yeah, sure. The first thing is that I almost divorced Tim, my husband Tim, who I've been with for 34 years now. I almost divorced him about 12 years into our marriage. And that was because I was avoiding him for sex, because the sex was so sh*tty for me. I'd never had an orgasm from intercourse, and I had dutifully had intercourse with him for a dozen years, and I didn't want to do it anymore. And I was disillusioned, but my career was taking off and I just put my energy there. And he was so sad. He tried everything. And we just decided that instead of getting divorced, that we would go to therapy. We went to therapy, and the first therapist was like, “This is just what happens.” And my husband's like, “We're not going back to her.” And then with the second therapist he was like, “I'd really like to have sex every day.” And the second therapist was like, “Well, you obviously are a sex addict.” He's like, “I'm not a sex addict, I just want to be close to my wife.” So I started to do a lot of therapy around the sexual abuse that I had, talk therapy, but then I also did a lot of somatic work, which is body-based work. Peter Levine has a somatic experience technique, and I think somatic therapies are also very good.
At that time, my husband and I went to some sex workshops and we learned skills. We were sexual seekers. We were those Betty Friedan 15-percenters. And it just transformed our sexuality. I mean, basically I got the instructions to my operating system. We did the things and I started coming. Everybody can learn how to have all the orgasms. You're not broken, you just haven't gotten the info. And I literally give it away for free. So, as you're listening to this, if you're like, “I really want to learn how to have an orgasm from intercourse,” my techniques are at orgasmicintercourse.com and they're there for you. I don't charge anything for them. These are the kinds of things that I do. And when I started coming really well, then I wanted to experience G-spot pleasuring, and so my husband and I learned about that. That's another program whose wisdom I carry on, which is called female liquid orgasm, releasing your divine nectar. It is a very healing and releasing thing to de-arm your G-spot. And the G-spot, named after a man, is not a spot. It's actually a tube of tissue that's the same tube that's in your husband's penis. It's just above your vaginal canal, behind the clitoral body, and it holds a lot of enteric emotion. It's part of your enteric nervous system. It holds memory and wounding, especially sexual traumas in women. So my husband just rubbed that spot and released that and de-armored it and opened it. And I roared like a freight train and cried like a baby and screeched like a witch. It was some freaky stuff. But we went through it together and he did a lot of trauma healing on me, and we just found our way through that together.
And most couples don't even go to therapists. Often, they're healing each other through loving touch and awareness and expansion and exploration. That's very, very common. But I've done a lot of things to heal that trauma. When we went through those incredible experiences, it was this moment where I said, “I want to devote the rest of my life to helping everyone else learn these simple things.” Because if I can get naked and go to a workshop, I can bring this workshop information on the internet so people don't have to get naked and go to a workshop in San Francisco, and they can access it from all over the world. Because I'm a tech nerd, so I know how to put stuff on the interwebs. So 20 years ago, we started our company, basically bringing these techniques that we were taught online so that anyone anywhere in the world could learn these things at home, like the ExpandHerOrgasmTonight.com program, that one has 21 erotic play dates. I'm going to send it to you. It has 21 erotic play dates that you do with your partner to learn this beautiful orgasmic clitoral stroking technique that literally connects you with Source through your orgasm. But these 21 modules, you could do them 21 days in a row, you could do them 21 weeks in a row. You can do them in any order you want. You can skip the ones that don't appeal to you, but each of them is like a different facet of learning how to be in limbic connection with your lover, feel sensation, hold sensation.
One of the things therapists do a lot is they teach sensate focus. That's what it's called. If you go to a sex therapist, they'll do sensate focus, where they'll actually have you not shy away from the feeling. These are little simple things that you can learn that really move us from, you know, what is sex? Sex is not: “I grab your boob, I jump your bones, I ejaculate, and this is your job,” right? It's: “How do I hold you, nurture you, heal you, make you feel sensual and desired? How do I give your yoni the 20 to 30 minutes of focused attention that it needs for you to actually feel the pleasure that a penis feels in minutes?” Right?
“How do I hold you, nurture you, heal you, make you feel sensual and desired?”
AA: Yeah. Okay, so let's go now to what I said we were going to talk a little bit about, which is patriarchal structure and the water that we're all swimming in. And I appreciate when you said this before, you did mention that this isn't men's fault either. Growing up, we're all swimming in the water, and I'm thinking of that now. A lot of men, I'm sure you see this all the time, actually really do want to be good partners for their wives, good sexual partners, but they haven't been handed the instruction manual. Partly because their wife can't hand them the instruction manual because they don't know either. So this is why you do what you do, I think. But tell me, what are those patriarchal structures as you see them? How does that show up for a typical American woman? What barriers does it create inside of her?
SB: I think the best place to start is with libido, desire, and arousal. A lot of women say, “I don't have any libido.” And there are a couple of reasons for that. It's not just your hormones, it's that your libido is the other side of the same coin as your health. And if your health is diminished, and that includes emotional health, if you have anxiety, depression, or you're going through any kind of health issues, you're not going to have a good libido, because you can't be desirous for lovemaking if you don't feel good. So that's one thing. The desire is, how do you feel about yourself? And we've grown up in a world of having to look at perfect women. Our body image issues. The fact that our culture thinks that when you hit 40, you're old. You're just a baby when you're 40, that's nothing. And we get put out to pasture. We're useless after menopause. The only thing we're good for is taking care of the grandkids or something. Are you freaking kidding me? I'm writing two books and making a documentary, running two companies, I'm traveling around the world. Come on. I work out every day, I cook all three meals. I'm on fire. I've never been better. So that whole thing that makes us feel bad about ourselves. Imperfect, not good enough. All the messages are there about that.
And then if we don't understand what we really need out of our relationship and we're pissed off at our partner, they're not meeting our needs, then we don't desire them either. So there's that. Everything that happens outside the bedroom impacts inside the bedroom. I can't often get on television or a stage to talk about sex because people are so freaked out about sex. A lot of times I have to kind of default to relationship constructs to get publicity and build my brand awareness, because I'm constantly shadowbanned and censored. Like, if I were to use somebody's email platform and they found out I was sending content around passionate lovemaking, they would shut down my business, I’d lose my Instagram, all those kinds of things. It's very hard for people to find out about me, so thank you for having me. This is why I have a business mastermind with over 50 sexperts. We work with each other to lift each other up because we're suppressed by tech platforms.
And when I go on television, a lot of times I talk about something called relationship values. Understanding what it is that you want out of your relationship and what your partner does because you want very different things. They're testosterone-dominant homo sapiens, and we're estrogen-dominant homo sapiens. And if we're not getting our needs met and we can't clearly communicate what it is we want, and we don't understand what they want because they're different from us, we tend to be the blind leading the blind and dissatisfied in our relationship. It helps get a lot of clarity so that you can start to treat your partner the way they want to be treated, and they can do the same for you, and then that helps inside the bedroom.
The next piece is arousal, and that's this two minutes versus 20 minutes situation, where we have the same amount of erectile tissue in our vulvovaginal system, but men have penetrated us and they’re fast asleep before we're even turned on. Because we have this patriarchal construct that there's foreplay and sex, and sex is what matters, and that's penetration. Yet all we see, men, women, people across the gender spectrum, is pornography. And you've mentioned this on one of your previous shows, that TIME Magazine had a study that showed that 96% of a random sampling of 360 porn clips showed degradation of women. And that's where people are getting their sexual education. And frankly, movies and television are derivative of that exact same content. They're like porn lite.
There's nothing in it that is about how the female body needs to be pleasured, which is with words of adoration and appreciation, being held, not being grabbed, understanding that we need nurturing touch, sensual touch, healing touch, and sexual touch. We need full body touch. We need our hair stroked, our cheeks kissed, our eyelids kissed. We need our breasts worshiped, we need our bodies touched. We need oral pleasuring, we need manual pleasuring. We like sex toys, vibration, oscillation, air stimulation, thrusting, all kinds of things to be used on us to fill and engorge with blood those funny little nooks and crannies of erectile tissue that are what we need to get our clitoral erection. And it's technically a clitoral-urethral, para-urethral erection, right? So we need to be taught about our parts. We need to give them names. We need to understand the locations. We need to get away from, “Touch the tip of the clit and you'll be fine,” and into: Wow, did you know that you can come from having your labia stroked once they're awakened and activated? Did you know there's such a thing as orgasmic activation and orgasmic cross-training? I mean, all of those things leading all the way up to how a vagina needs intercourse. When you put a penis inside a vagina or toy, what does it want versus what the penis wants? Because all we see is what the penis wants.
One of my favorite things is to get on stage and blow up a balloon and show people what a vagina wants because it looks like a pocket until it's turned on and engorged. And it's just so interesting that we're not taught and we have no sexual literacy. It's completely suppressed, and it just keeps us all in the dark. It's hurting us all. So when women can get the kind of arousal and touch and love that we need, when we get encouragement, when we are allowed to ruthlessly sexually self-expressed. When our lover doesn't contract from the desire, which can be ravenous within us. Sometimes we are a kitty cat, but boy do we turn into a lioness when we're given all these inputs and when we have a partner who's like, “More… I love this… Pounce me… I just love your appetite… I will give you everything you want.” When we can have that from a partner, then our arousal is no problem. Our libido is no problem. Our desire is no problem. But boy, that's a lot of steps to learn. That's a lot of stuff to unwind. Then we've got to deal with all the shame, the body shame, the trauma, all the bad sex we've had. So we pull a sled of trauma, but we're leaning into awakening. That's where we are right now. That's what's happening with you and I in this moment, is we are leaning into awakening.
AA: I love this. This is so interesting for me to also think about the historical context of the way that sexuality has always been suppressed. I'm thinking of the Comstock laws and Margaret Sanger trying to, even just through the mail, send brochures about how to prevent pregnancy, even just through the rhythm method. And for people to just understand their own anatomy, and that that was illegal not that long ago. So your description of having to be so careful about what you can say onstage, what you can say on social media, what you can even send in an email. I think it was your email comment that I was like, “Oh, it's like Margaret Sanger with the US Postal Service.” We exist on that historical timeline, and it just strikes me as so absurd that there's all this information available to us about pretty much every other aspect of our lives. Like, if we want to get in shape and build muscle, we can easily access that information to help ourselves grow and to make progress. If we want to learn something about chemistry or about literature, about any other topic, it's not hard to find the information. But our sexual health, our sexual wellbeing, which as you've so beautifully illustrated is such a key part of our human thriving, we can't talk about it. It's just so silly.
SB: I called a girlfriend of mine, I was on her show recently, and I'm going back to Miami and I said, “Hey, do you want to do another segment? We got the most incredibly positive comments on the segment.” And she's like, “Suze, I love you so much, and I want you to speak at all of my live events, but I can't have you on my show anymore because my YouTube channel took–” she makes all her money on her YouTube channel. And she said, “My YouTube channel took a massive hit. They denied me any traffic. It took me six weeks to recover from the hit of having you on my show.” Isn't that crazy? I hope you're going to air this segment!
AA: No, no, no, I will. Oh, I will. Because I think it's so important, and I do think, I mean, just this conversation is even making it hit home for me even more how much it really is patriarchal. It's just the patriarchy that we've inherited that is causing this problem. And you're right, the people are hungry for it. They need it, but they don't know how to talk about it. They don't know where to go for help. So, I'm so grateful for this work.
SB: Come to me.
AA: Yeah. And people will now.
SB: I wanted to tell you about the documentary that I'm working on. We haven't even gone into production. I'm in the fundraising stages of it, but the documentary is interesting. The placeholder title of it is currently called “Behind Closed Doors”, but I was joking with the filmmaker the other day that it should be called “seggs”, S-E-G-G-S. Because my social media manager, she takes all these clips from all these things that I do, whether it's stage appearances or what have you, and she has to run everything through to script, and she has to strip all of the words out and she has to retype every single one and change the spelling. She has to bleep me saying vagina, penis, clitoris, sex, everything. And people are constantly complaining, “Why does she bleep everything?” And I'm like, “Because I'll be deleted from the universe if I don't.” And the film is about the confluence of the patriarchal suppression of feminine pleasure. “You're there to make babies. That is your job.” That’s what it is. And it's about the big tech censorship and being complicit in this suppression, and it's about the lack of sex education. If you look at, I think it's called siecus.org, they do a report card state by state by state about the quality of sex education. Like three states get some As, and pretty much everybody's Ds and Fs across the 50 states of America right now, and it's going to get worse so the only kind of sex education we get is fear and abstinence based. And it's so interesting too, because I'm the Chief Advocacy Officer of an STI testing company. They're called ProDx Health, and they have at-home STI testing kits. They came out of the COVID era. They are a post-pandemic tech company who sells you kits that you can keep at home. And then if you decide, “I would like to take this man as my lover,” Okay, here's your kit. We'll do our swab, our urine test, our blood test. We send it in, and in 48 hours or less we have results on our phones. Then we know we're protected. They are doing incredible work. But we no longer have the CDC reporting on syphilis or gonorrhea. There's a mycoplasma genitalium outbreak happening, especially in Southern California right now, and nobody even knows about it. And if you went to Quest or you asked your preferred provider to give you STI testing, they don't even test for Mgen. The fact that nobody gives a sh*t if we get STIs in this country.
AA: Because you can't talk about it.
SB: Just can't talk about it. They can barely advertise. It is so oppressed. I know we need to wrap up probably pretty darn soon, and I don't want to leave here with everybody feeling super bummed and sad. I would love to leave coping mechanisms, ideas for how to help, that kind of thing. Because I don't want it to be like, “Oh my God, she was such a downer!”
AA: No, no, no!
SB: But you can't fix it until you see it and you know it. And then once you see it, you can't unsee it and you need to fix it. And I can't leave you here without it.
AA: Yeah, no, no. And we won't. But I do appreciate, I think it is so important to point that out. And again, the absurdity of, like you said, the pornography and the porn-influenced television. Nobody has a problem with that, but that's the patriarchal view of sex. But these conversations are highly–
SB: Well, you know why. Because that's what they want to promulgate. But they don't want to promulgate safe testing, abortion, bodily autonomy, consent, anything that's loss of control.
AA: I do want to talk about some strategies. One thing that I wanted to ask you specifically is… one thing that I know that because I come from a very conservative religious background and probably a higher percentage of my listenership does as well, higher than average. One thing that I think keeps people back is this silence, this shame of even having sexuality, and especially being a girl or a woman. How do you get from that embarrassment to even look at sexuality, let alone be able to communicate openly about it with a partner, what's that like, and how does communication during sex develop self-trust and the ability to be in touch with yourself, as well as informing your partner so that you can have a better sexual relationship.
SB: The answer to your question, number one, is therapy. I can teach you how to have hot sex, I can teach you how to have agentic bodily autonomy, I can teach you how to feel into your body and know what you want and ask for it. I can teach you that your body is different every single moment of every single day, especially in the feminine form because we're all on a moon cycle, even after menopause. I can teach you how to say what you need to say to get the pleasure that you need. I can teach you how to understand that there's not a darn thing wrong with you and that you can activate pathways to pleasure and that you can teach your body to learn how to have incredible orgasms. I can teach you all of those things, but what I'm not is a therapist who can unwind all of the shame and the trauma and the repression. So, like Betty, who realized that there are sexual seekers, I serve the sexual seeker. But what I could tell you is that the people who are listening to this segment are the ones who are the sexual seekers, because the ones who are too ashamed and afraid to even listen are not here. They didn't make it this far.
AA: Not ready yet.
“it’s going to get worse so the only kind of sex education we get is fear and abstinence based”
SB: Not ready yet. And you know how it is. You can't save everyone. You can only save the people who want to be saved. And they're right here with us right now. So, what do they need to know? It’s really interesting. If you think about passionate lovemaking techniques and you think about bedroom communication skills and you think about intimate wellness, these are the three pillars of my world. What I have determined. I started out teaching pleasuring techniques and I realized that I could teach you all the pleasuring techniques in the world, but if you literally cannot ask for what you need – too hard, too soft, don't like it, wanna try this, stick your finger here – then they're useless. So then I had to develop a portfolio of techniques that help people have communication skills. And then the third aspect of intimate wellness is that if your parts don't work or it hurts, you have to fix that first. So it really does start with this. The foundation is intimate wellness. If something hurts, we have to fix it. The second step up is communication skills. And there's a very specific group, like a ladder that you go through, where you learn the first thing and then you graduate to the next thing and you graduate to the next thing and you graduate to the next thing. With lovemaking techniques, you could start anywhere. It's like choose your own adventure, they're all good, and you can learn them in any order you want. But for communication, which is the foundation after health, because remember we talked about libido, and if you're not healthy, you don't want sex. So you have to work on your health.
But with communication, the place to start is how to know what you want and to feel safe asking for it. And here's where we go back to the monkeys on the branch of the Tree of Life. The testosterone-dominant homo sapien, he walks in this world safely. He doesn't have to worry about being the prey like we do as the estrogen-dominant homo sapien. We are the prey. We are not safe. We're multitaskers. We have our mind on a million things. We have to constantly be vigilant, because we could be hurt in so many ways by those predators, and that makes it very difficult for us to slow down, get out of our head, and get into our body. So when women hit the bed, often they're doing duty booty. That's one of my new favorite terms someone taught me. I used to call it “mercy sex”, and boy, have I done a lot of mercy sex to get where I am today. A decade of it I did. So if we're doing duty booty and we're just trying to get it over with and we've got a million things and we don't feel safe and we're not sexually satisfied, it's going to be a problem. How do you break that? You've got to learn how to listen to your body. And I like to say, “The lips down here can't speak, but they're always talking to you.” So you've gotta use the lips up here to say the words that she's telling you. She's talking to you the whole time if you tune into her, but you've learned to shut her up and ignore her because you've had to do your duty.
So once you begin to get out of a duty mindset, now you're dealing with, “Okay, but if I tell him, he's going to contract.” Because in the testosterone-dominant kingdom of the homo sapien, they live in a pecking order. This hurts them too. I don't play the blame game here. Everybody's hurt by this paradigm. A guy is either up or down. He's not team oriented, he's not community minded, he wasn't taught to do that. So if he does something wrong, “Babe, that doesn't feel good, it's scratchy,” or “I don't like that. Can you do it harder or softer?” Most men’s first reaction is to emotionally collapse, and that's the victimhood, which they're really good at because that's what they're allowed to do, be a victim. We've got a big problem with victimhood in our culture right now. Male victimhood. Or, they fight back. “You don't need to tell me what to do. I know what to do.” Egoic protection and armoring, and those are their two go-to allowable ways to behave, and that's what they do in the bedroom. So you just shut up and you don't say what you need to say. You just suck it up, stuff it, withhold, walk on eggshells, don't speak, because you don't want him to get pissed off or act like a victim. So you've gotta break that cycle. The very first way to break that cycle is a technique that my mentor, Dr. Patty Taylor, who taught me the expanded orgasm practice, she got her PhD in female orgasm, the first woman in the world to ever do that, and she's whose lineage I carry forward.
AA: Wow.
SB: She's been one of the biggest mentors of my life, and I have had some incredible mentors. And she taught me a technique that I wrote up into something called the Sexual Soulmate Pact, because people love this notion of a sexual soulmate, so it makes it a little more palatable for many people. Soulmates are co-created. They're not divinely ordained. There is not a soulmate out there for you. You can turn any mate or date into a sexual soulmate with the skills that I teach. But it's called the Sexual Soulmate Pact, and it's at sexualsoulmatepact.com. Pact like an agreement, P-A-C-T. Go there, download it, it's free, print it out. It'll basically teach you how to feel what you need to feel to communicate what your body's asking for, and how to do it in a way that your partner won't resort to victimhood or to male pattern anger. Because it works with the male psyche, and the male's psyche needs to win and he wants respect. We want adoration, encouragement, and appreciation. He wants winning and respect. It's our culture. So go with it, right?
And when you have the conversational construct in this Soulmate Pact where you enter into this agreement– and some men are stubborn donkeys, very hard to train, but men need training because they don't know what they're doing. They just think they do because testosterone makes them very sure and confident. That's why they can do so many things that women in corporate boardrooms are like, “How can you be so confident when you don't even know what the hell you're talking about?” It's testosterone. So when you get him winning in the bedroom, he loves to hear what you need and then he doesn't look at feedback as failure, he looks at it as winning. It's a beautiful technique. Thank God for Dr. Patty. She was like a Betty Friedan. She's still alive, but she's retired. Her work is incredible and I'm lucky to carry it forward and bring it to people. It's sexualsoulmatepact.com. Print it out, read it, give it to your partner, talk about it, come to an agreement, and practice it. Because if you're with a stubborn donkey, he's going to need repeated reminders to do it until he forms the habit. Some men are really fast at switching into new strategies and others are very slow. If you got a donkey, God love you, girl. Don't give up. He'll get there.
AA: Hahaha. I love it. I love it. Well, these are such great, like you said, they're coping mechanisms. These are such great tools, such great skills, and I so appreciate your emphasis on that growth mindset, and that it's like anything else that if you're willing–
SB: Sexual seeker.
AA: Yes. If you're willing, just do the work, learn the skills, practice, and you can get better at it. And I appreciate that so much. So as we wrap up, I know you've mentioned a few different websites. Is there one umbrella website where people can find your work and then maybe go on different paths to different techniques or different materials? Where can we people find your work?
SB:Betterlover.com, that's my newsletter. I send it out twice a week from there. And that's kind of a Rosetta Stone into everything. And both issues twice a week, I think we send it out on Thursday and Saturday. I write them, but I don't send them out. That's a really nice newsletter because you're going to get a new idea in every email, so over the course of years, you are going to increment your knowledge so beautifully and so easily because each one is a little snack and they all stack up to a big, beautiful foundation for the best sex of your life that keeps getting better.
AA: Oh, I love it. Well, I'm so grateful, Susan. I'm so, so grateful for the work that you do. Thank you. I sometimes talk about how patriarchy affects us in all the different layers of our life, our civic life, our religious life, our educational life, our work life, but there isn't anything that it infiltrates and affects us that's more intimate to ourselves than our relationship with our own bodies.
SB: And pleasure.
AA: Pleasure, our own pleasure. And then if we want to partner with an intimate partner, there's just not much that is more personal to us. So to be able to deconstruct that internal patriarchy is key to unlocking so many other things.
SB: It empowers you in all other areas when you finally take back your sexual power.
AA: Yeah. I can see that embodied in you. I'm so grateful for your example and your courage in talking about this super critical topic and sharing your wisdom so generously. I'm really grateful for you. Thank you so much.
SB: Thank you so much, Amy.
