How Do I Sustain Intimacy into Menopause? | Susan Bratton

Welcome to another fabulous podcast of women to Women series. And I am delighted today to welcome Susan Bratton. I actually don't know her very well, so we're going to get to know each other really well today. Who's considered the intimacy expert for millions and boy do we need her information. She's co founder and CEO of two corporations, Personal Life Media, a publisher of heart connected lovemaking techniques and bedroom communication skills. Listen, ladies, because there's a lot we can learn. And the 20 manufacturer of organic and botanical supplements that enhance sexual vitality. We're going to ask and talk a little bit more about that today. A best selling author and publisher of 34 books and programs including Sexual Soulmates, Relationship Magic, Revive Her Drive. Yes, Ravish Him, Steamy Sex Ed, the Passion Patch, Hormone Balancing and Hot to Trap, Susan has been featured in the New York Times as well as frequent television appearances. So welcome Susan. We're going to have a great conversation today.

Yes, let's talk about ladies libidos.

So I tell you, I'm a women's health expert and it's the first people, the first question people ask, the interesting thing is when I ask them how many women are sexually active after about age 55, I would say probably 60% say no. So let's talk about all of that because that is horrible and it's really something that doesn't need to happen. So let's talk about libido. You know, let's kind of start there. The notion is that it's only about testosterone or it's in your head.

Yeah, well, I mean, testosterone certainly does help. And I personally use bioidentical testosterone in organic shea butter every morning on my clitoris because my sex life is so important to me. So I actually think a lot of women don't even understand that it's testosterone. They think that when their estrogen falls that they lose their sex drive. I think that's the most common myth. So even having women understand that it's, you know, that when your estrogen falls and that increases your testosterone ratio, you might actually be more interested in sex when you go through menopause than you were beforehand. So a lot of it, of course, is in our number one sex organ. Our biggest, you know, our biggest sex organ is our brain. But a little bit of testosterone supplementation is really nice, not only for drive but also just for the balls, the lust for life, the zest, you know, it, it gives you a confidence. I mean, I see men and when their testosterone diminishes, they turn into little Old ladies. Well, I don't want to be a little old lady any more than I want my husband to be one. So, yes, testosterone is helpful to a point, but it's certainly not enough. And, you know, you mentioned that 60% of women over 55 in your practice are less and less interested in having sex and looking at menopause as the way to get out of doing it. There's definitely this mental connection of sex is for procreation. And after I can no longer procreate, I no longer need to have sex. And that's an easy out for a lot of women because they just never enjoyed sex that much. And that's where I really come in. I mean, once women understand that it's more about your gut microbiome health than it is about your hormones. If you can't make hormones because your biome is messed up, if you're not pooping really well and you're not hydrated and you've got diminished neurotransmitter production, all of those pieces feed into your lack of desire. But libido is just really one third of how you feel about your sexuality. There's libido, there's desire, and there's arousal. And I always try to get women to think about those as three interlocking circles where libido is your health, your sexual desire is one side of the same coin as your overall health. When you don't feel well, you don't have libido. So a sure sign that you're coming back to health can be increased libido and interest in sex. And then I think about desire as how we feel about ourselves and our partner. And for women, we struggle with body image issues. So many body image issues, which I think are directly related to estrogen. Estrogen makes us. It's like the worrywart molecule, you know?

And so there's some things you can do about desire, actually creating more desire, feeling more desire, and then there's arousal. And this is where I actually think, Marcel, that things go off the rails really early on in our sexual life. And it's almost irrevocable that once we have not gotten the kind of stimulation that we need to feel good about sex, we give up on sex. So I'd like to spend more time talking about what I call the matriarchal view of sex rather than the patriarchal view of sex, which is pretty much the way we've been having sex our whole lives. And I want to change that.

Let's go for it. I mean, I think One of the things that's so astounding to me, I've been in practice for 40 years, is how, number one, how many women are uncomfortable talking about it. One of the questions I ask is, you know, are you regular orgasmic? And they're just kind of, you know, their little head goes down and they're really uncomfortable with it. The other thing is, I think that as a culture we are objectified, you know, as women. And that plays into all of this too, is when are women going to kind of take on the desire to say, I want to have it really good for me too. How can we work together to have it be amazing for both of us?

Well, I think that women would ask for what they want if they knew what it was.

One of my techniques is called the sexual soulmate pact. And you can get it, you can Download it@sexualsoulmatepact.com and over the last 50, I morphed from being a Silicon Valley executive who almost lost my marriage because we didn't know what we were doing in the bedroom to a sexpert for that reason. Your greatest wound becomes your greatest gift. And I became a sexpert. And most people in the sexuality space are therapists, marriage and family therapists, psychologists, even psychiatrists in some cases, who are dealing with very intractable sexual issues. I'm not any of those things. What I am is a sex techniques expert. I teach people how to transform having sex into making love. What I've spent the last 15 years doing is helping people understand how to co create incredible pleasure and heart connection together. And I have so many techniques. I don't know if you. I don't even remember what you. How you introduced me, but I've written over 40 sex techniques books now. And.

About a decade into doing this, I realized that all the sex techniques in the world don't matter if you can't ask for what you want. And then I realized in working with so many people, thousands and thousands of people from all over the world, across the, you know, across cultures and across ages, is that generally.

Women don't know what they want because.

They just know what they're getting, isn't it? And they're afraid to ask because, well, I don't know how to tell him what I really want because I don't know what I want. I just don't like it. So I'm not going to hurt his ego and piss him off and make him contract. So I'm just going to be quiet and I'm just going to take What I can get and get through it as fast as I can, is how a lot of women end up. And so I developed the sexual soulmate pact. Because what it does is it teaches you to understand that you live in an animal body and that you have to get on the same team with your partner. It's almost like you and them against your body, but not really against your body, more like allowing for your body's needs. Where we as women, we, you know, we're cyclical in nature. We're on a 28 day cycle even after menopause, and what we wanted yesterday isn't what we want today. We're very different all the time. We're very changeable in what feels good, soft or hard or sensual or a little more, you know, aggressive or dominant or what have you. And getting women to understand that that's normal and there's nothing wrong with it, and then getting their partners to understand how different we are than they are, so much more steady state. And then getting women to understand that one of the things we need most is variety and novelty and that we need that more than our male bodied partners do. Even, even though men are the ones who are like, oh, I want to try this and I want to try that, which is great, they're great initiators because they're testosterone dominant, that's a great role for them. But when I can get a woman to begin to trust her own body wisdom when I tell you she knows that body you're living in, she knows what you want, start listening to her. And then when I can get her to trust that her partner is enrolled in this pact, this agreement, that when she says go left, go right, go harder, go softer, if that's hurting, I don't want to do it, I'm done. Let's try this. Now I'm in the mood for that. Can you rub my feet? Can you rub my neck first, whatever it might be? Can you hold me? Can you kiss me? I don't like it when you stick your tongue straight in my mouth. It's too much, too fast, Whatever, anything, everything, constantly. When she can get to the point where she's saying in real time, in the moment, through her own body wisdom, what's right for her, what I found is that when she can get her partner to just say, okay baby, got it, thank you. Tell me more. How is this harder still or lighter still? Is this far over enough? You know, whatever it is, how does it feel when I do this? Are you good with that? When he starts realizing and thanking her for the information she's giving him. When he realizes that it's helping him be the winner because that's what he wants to do. He wants to give her incredible pleasure and be the winner, then things start getting really good. So I believe that all of the great techniques in the world really sit inside the foundation of, of good, comfortable, caring, appreciative, encouraging communication. And when people start talking about sex, it opens the door to what people call dirty talk. I wish it wasn't called that because I don't think it's dirty. But appreciating the beauty of your partner's genitals, adoration, worship, what I call sharing frames, the way that you tell your lover a particularly wonderful body based experience you had with them after your lovemaking is over, you know, all of those kinds of things can begin to bubble up and you can get better and better at those with practice. And then you've got that nice, slippery, clean communication, greasing the skids of intimacy and pleasure.

So the take home from that is women number one, finding out what they like and if they don't know what they like is to listen. And the second part of that is to really learn how to communicate, which I find so many of my patients totally unable to do. And I think that's going to be really important for them to also at the end we'll talk a little bit about where they can find more information so they can start dabbling in the information because I think sometimes they want to do it quietly so they can become a little bit more verbal later. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about food. You know, we always talk about oysters and how that's really aphrodisiac and are there any such things that really make a difference with regards to libido?

Yeah. Where most people think that libido is low, libido is based on.

Hormone issues. In actual fact, if your vaginal mucosa is getting enough estrogen that it's plump and not painful.

And you know, you have confidence that you and your partner can get you turned on. And I do want to, I want to make sure we go back to arousal as well and talk about what the matriarchal view of arousal looks like and why we haven't been getting what we need. So help me, Marcel, parking lot that because I want to come back to it. Because arousal really begins in relaxation and our male bodied partners are so far ahead of us. They're so goal oriented, they've got a hard on, they're ready to go and they're ready to just, you know, stick it in. And we are so far behind them that what I teach men all the time is how to touch her from the outside and work your way in, how to hold her, how to get her to relax and get out of her brain and into her body and the kinds of things that we need. And we can parking lot that now, but I just want to make sure I don't skip over that piece. Because.

Arousal also requires blood flow. And as we age, we know that our hormones decline. But what we don't understand as female body owners is that the female sex needs as much blood flow to our genitals as our male bodied partners do to their penis. If you think about a banana, a banana and the fruit inside, that's pretty easy to imagine. It's a penis. The banana is the same as the penis. It has all these big chambers of erectile tissue in them. And.

About half his penis sticks out of his body and half of it goes in and down toward his testicles. So it's kind of like a bent banana, if you will.

He has the benefit of something called hemodynamics, which flood the corpus cavernosum and corpus spongiosum, these chambers with blood flow to give him an erection. It puffs the penis up and locks the heart on in. When men begin to get erectile dysfunction, they get bendy. It doesn't lock as well. Their blood, their veins, their vascular system gets brittle and clogged with plaque. Well, if your husband is like that, you're like that too, because you're eating the same foods they are. You're getting the same amount of heart disease. Heart disease is a very under reported issue for women's health. And the first thing that goes is the blood supply to our feet and our genitals. So if you have swole, if your feet get swollen at the end of the day, if you have trouble getting your rings off, if you have edema, you also are not getting blood flow to your pelvic bowl. And if you think about it, you take all the meat of that banana and then you wrap it around our vulva. And when you wrap it around our vulva, we have the same amount of tissue. You know, when we think about the women's clitoris as the pleasure point, well, the clitoris, what we think of as the clitoris is just the tip of the iceberg. It's like the stem on the banana. We have all that erectile tissue, same amount, but it's draped over our vagina. It goes up inside our vagina through the urethral sponge, which people call a G spot. It's not a spot. It's a long kind of a tube, a noodle, a spongy noodle of tissue that wraps around the urethra. And then we have a perineal sponge on the bottom of our vaginal canal between the vagina and the rectum. And we have the. The outer labia. Underneath the pubic hair are the vestibular bulbs, the legs of the clitoris, and draped over the top of the vagina are the arms or crura of the clitoris. It's all erectile tissue. We literally have erect. We have a penis wrapped around our vaginas, a penis's worth of erectile tissue wrapped around our vagina. And yet we don't get it stimulated, we don't get it full of blood. And what happens as we age is the blood doesn't flow to our pelvic bowl because our body is keeping the blood to oxygenate the rest of our tissue, our organs, our heart, our brain. So when we lose nitric oxide production, by the time we're 50, we have half the nitric oxide production that we had when we were 20. We're just not getting the blood flow. And if you think about it, if you think about your vulva and you hold your hand in a fist and you clench your fist up, that's before you're aroused. And then when you're really aroused, you open that hand and make it like you're holding an orange. And that's how much more surface area that you get when you have good nitric oxide production. And that nitric oxide production allows the whole vulvar erectile network to expand and get bigger, which means you get more surface area in your vulva, which sends more proprioceptive signals to your brain of pleasure sensations. You literally feel more pleasure. We have incredible genital sensation loss as we age. We atrophy, we shrink up as we wrinkle, our vulvas wrinkle. And so what we need to do is keep the nitric oxide flowing. And aphrodisiacs are wonderful. There are certain foods, like, the reason they talk about oysters as being an aphrodisiac is because of the zinc. And zinc is very good for helping us actually produce our hormones. But to produce nitric oxide, you need to eat beets, leafy greens, things like cabbage, dill, arugula, romaine, butter, lettuce, kale shard, spinach. Spinach. These Are the things that our body converts into nitric oxide. But the downside is that a couple things happen. Nitric oxide is so important for us. This gaseous signaling molecule that vasodilates gives our blood system the tone that it needs to shunt blood where we need it to our brain when we're thinking, to our heart when we're exercising, to our belly when we're digesting, to our genitals when we're making love. And if it loses its flexibility and it doesn't have enough of the signaling molecules, it's not getting the blood where it needs to go. As soon as women start taking nitric oxide supplements, they find that their lubrication improves drastically because we're not self lubricating. Our vaginas lubricate through our blood plasma, seeping through the vaginal mucosa and wetting the walls. And so when we feel dry, yes, a part of it is that our vaginal mucosa is shrinking from atrophy, from loss of estrogen. But a big part of it is nitric oxide production. And when we eat these vegetables, we need to eat quite a few of them. We need to masticate them well. And if we're using mouthwash, the mouthwash is killing off the bacteria in the crypts of our tongue that convert the nitrates to, to nitrites. And then if we have low acid, which almost everyone does as we age, we have a low stomach acid, and then we take acid blockers and proton pump inhibitors on top of it, then we can convert the nitrites to nitric oxide. So we're just diminishing, diminishing, diminishing, diminishing. We're not eating enough vegetables, and then we're not able to convert them into nitric oxide. So the simplest thing to do is bioidentical hormone replacement therapy and a really good nitric oxide supplement made from organic foods, which is what mine does, which is called flow. I, of course I make one because I realize that this is the most important thing. It's at the 20store.com flow. But really, anyone that you take will be great. Mine happens to be organic, which I think is really important. I don't want more pesticides from Chinese supplements in my body. You know, you got to watch out for that stuff. A lot of it is just really, really just junk, what you find on, you know, in most supplements. So eating foods is good. And supplementing with nitric oxide, if you're over 40 is really very smart to do for so many reasons, including cardiovascular health, Overall, Yeah.

Just a reminder that women at menopause, their risk of heart disease goes up 21%. It's actually one of the bigger killers for women, actually more so than breast cancer, believe it or not.

Yeah, I do believe it.

Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the vagina. I want to just mention something. You know, I like to see women's vagina happy. And even if they don't want it, there are women who don't want to go on bioidentical hormones for the risk factors or whatever. But there are forms of estriol, which is a vaginal cream that can be compounded. And sometimes I'll put DHEA in it and sometimes I won't put DHEA in and I'll just leave it with DHEA by itself. And those don't tend to go what we call upstream so that they're really not problematic for people. So you can have a very happy vagina until you're 200 when you die. So just important to know.

I agree. I honestly think that my vagina has never been more lush, more beautiful, more healthy, more robust. I have been nurturing my vagina in my 50s, I'll be 60 next month. And I've never, ever had a happier vagina than I do now. I use bioidenticals, I use my V fit. I wanted to show you this. Do you know about the V fit? You know about it?

I do.

Know. Well, tell people about it though.

Have you used it? Have you gotten one? Have you used it?

I haven't gotten one, no. But I do.

This is a game changer. I used to have to go out. I used to have to send women out for treatments like CO2 lasers and RF devices to basically traumatize the vaginal mucosa to get more collagenation and more tissue to thicken. And now a woman owned company called Joy Lux has this product called the V Fit and it's three modalities. It's a do it yourself at home vaginal rejuvenation tool. It's not a vibrator though. It does vibrate. That's for Kegel toning and it's warm for recollagenating the vaginal mucosa. But it also uses photobiomodulation, low level laser light therapy, red light therapy, intravaginally. The Joy Lux team focuses the marketing on reversing incontinence, which of course we all struggle with. And it does a great job of reversing incontinence, but it is also Wonderful for reconstituting and making the vaginal mucosa just thick and fluffy and puffy and lush and pink and wonderful. And interestingly enough, I have recommended this to so many women that I have hundreds of women who have emailed me and told me they love it. And in this particular case, I had a couple of women who said that they had an odor that was just. They didn't like the way their vagina smelled and they didn't know what to do about it. And it wasn't bacterial vaginosis, it wasn't candida, it wasn't anything. You know, they had culture after culture, swab after swab, and there was nothing there. And then this remodeled the scent of their vagina because it does some changes to the glycogen. The red light therapy has a positive effect on the glycogen process in the vagina. So the VFIT is absolutely wonderful. And I just, I really love this product. It's a game changer. I also recommend a toy, a really good toy. This is from Fun Factory. It's called the Lady Buy. There's a miss Buy that's a little bit longer that I prefer because I'm a giant woman. I'm almost 6ft tall and I've got a very large voluminous vagina. I don't have one of those tiny little things. I've got a, you know, it's a man eater.

Just being silly.

But I like this because it, it has two motors. That's why it's called Buy. Fun Factory is a German company. And they're really the, they're really the Porsche of vibrators. Super premium product. And I mean, why would you put anything less than the best inside your vagina? Especially because you have to watch out for all that Chinese junk with the phthalates in it that'll, you know, just suck toxins right into your body. And this has two vibrators, one for the clitoral area, a big pad that goes on the clitoral area, externally, the clitoral tips, the glands and the shaft, and then one internal that gets the G spot, if you will, or the urethral sponge and the intravaginal tissue. And the more women can self pleasure with a vibrator, the more easy it is for them to achieve orgasm. And the more easy it is for them to achieve orgasm from solo pleasure, the more easy it is for them to do what I call crossing the gasm chasm, bridging the orgasm gap between how easy it is for our Male body partners to come and how hard it is for us. And so women are like, well, won't I get addicted to this and then not want my. I'm like, no, trust me, he has things. He can do things to you that you can't do with the lady bye or the Ms. Bi.

So I always recommend a good solo pleasuring practice with a high quality double vibrating toy like this as well. Some women like different sensations on their clitoris. They might like the Womanizer or the Volta from Fun Factory. They might like those kinds of, you know, sucking techniques or flittering techniques on the clitoral tip. But the problem with only using those kind of vibrators or bullet vibe or what have you is that you're not getting the internal systems engorged full of blood. And that's the goal, which is you must give yourself time to get fully engorged. And you must recruit your partner during the arousal process to help you get engorged. That's his job, is to help you do that. And the more you solo pleasure, the easier it is for him to get that done when you're making love. And the better it'll be for you to start having orgasms from intercourse without having any need to have a finger on a clitoris or a toy on a clitoris. That's just a bonus. You can have orgasms with proper vaginal engorgement. That's what I think is the most important thing.

So how about really talking a little bit about our audience that may be listening to this and thinking, oh, my goodness, I couldn't do any of those things because I have them in my practice. But they're interested, they're intrigued, they want to have this relationship. And also for those women who are dealing with Ed. I mean, I have a number of those people in my practice, and they just say, look, I'm done. You know, you won't do anything about it. It's too frustrating for me. So I'm just going to pleasure myself and let it be that way.

Okay, so the first thing is that get yourselves both on. All right, so the woman who is like, I'm done. I can't talk about it. I don't want to do it. Look, I can't save everybody. I can't fix everybody. I am here for those women who want to fight for their sexuality, who want to have good sex for the first time in their life. And many women, when they're in their twenties, it's all new. And, you know, we don't know what we don't know. In our 30s we're focused on having our babies. In our 40s we're waking up and going, wait a minute, what about me? And in our 50s we're like, I better use it or lose it, right? So some.

There'S some, there's some urgency that happens as we go into perimenopause and through menopause. And that's where I want, I mean I help women of all ages. I mean I help women have. I teach people how to lose their virginity in a beautiful way and what to expect and how to make it nice all the way up to 80 and 90 year old people and how to keep going in your older, your older age, older years. So what I would say is that for women who are curious, there are so many wonderful resources that I offer. I really think about your sexuality as a three legged stool. There's techniques and one of the things that I produce is a program and I can send it to you. It's called the Steamy Sex Ed Video Collection. And it's a video series of 200 heart connected lovemaking techniques. It starts with sensual massage because to me, if you're going to engorge a woman's vulva, manual massage is the best thing. Just a yoni massage, Yoni being a word for the woman's sexual genital structures. It's a Sanskrit word we use in tantric sex. And I think it's pretty, the yoni, it's better than saying vulva. And vagina is just one part of the vulva. So I like a yoni, his penis is called a lingam in that tantric language. So it shows yoni massage. And I always say to couples, don't Start at video 8, start at video 1. Learn how to touch the genitals, learn how to bring the blood flow, how to bring the pleasure, learn about the kinds of orgasms you can have before you move to oral pleasuring, before you move to lovemaking, to new positions. You know, get the bones down, you know, get that going, get comfortable looking at your vagina, get comfortable having it be pleasured. You know, start there. And if you're 65 years old and that's where you're starting, that's where a lot of 65 year old women are starting. Right now I have many, many women in my 60s who are having the first really good sexually driven love affairs of their life. And a lot of them are dealing with their partner's ed. Loss of erectile rigidity. So I want to answer that question because I know the answers to that too. I am an expert at the male, what I like to call the banging boner. I just want to have a really solid package, a man hammer for my guy. And I want him to feel confident about it. I want him to know it'll work when he needs it to. He can go hard, get hard, go soft, get hard again without feeling worried. When a guy gets to that point, he can really be a good lover. He can be a confident, patient, devoted lover. So just to parking lot that there are three techniques. One is either going for treatments called Gainswave which knock the plaque off the penile arteries and stimulate new tissue. There's an at home device that's kind of like the V fit for guys. It's called the Phoenix Pro.

And then there's the P shot and the O shot. The priapus shot for men and the O shot for women. The orgasm shot for women. This is comes from your own body. PRP platelet rich plasma concentrated and injected into the genital structures, the erectile tissues to stimulate new tissue and nervous tissue growth. Because as we age we lose sensation. So that and for men, the vacuum erection device, the penis pump. There's only one I recommend. I've written a book on it. It's called the Pump guide. You can get it@pump pumpingguide.com and it'll teach you about all of these things. Because we are Dr. Mom in our relationships. We need to help our male bodied partners keep their penises from atrophy. They atrophy, they shrink, they get plaque, they get problems. But we have tools, techniques and technologies to reverse the aging. Just like when we go get fraxels for our face and you know, do all the things that we do to keep our skin and our face in good shape and go to the gym, et cetera. So the penis pump is called the Whopper. That's the one I recommend. It's a two cylinder system. It's custom fit to the man if you will. There's many different cylinder sizes you measure first and that increases blood carrying capacity for the penis, which is so there's basically the cheap thing is a penis pump. Then you could add the Phoenix Pro or the GainsWave. Then you could top it off with a cherry on top with the P shot. And I explain all of these things on my YouTube. I have a YouTube channel called Better Lover. You can see all the videos there. Very, very easy. To find out more information, you can email me anytime. And for her using the VFit, getting O shots, I've had six O shots now six. They are fantastic. And taking your nitric oxide and doing your bioidenticals and then masturbating solo. Pleasure. These are the things that really make a difference.

So what I love about what you're saying is it reminds me of a story of a patient came in to see me. She was from a nursing home, and we're doing an annual honor. And she was 82. Great. She was whispering in my ear, and she said, is it okay to do it? And I'm like, do it? What do you mean? You mean to have sex? And she goes, yeah. Can I do it every day and not hurt myself? I said, yes. She goes, if I knew then what I know now, I would have dumped him a long time ago. It was very, very cute. So she was an example of what I see in my practice, which is there are those that are willing to say, all right, how do I fix this? Yeah, we know that being sexually active is also incredibly helpful for our health overall. It keeps us younger and it keeps us more vivacious until our 90s. And there is no reason to stop having sex, for sure. So let's. One more question that I have for you, and that is, we talked about the microbiome and we talked about. I teach the Institute of Functional Medicine. I'm getting ready to do the hormone module for them. Great. I'm astounded at the research looking at the microbiome of the vagina.

Yes.

Biome of the uterus, the microbiome of the gut, the microbiome of the lungs. So we know that the food that you eat, the thoughts that you think, the neurotransmitters that you have, it's all collected in terms of the healthy body. And that's really what you're talking about, is we need to stay healthy. Yeah.

I recently did a vaginal swab with Juno. Have you heard of Juno? Juno, yeah. I think that's quite interesting because the reason that I did it was. Well, number one, interested to see what's in, you know, what's in my biome. But they have. Basically, there's a researcher, I think he's with the University of. Somewhere in the south, southeastern part of the state. He's doing vaginal swabs from thousands and thousands and thousands of women of all different ethnicities. And one of the things that I think is really interesting is that he's found that there are lead bacteria in certain ethnicities, microbiomes. So the Caucasian woman has the lactobacillus as the lead Asian women have a slightly different bacteria. African American women a slightly different. And Latinx women a slightly different bacteria. And I wanted to know what my lead bacteria was, because anytime I feel that my vagina is getting a little bit off.

I've been taking the Garden of Life women's raw probiotics, which you're supposed to take orally. And I just open up a capsule and I put it in a little Kathy's Healing lotion, which is a completely organic, really nice, simple body lotion that you can get off of Amazon, that you can use intravaginally. And I just mix up a little paste, and I just insert it way up in my vagina and kind of let it work its way down, and it fixes it. Pretty much every time I've ever had a problem, it's fixed it. And I wanted to make sure that the probiotic that I was using was a match for my vaginal microbiome. And I really. I can't believe that we women can't go to CVS and do our own swab tests and that we can't swab our vaginas and know what our bacterial load is and then get the right probiotics for insertion into our own vaginas. Like, it just makes no sense that this is something that you have to still go to the doctor for. I wish we could do those kinds of things ourselves. So I wanted to know what you thought about all of that as I'm telling you. What's going through your mind?

You know, I've seen people with too much bacteria in the vagina also. I mean, it's, you know, dodalign cytolosis, we call it, and it actually can cause symptoms, too. So you're absolutely right. It's really, really helpful to know what your microbiome is doing now. Thank God we're not douching anymore because that really caused problems. And people that have chronic, you know, yeast infections or bacterial vaginosis, that's almost always from the gut. And as you heal the gut with either parasites or worms or because I see all those things in my practice, and yeast overgrowth, then the vagina comes back to normal. So it's got this amazing healing ability. Sometimes, believe it or not, what I will do is have them use organic yogurt, and I'll have them put a tampon in the organic yogurt, leave it in there for five minutes, and it also changes the ph of the vagina. It's just helpful to understand your own vagina. And so many women don't know that they can do these things. And it's so important because really, as you said, you can have an amazing happy vagina until you're in your 90s. You just have to where that we can kind of shift that dynamic a little bit. Right.

One of the things that I like to do is take a few drops of nascent iodine in an irrigation bottle and irrigate my vagina when I'm feeling it's a little bit off. And that seems to work really, really well. So I always am worried about saying all douching is bad because in essence what I'm doing, I call it irrigation. But I'm not really sure whether the terminology of douching, when you say douching, I think women think, oh, I go to CVS and buy, rinse my vagina out with it. And I never want people to think that. But I do think sometimes that irrigation of the vagina with a little bit of nascent iodine is super helpful.

We used to use that all the time for people that had haemophilis vaginalis we call it, or bacterial vaginosis. And doing that occasionally, it's fine. It's when you do it often, which is what a lot of people were doing is thinking they wanted to get clean and all that kind of stuff. So. Yeah. But there's one thing, one thing that we could do to improve our sex lives. What would that be?

As women? Probably self pleasure. Yeah. I think that the more that you're in touch with your orgasm, the more that you begin to expand your orgasmic potential, the more that you awaken and enliven your vulva, the more that you feel pleasure and bring pleasure into your life, the better it's going to impact every part of your life life, whether that's your connection with your partner and your desire because you'll be more engorged and aroused or just your own feeling of self empowerment by being a turned on woman.

Our desire and our turn on are a catalyst for our own creativity and our own connection to self and others. So probably self pleasuring.

Awesome. So can you share with us all the ways in which people can get more information? Because you've been tantalizing in terms of all the things that you've grown out. People want to know about ED now and how do I get my vagina happier and what are some of the things I can do? Where can I purchase some of these things? How can they find out more about you?

The easiest way to find out anything and everything I've talked about and more is to go to my website@personallifemedia.com and when you do that, there's a search box and you can search for anything. What was that pump called? What was that douche called? What kind of iodine? What's the probiotics you're using? What's the lady by? What's the V fit? What's the dirty talk? What's the steamy sex ad? I mean, you know, what's the sexual soulmate pact?

When you've written over 40 books, there's a lot of stuff there, and most of it's free. I mean, honestly, I give away hundreds of things for free. So I'm extremely generous because I do want to meet people when they're ready, wherever they are. If somebody's like, I need to work on my dirty talk, I want to get those videos. I need to fix my vagina, whatever it is, I'm there. And then once they're there with that, they want more and more. And things start to get on what I like to call the upward pleasure spiral. So. And I answer all my emails. So if you do get onto my email newsletter list and you have a personal question, just email me. This is how I got good. Through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of email responses to people from all over the world and them giving me feedback over decades.

Well, we need you desperately. No, you do. It's bad for so many people. People are so confused and they don't know where to turn. And I just love the work you do and thank you for doing it. We really need you. Thanks so much. So for everybody that listened, you've got some amazing things to think about. And you know how to get a hold of Susan and get any information that you want in the privacy of your own home. Thanks again.