Episode 92: Can Orgasms Overcome Menopausal Symptoms?

Hi, I'm Suzanne Noble, and you are listening to Sex Advice for Seniors. And today I am with the founder of Emotional Bliss, which is a sexual wellness company, called Paul Telford. He's probably one of the few, if not the only, man I have spoken to about why the female orgasm is so important to a woman's health. Paul, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate the invitation.

And yeah, I mean, I know that you started this company mainly because of the discovery that women— when women experience orgasms, all sorts of things happen. And that particular phenomena has a direct relationship to how we experience menopause.

Sure. The— if we go back to my original encounter, um, I was really fascinated to learn that there's a disproportionate level of antidepressants prescribed to women as opposed to men. Um, and that was really explained to me— as the main reason is that men are really encouraged to orgasm regularly due to health reasons, which is understandable, whilst a doctor would never ever ask a female patient if they regularly orgasm. So the alternative is a course of antidepressants if they're feeling unwell or they're just not feeling together with themselves.

Yeah.

Whilst knowing that, you know, our brain naturally produces serotonin and dopamine, which are the main you know, substitutes for these synthetic antidepressants. Um, you know, I just, I just really couldn't get my head around that, to be honest. And I came— ended up being quite fascinated to understanding about the female orgasms and really the benefits of the female orgasms. So the more I researched it, um, it was apparent that there was an awful lot of misinformation, particularly about the G-spot and all different other associations. Um, we do have a fantastic, uh, video on our website about the history of the, the clitoris and the G-spot if, if anybody's interested. But, um, so really, and also the, the, the G-spot, funny enough, was it— well, the clitoris was only really discovered in 2004, and that was by, um, it's a Professor Helena or O'Connell from Australia. Um, and because of her research, we now know that the clitoris is quite a sizable organ. You know, you can fit it in the size of your hand when, you know, history tells us it's this tiny little gland which disappears through pre-puberty and all the other misconceptions which we've gone through over time. Um, so really Once you understand, uh, the role of, uh, how, how important it is for, for men to, um, orgasm, obviously because of the reproduction system with the release of, of semen, what we now understand is that the clitoris has no function whatsoever for reproduction. So we've really got to understand why the clitoris has this, this, this quite sizable organ with 8,000 nerve endings. So there's more nerve endings around the clitoris, right, other than any other part of the female body. And when it's stimulated, you know, it connects directly through the spinal cord directly to the brain and stimulates the hypothalamus within the brain. And then on the back of that, what happens is you're having these release of natural hormones. So you have the serotonin and the dopamine, which is really the antidepressant side of things. You have oxytocin, which is considered really as the, the miracle hormone. You have testosterone, progesterone, estrogen, and obviously the endorphins. So what we can presume is what the brain is actually doing is naturally rebalancing the body hormone levels. To their optimum levels during either during orgasm or post-orgasm. So the pleasure is nice, but what's happening to the brain is really quite significant and for me, significantly more important. So, you know, what we're doing is, is essentially nourishing the brain and stimulating the brain to maintain healthy brain health, which is really good and positive. But when we— it's kind of seen as a taboo subject, soon as you mention orgasm. It's just we can't talk about that.

So even masturbation, I mean, you know, like we've— a guy sort of are never not encouraged to masturbate, right? I mean, it's just guys talk about playing with themselves from a very early age, and it's kind of a joke really amongst guys that, you know, you're gonna tug one off and all this sort of thing. But a woman would never ever say that. And in fact, older women especially were brought up really not to even look down there, much less to try and figure out what's going on down there. And, you know, as a result of that, there's a lot of women, as you know, that have never experienced an orgasm and struggle to experience one through penetrative sex simply because they don't really know their own bodies. And I think, you know, never mind the fact that once you do have an orgasm, as you say, you release all these hormones and, and great, you know, chemicals into your body, which makes you feel good. Aside from, you know, aside from the just general pleasure, as you say, it contributes to your overall brain health and other aspects of your health. But, you know, for a lot of cultures, there's so much shame around all of this. So it's just not something that people regularly discuss. And so I'm not surprised that you went, God, I didn't even know all this. Most women don't know it either.

Which is sad, don't you think? Yeah. How many women have gone through life not experiencing orgasm?

Yeah, well, some people that I know personally, I can tell you. So, yeah, you know, and funnily enough, when I consider some of those people, they are people who err on the side of probably being a bit depressed, if I'm really honest.

Which, what I mean, it starts with depression. And once you've got depression, then you have a low libido. And once you have a low libido, then the cycle just repeats itself. You go to the doctor and the first thing the doctor do is give gives you pharmaceuticals, which is the way the process works. And what they should do, if they're doing everything properly, is they should be taking blood samplings to monitor, is there any hormone deficiency, as opposed to, you know, just prescribing medication, really, with a, with a bit of a look-it-and-see type of approach.

Yeah, but when we come to, oh, you know, the thought about older people especially, I suspect, you know, one of the things is the medical profession, as we know, hasn't been terribly up to date when it comes to understanding sexuality in later life, right? They just kind of assume that if you're not procreating, why should it? You know, a lot of people tell me if you're not— they've been to the doctor and said, if you're not procreating, why do you care about any of this?

Right.

And the second thing is that You know, just aside from orgasms, of course, there's all sorts of other things that you can do to promote good sexual health. And a lot of women just aren't being told about those things just because, again, it's just not something that, that the medical profession has been educated on, I think. And it's really luck whether you get to meet somebody in your GP office who—

Yeah.

Says, are you still having sex? I mean, honestly, I, I've never been asked that question. Yeah. Never mind if I'm still having orgasms. I don't think I've ever been asked that question my entire life.

Well, I think, I think one of the issues is the association between sex and orgasm. We don't, we, as far as we're concerned, as we age, things don't work as well as they should and things change, your bodies change. Yeah, and we promote very much intimacy, touch and feel in masturbation. And the process is longer and certainly more enjoyable. And it's to take away the emphasis of sexual intercourse, particularly as men get older. We have obviously erectile dysfunction, which happens to all men regardless. You've got the risk of prostate, so once you're 50, you've got a 50% chance. Once you're 60, you've got a 60% chance. Prostate isn't a good— there isn't a good conclusion really with prostate when it comes to erection and ejaculation. So if you want to maintain a healthy relationship, you have to really emphasize away from sexual intercourse and take that negative connotation or that guilt that you can't perform intercourse and move that and switch that to an alternative. And we've had some fantastic, um, relationships with couples who we've supported along the way where the whole emphasis has been on massage and touch and erogenous zones. We explain an awful lot on, on our website about erogenous zones, but it's to get the maximum amount of satisfaction and pleasure with, with with each other. And it was once explained to me by Suzanne Noble, a sexologist who we work with, that the best experience you can have between a couple is when a partner, male or female, brings their partner just prior to orgasm, and then slowly feels that spiritual connection, that has that connection, and then slowly brings it down and then brings it back up again. That is the pinnacle of an intimate relationship. And if you can focus on that, where you're actually communicating with one another through a spiritual and emotional feeling, as opposed to the old historic way when we're younger, where it was penetrative sex and ejaculation, then your relationship changes somewhat for the better. And what all we're trying to do is creates loving relationships and promotes how important it is to have these loving relationships through touch and feel and exploration. And it's all fun, but it's not over and done in 2, 3 minutes as it probably was in the past. It's something where you have to dedicate time once a week, once every 2 weeks.

Yeah.

Um, and it's important to maintain a relationship. At the end of the day, your body still functions until it dies. And your organ works. Yeah, yeah. Clitoris is, as I mentioned earlier, a significant organ, and it works throughout your life. But if you don't stimulate it, it's, it's not working. And if you didn't need it, you wouldn't have it.

Yeah, I mean, going back to your, uh, taking someone almost to the point of orgasm and, and down again and up again, we used to call that in Tantra riding the wave.

Okay, that's a new one.

Riding the wave is what it's called in Tantra. In BDSM, it's called edging. Okay. Um, and when you describe it, it's taking someone to the point of orgasm, bringing them down and back up again. But, but many alternative lifestyles have, uh, have incorporated that as part of their sort of practices, if you like, and And yeah, you know, and they've done that because they— because people that are really involved in sex and pleasure know that our body has the ability to do all sorts of amazing stuff if we, if we let it. And the more we learn about our own pleasure cycles, the more that we can enjoy ourselves. Right. So, so, yeah, I mean, I think for me, you can do that any— you can do that on your own, or you can do that with a partner. And I know that, you know, for a lot of older people, they are single. And I think, you know, ultimately we have to encourage everybody to self-pleasure or experience pleasure with another person, because it's keeping that stuff going, active.

Sure.

Whether it's with someone or without someone, that keeps you healthy. And as you said, if you don't use it, you lose it, right? That's That's the truth. And, and you know, what we see a lot of is, is people, um, uh, writing to me about vaginal atrophy, which before I did this podcast, to be honest, I knew virtually nothing about. And I suddenly realized it's a hugely, uh, it's a, it's a significant problem amongst older women, mainly through just, you know, not using it and not promoting their own sexual health, right? There was a story today in Metro about a woman who was talking about the fact she hasn't been kind enough to her vagina. And I thought, yeah, you know, probably most people are not even thinking about it that much less thinking how they can be kind to it. But I think, you know, As you've, as you've discovered, masturbation or pleasure with another goes beyond penetration and is really about touch and all the aspects of touch, massage, and everything that we can do both on our own and with another person, right?

So true.

And your products are very much geared, you know, I've, I've received them, I'm testing them, very much geared with the older consumer in mind. Aren't they? And much— and geared to simplifying some of the, uh, complexities of sex toys that, that we know have, have happened. And so tell me a little bit about the evolution of Emotional Bliss and, and how you came to design these two very specific products.

Well, my idea really was to connect with psychosexual therapists who could really guide us in the right direction. As— and we were very— for— well, I was very fortunate to be introduced to one of the UK's leading psychosexuals, lady called Julia, who strongly believed in the need to promote, you know, healthy benefits of orgasm and also to encourage relationships. You've been working with Relate, uh, as a Relate counselor for over 30 years, and she was really quite experienced, you know,, you know, within the psychosexual field. So Julie became a very good friend, um, but also really my mentor. So she would really set the bar, and we would then go away and try and achieve what she wanted to achieve, which on the face of it seemed relatively simple, but it turned out to be a bit of a challenge, a bit of a challenge. And, and, um Really, there was so much challenges which we need to overcome. First of all, we need to understand that everything as far as the nerve endings, external, not internal. Okay, you have the first— you have something called an orgasmic platform, which is the first 25mm to the entrance of the vagina in the back of the pelvic floor around the, uh, urethra. But ultimately, that's the backside of the clitoris. It's just beautiful, huge organ. So we needed to first of all stimulate that. Common thought was more vibration, quicker the orgasm, the more powerful the orgasm. It's the complete opposite of that. You need low vibration, particularly as we age. The challenge became, um, when we're working with menopause, uh, MS, and diabetes. Because particularly with diabetes, type 1 diabetes, nerve ending deterioration, particularly women over 40, is quite prolific. So what we need to do is be very gentle. So it was really understanding to get the right shape and the texture. We got antibacterial. We're the first people to use an antibacterial medical grade material. So big on the standard side of things. We've got the correct levels of vibration. But the problem was, was really understanding how the female orgasm works.

Yeah.

And a lot of the research on, as far as psychosexual therapy is concerned, is, is done from Masters and Johnson from the 1960s.

Wow.

From the US. Yeah. And he really identified, or they identified, there's 4 different phases. And the first phase is external stimulation. That's when the blood goes in and moisture and so forth. Second phase is external stimulation, but the third phase is called the plateau phase, and there's no external stimulation. Everything's happening internally.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's where there's a— in the majority of women who think they've had an orgasm, that's where they stop and they start doubting themselves. And once you doubt yourself, thinking, I'm not— haven't had an orgasm, or it was nice but I don't know what everybody talks about, That's because they haven't actually had an orgasm. They haven't got past the third phase. So what we were told or advised to do is if we could actually bring an additional sensation to come in roughly around about 10 minutes or so. So you've gone through the first and the second phase because you— everybody, every female body is the same. Then you hit the plateau. We then bring the heat in and the heat keeps the extra sensation which then keeps, um, you in your emotional bubble because women need their emotional bubble while they're experiencing pleasure, where men are more visual. Okay. So then you got to the third phase where there's no external stimulation. So the whole point was to bring in the heat. So if we're bringing the heat, we could keep, uh, you within your bubble because all women are emotional. So when they're experiencing pleasure, they want to close their eyes and go within themselves and experience whatever they want to experience. Yeah, so the heat keeps you in there, um, and that's why we have such a huge success rate. But that was nothing down to my support, that was purely down to sitting down with sex therapists, asking for their advice, sending them out for testings. I mean, there was over 300 sex therapists involved in the testing. We worked with, as I said, MS, thyroid, menopause, and we didn't get it right the first time round. That's why we had to go back and introduce the heat, um, to get it going. The other issue really was then, but really understanding the types of vibration, and what we didn't want to do is put high levels of vibration in there because that's the perception. So we then have to fine-tune and put different types of vibration in there, uh, to get everything going because of the nerve end deterioration. And I would like to say this is also applicable to men as well. And what we found, um, across this journey is every man has an issue with erection. So what you don't do is go out and buy a pill and pretend you haven't got a problem because your erection is your barometer for your heart. So what you do do is you go to the GP and you get checked out, and if you need a tablet, a little blue tablet, well, buy a blue little tablet. But once you've got checked out from your GP that everything is fine. It's just a nice little comment.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm actually going to have a drink tonight with a guy from the States who runs a company called FirmTech, which measures your nocturnal erections as a sign of your vascular health. So there you go. That's my exciting life. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, Paul, I think also, you know, what, what you mentioned is the fact that, and we've spoken about it before on the show, is that as we get older, of course, the small nerves start to deteriorate and we need to focus more on the larger nerves, which need more of those deep, low vibrations to cover a greater area than we would get with that very strong vibrations that would just be hitting those little nerves. Right. So there is also a reason for, um, you know, what happens in later life around our, um, how we experience pleasure and, and why things are, are different for us. And, and sex toy companies just generally don't really consider age mostly, or, or illnesses or chronic illnesses. So they're just doing a sort of one-size-fits-all product, which is basically ram up the vibration, right? Give you 20 different patterns. I still don't really understand what that's all about. But, you know, it's really, as you said, about understanding that at a certain point in life, the situation changes and the products that we respond to need to change with us.

Yeah. And also all those products which you've discussed in the past, in the, with the, the sex toy industry and other industries, they all start off with a designer. We never started off with a designer. We started off with a clean piece of paper which said orgasm women. That was it. And that's where, so we got all the information, the shapes, the textures, but that was us experimenting from theoretical concepts to proving them either correct or not correct. And the whole goal was to make sure that regardless of your age or medical constraints or anything, provided— unfortunately, spinal injuries, we've tried and we work with quite a few women with spinal injuries and we can't do anything. It was purely the connection between the clitoris and the brain. Um, but we've worked with, with women who genuinely believed there was something wrong with them, and that was because of the perception. The perception is you know, sexual intercourse, you will have an orgasm, and an orgasm is going to arrive in 3 minutes because that's when his orgasm arrives, in 3 minutes. Ah, it's all on a good day when you're younger. When the reality is, is quite different. It was described to me about one, one sexologist as it's like waiting for a bus with your partner. You're both getting on at the same time and him getting off at the next stop and you're still on the bus. And that's what she's lived with all her life. I had another woman who was fantastic woman. She was 71 and she'd gone through her life thinking there was something wrong with her. And, uh, we, we sent her a product and it changed her life. It just, she realized for the first time now that her body works and there's nothing wrong with it. And she's just 71. And you say that to, to anybody on the street and it's like, ooh, you shouldn't. And it, for me, that was absolutely incredible. There's so many stories we've come across, um, and women who have helped. We had, uh, we recently did a survey in, um, uh, Doncaster with 30 women who were struggling with menopause. This is really for me to understand, do we actually release estrogen and is there any benefit to orgasms with women who were working, living with menopause or struggling with menopause? Yeah. And we had one woman who Described herself as being close to being a recluse. Um, she had lost her job. Uh, the company who she worked for wasn't very sympathetic towards the stresses she was going through with anxiety and stress, hot and cold flushes. She was in a really, really difficult place. And so we went on a, a 12-week, um, orgasm whereby, uh, you orgasmed once or twice a week. But what we were looking for is looking at the characteristics of how you felt after the orgasm. And within 2-3 weeks, she joined a gym. Her life had changed. She described herself as previously living in a gray cloud to now dancing in sunshine. She had an issue with a family with Alzheimer's, which we all have. Well, I, I, I've just lost my father with Alzheimer's, so there's always that stress. And then once you start getting anxiety and you start with the brain fog, all you're doing is increasing the stress and the anxiety, and you're making the system— the symptoms worse. She basically cleared all of that. She reduced everything, and, and that's all because she naturally rebalanced the hormones in her head. We knew that she'd feel better purely because of the serotonin and dopamine. What we were astonished by was her comments about improved nail growth and improved skin texture. And that can only be estrogen, as well as other things. There's obviously testosterone and progesterone and oxytocin and the whole thing. But all she'd done is really given power to our brain through pleasure, and it changed her life.

And she couldn't believe it. That's why I must look like I do.

Yeah. And it's surprising, it's surprising how many people ask what I do. And I said, well, I try to encourage women to orgasm. Look at me as though I've just landed from Planet Zonk. And I said, it's important that you should orgasm for your health and to stimulate your brain. It's important that you nourish the brain. And it's surprising how many women dance around and say, you know, particularly if you're going through the menopause, for example. Yeah. And it's surprising how many women turn around and say, oh, that's why I didn't have any problem with menopause. And it's just like, absolutely fantastic, you know. And that's, that's basically what the whole project is about, to make people feel good about themselves, feel happy, and to nourish the brain and feel confident in themselves, but also really to establish relationships. There's one tip I'd like to, like to share because I know we're running short. Closing tip, closing tip, closing tip is the best advice I've ever been given by, um, I think this was from Julia, is that you should never stop kissing passionately. But the problem is, once you start kissing passionately, male to a female partner. The female partner thinks, oh, I've got to do the washing, I've got to do this, so I've got— what's he doing now? He wants that. So there's always that bit of negativity. But in the beginning of the relationship, passionate kissing was really quite prevalent within the relationship, and it's to maintain that. So what she recommended, which is probably the best advice I've, I've received, is you have a safe space. And the safe space is, for example, a kitchen. So you can kiss each other passionately in the kitchen, which both means all you're after is just a passionate kiss and to show that affection. And that is probably the best advice I could give you, as well as always hold hands.

I think that's brilliant advice. I thought you were going to say passionate kissing in the kitchen means you have to shag over the kitchen table, but you know, that's just the way— that's just the way my brain works. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for coming on the show. It's really been great. We are going to— I think we're going to do a little giveaway as well with a couple of products, which I will add to this when it goes out. So thanks very much. It's been really a pleasure talking to you. More orgasms, that's what I say.

For sure, more the better. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. You have a lovely evening.