Beyond Libido: Reclaiming Your Sexual Power in Midlife with Susan Bratton SUMMER REBOOT - Episode 278

Important Links:

Find all of what was discussed (start here):
https://betterlover.com/
More about Susan Bratton:
https://susanbratton.com/
Mentioned in this episode (these products are beyond incredible & I've tried some of them use code Susan20 for a discount):
https://www.foriawellness.com/

Join my Substack, where you'll get a glimpse of my upcoming book:
https://substack.com/@sandyknutrition/posts

What if everything you've been told about sex after menopause is wrong? In this eye-opening conversation with intimacy expert Susan Bratton, we dive deep into the biology of female arousal that most women have never learned—revealing why so many struggle with pleasure and desire in midlife.

Susan shares the revolutionary concept of the "lady boner"—explaining that women possess just as much erectile tissue as men, but it's distributed differently and requires far more time to become fully engorged. This biological reality means many women have spent decades having sex without being fully aroused, leading to diminished sensation and eventual atrophy of these tissues. The solution isn't just more foreplay—it's understanding that what we call "foreplay" is actually sex itself, and that female arousal patterns have been ignored in favor of male-centered definitions of intimacy.

The conversation explores Susan's comprehensive approach to "sexual biohacking" for ageless vitality, including nitric oxide boosting through diet and supplements, bioidentical hormone therapy, acoustic wave treatments that regenerate genital tissue, and techniques for maintaining muscle mass. For men, we discuss the overlooked issue of penile atrophy and how tools like vacuum erection devices can reverse deterioration without jumping straight to medications. Throughout, Susan offers practical communication strategies for introducing these concepts to partners, emphasizing that sexual wellness isn't just about pleasure—it's connected to longevity, cognitive function, and overall wellbeing.

Whether you're currently experiencing changes in your intimate life or want to prevent future issues, this conversation offers a roadmap to sexual vitality that honors the actual biology of our bodies rather than cultural scripts about aging. As Susan beautifully states, "Your sex life is part of your creativity. It can fuel your vitality. It ca

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Sexual Vitality Expert
• 9:14 Understanding Female Erectile Tissue
• 21:54 The Importance of Yoni Massage
• 36:35 Sexual Biohacking and Nitric Oxide
• 54:45 Gains Wave and Intimate Regeneration
• 1:04:46 Penis Pumps and Male Atrophy
• 1:16:15 Hormones, Periods and Longevity
• 1:24:13 Oxytocin and Gut Health Connection
• 1:33:14 Closing Thoughts and Resources

Transcript

Sandy Kruse: 0:02

Hi everyone, it's me, Sandy Kruse of Sandy K Nutrition, health and Lifestyle Queen. For years now, I've been bringing to you conversations about wellness from incredible guests from all over the world. Discover a fresh take on healthy living for midlife and beyond, one that embraces balance and reason, without letting only science dictate every aspect of our wellness. Join me and my guests as we explore ways that we can age gracefully, with in-depth conversations about the thyroid, about hormones and other alternative wellness options for you and your family. True Wellness nurtures a healthy body, mind, spirit and soul, and we cover all of these essential aspects to help you live a balanced, joyful life. Be sure to follow my show, rate it, review it and share it. Always remember my friends balanced living works. Friends, balanced living works. Hi everyone, welcome to Sandy K Nutrition, health and Lifestyle Queen.

Sandy Kruse: 1:32

Today I have a repeat guest she's just so lovely. I welcomed her to come back to my show and her name is Susan Bratton, and she is the intimacy expert to millions. She teaches people how to achieve ageless passion and unlock the secrets to lifelong vitality, which is what we all want, right? Susan is a champion and advocate for all those who desire intimacy and passion their whole life long. She's the co-founder and CEO of two corporations Personal Life Media and the 20. Susan is the best-selling author and publisher of 34 books and programs. She has been featured in the New York Times and on CNBC and the Today Show, and as well as frequent appearances on ABC, cbs.

Susan Bratton: 2:29

The.

Sandy Kruse: 2:29

CW, fox and NBC, and today, susan and I are going to be discussing sexual vitality and how to keep the loving alive beyond menopause and andropause. For those of you who don't know, andropause male menopause they go through it too, guys, in a different way, but they do go through it, and so this is going to be a very important conversation. Susan is an absolute wealth of information. So with that, welcome, susan. Thank you for coming of information.

Susan Bratton: 3:05

So with that, welcome, susan. Thank you for coming. Sandy, it's so good to see you. I'm so happy to be back with you again. We had so much fun the first time we got together. That was such a great episode, and so I've really been looking forward to seeing you again. It's just so great to be on your show.

Susan Bratton: 3:18

One of the things that I love about what you do is you really help people, stitch together the basics but then get beyond them. I kind of think about your audience as being like the superheroes of health and vitality. They're like tell me all the things and because I'm a nerd around ageless sexuality and what it actually takes to have great sex until the day you die, instead of feeling super frustrated, beating up, beating yourself up, feeling guilty, feeling like you're you have to perform, feeling like you don't really want to but you're doing it mercy sex. There's so many things that happen to us in midlife that we take on as kind of our oh, we're just doing this wrong, we're bad, you know, we should be better. We have all this stuff, and I'm hoping that you and I can kind of clear the path for your listeners to have a whole new approach to their sexuality.

Susan Bratton: 4:20

Because, in all honesty, the people who've given up on their sexuality aren't even going to be listening to us today or watching us today. They're not even going to. They're like I could take it or leave it. I'm not doing it anymore, I've given up on that. So we're really speaking. I think, almost all the time when we do a segment about sexuality to people who are like there's a flicker of hope. Tell me or hey, you know, I'm finally making up for the lost time, or I want to have a better sex life. Tell me what to do. So that's what I'm hoping we'll get into today together.

Sandy Kruse: 4:57

I think that sounds really good because I think you know, speaking from a woman's perspective, we go through such phases in our lives and then our sex life changes. With those phases, you know, like if you're a parent, you remember those days when that toddler would crawl into bed with you and then right, and then there's moments on one hand, sex life killer on the other.

Sandy Kruse: 5:27

Right. But then there's the times where you are suffering, and I've been there and I'm still there with a snoring husband. I actually did a show about this, susan. Can you have intimacy and a healthy marriage without sleeping in the same bed? Because, you know, as you know, as we get older, for me my sleep takes precedence over anything. I have to sleep well, otherwise I'd look like crap recording with you, wouldn't I? And I would also feel like crap and wouldn't want to do all this stuff. So you know, there's a lot of changes. We go through our lives and then we end up at menopause and there's more changes. So I first want to ask you what your story is and how you became an expert in this area.

Susan Bratton: 6:19

Yeah, I've been a sexpert for the last two decades and, like you mentioned, I've written. I've actually written 44 books and programs. Now that must have been an old bio. I added them all up and went oh, it's bigger than I thought Was.

Susan Bratton: 6:35

12 years into my marriage and I didn't want to sleep with my husband anymore. It wasn't pleasurable for me. I'd been giving him mercy sex for years. He was like super mad at me and checked out emotionally. In our relationship we were very platonic. I would relent to mercy sex with him when I felt like I had to, and it's not that I didn't want to have good sex. I just had never had an orgasm from intercourse and I've been having intercourse with him for a dozen years and I just was like I don't know, it's just not doing anything for me. And he said, ok, well, let's see if we can figure it out. And we went to marriage counseling and I worked on some trauma that I'd had and did a lot of that kind of stuff. We did a lot of personal growth development. We started getting very honest with each other. That was one of the biggest things. But what really made the difference for us was going to some sex, love and intimacy workshops and actually learning how to make love and orgasmically, how to have very pleasurable lovemaking and not just intercourse, have very pleasurable lovemaking and not just intercourse. But you know touch and oral pleasuring and holding each other, and you know arousal, understanding arousal and things like that and it so instantly transformed our relationship. We had this renaissance in our relationship where we just totally fell in love again together. We had all this new relationship, energy, the sex was finally good for both of us and we just kept getting better and better and pursuing more and more knowledge.

Susan Bratton: 8:12

And my husband and I were both Silicon Valley executives and he's the original inventor of the Rhapsody online music service, the first you know like now we're at Spotify and Pandora, but he was the inventor, he was the cat beyond the category inventor of that and my company invented the cable modem and we, you know like we were really Silicon Valley 1.0 web people and we said we need to. People aren't going to spend the money that we spent to go to these workshops and get naked and learn techniques in a room full of people. Why don't we bring the workshops to people at home? Why don't we create programs, online programs? And this was still very early 20 years ago. That has now.

Susan Bratton: 9:00

I've been married for 33 years and I'm having the best sex of my life. It just has kept getting better and better and I've never run out of new things I've wanted to do or try. My orgasms are incredible. I have different kinds of orgasms. I teach orgasmic cross-training, orgasmic activation. I teach orgasmic intercourse skills, orgasmic oral skills. This is what I actually do and I worked. I launched a publishing company and I published the work of these experts who were working with you know 20 to 60 people at a time and it basically created experiences that partners could have wherever they were in the world, digitally, direct to consumer, and I've been doing that for 20 years. Now. I have a team of about 20 and my other company that's my company called Personal Life Media and the brand is called the Better. It's called Better Lover, and then I have another brand called the 20, because one of the things that I realized about 10 years into teaching people how to have great sex is that there are three legs to the stool of having sex.

Susan Bratton: 10:13

That serves you for the rest of your life and when you have good sex and by sex I don't necessarily mean intercourse, I mean all the things. I really make a distinction between what people say when they say foreplay and sex, as sex is intercourse and like that's what you're going for when they leave all the other goodies on the table and rush through them. I try to correct that because there are skill sets communication skill sets, technique skill sets and then there's that third leg of a great sex life, which is and it's, an ageless sexuality. You know you want to have it as long as you can because it makes you literally live longer, healthier and happier than someone who gives up on it. And that is what I would consider to be intimate wellness, or what I call either sexual regenerative therapies and treatments Everything from acoustic wave to photobiomodulation, red light therapy to supplementation to vacuum erection devices, all kinds of things.

Susan Bratton: 11:14

I also call that sexual biohacking. That's a popular term and I speak from the stage. Frequently, like in the next month, I'm speaking on three stages about sexual biohacking. It's another word for the same thing, really, but that's very important because your body is going to go through atrophy and the atrophy can be reversed. So all your parts are working, because you can have all the techniques and communication skills in the world, but if it hurts, you're not going to do it. So that's where I got into the whole health side of things and started my second company called the 20, which is sexual vitality supplements and blood flow supplements.

Susan Bratton: 11:54

And the blood flow supplement I make it's called Flow Nitric Oxide Booster, and what's interesting about that, as an example of kind of my ethos of holistic health and as much natural healing as possible, staying away from pharmaceuticals and keeping your body working, is that the nitric oxide booster that I pretty much say anybody over 40 should be on a booster and you should be upping your leafy greens and your beetroot and eating your dills and your cabbages and things like that to get the nitric oxide. But our soils are depleted and so you can't get the nitrogen to turn it into the nitrates that turn to nitrites, that turn to nitric oxide that pump the blood to your genital systems if you don't have enough of these precursors. And so I have a food derived supplement that's made from organic watermelon rind, spinach, sour cherries, instead of things that I think about supplements, and I think there's two dimensional and three dimensional supplementation, and two dimensional supplements is they made it in a lab and three dimensional is this is something that came from the earth, from nature, and it's always going to have things in it that are much more synergistic and more bioavailable than lab-based things. Now, some of that stuff, like vitamin C studies show you that you know, ascorbic acid is just as good as you know the vitamin C derived from sour cherries. But I'll still go with the whole food oriented supplementation when available. It's not always, but there's a few things I've found that are quite interesting, that really help keep your all your biological systems working very well as you age. So that's kind of my story.

Susan Bratton: 13:47

And at 63, like I said, my genitals are more. They're more lubricated, more responsive, more orgasmic. I have more kinds of orgasms. They're longer, they're more pleasurable, they're more intense. I have sexual confidence. It's just a joyful part of my life, my sexuality, and that's available to everyone. It's just thank God for podcasts like yours, sandy, where you are intrepid enough to have somebody like me come on and talk about. Okay, what do I need to know and do? Where's my thinking been skewed from the misinformation that's in the world today? That's basically lack of knowledge, censorship and religious and cultural repression and a patriarchal view of what sex is. How do we correct that? What is female-centric sensuality, and how does that serve me? And so I think I've obviously been quite popular with this category of conversation and I'm so happy people are eager to know these things yeah.

Sandy Kruse: 14:52

So here's the thing you and I are definitely in agreement on this. I know because you just mentioned nitric oxide. I just released a show about nitric oxide, like with Nathan.

Susan Bratton: 15:03

Yeah, oh yeah, I've taken all Nathan's classes. He is the world's thought leader in nitric oxide production.

Sandy Kruse: 15:09

Yes, and it's interesting because this will be an interesting segue. I know you'll have something to add to this but men immediately jump to Viagra versus thinking about why is this happening to me in the first place and the root cause? Well, there's a couple of possible causes. There's atherosclerosis, exactly Right. Or there's a nitric oxide, or right. So there's a few. So at my age I'm a big believer in nutraceuticals that are really really therapeutic, like proteolytic enzymes, like natokinase, right, natokinase, seropeptase we're on that protocol and then on a nitric oxide protocol. But then also for me, for me specifically, I have to really be cognizant of my HbA1c. So there's so many factors that can affect our vitality, our sexual vitality, and people immediately go to the drugs versus kind of doing more explorative work and thinking, hmm, what could possibly be causing this lull in my sex life?

Susan Bratton: 16:37

Yeah, the atrophy and the loss of firmness, the loss of blood flow which makes them not have a firm erection. Can you talk about that? Sure, oh, my God, this is one of my cause.

Sandy Kruse: 16:48

that's one of your specialties, like what are the?

Susan Bratton: 16:51

what are some of the causative factors? Okay, I mentioned a few, but well, I think you hit the greatest ones and, honestly, I think it's better to talk about what are the solutions and what happened and what are the solutions, and so the other interesting thing that I think needs to be said before we talk about the solutions to the problem, because it doesn't really matter why your penis isn't getting hard.

Susan Bratton: 17:07

It does, because then you've got a root cause issue you need to deal with. But the big ones are atherosclerosis and insulin dysregulation, which are, you know, due to lack of movement and poor nutrition. So it's just that simple, Sandy Kay.

Sandy Kruse: 17:24

I mean listen, if you're eating McDonald's and all kinds of garbage, start there.

Susan Bratton: 17:28

If it comes out of a box, you're killing yourself clean that up yes.

Susan Bratton: 17:33

So, um, the thing that doesn't get said, because everything's focused on the male member and whether or not that's working is that if you pretended that a penis was a banana, you can imagine that 50% of that banana sticks out of a male body, but 50% actually goes in and down towards his testicles. It's twice as long as the visual that you see, and the penis is basically spongy tissue covered by a thin membrane called the tunica albuginea and the penile skin, and there's the pudential arteries, there's the capillaries, there's the nerves, there's things like that, but it's basically 90% of it or more is erectile tissue, spongy tissue, and so men have what's called fast acting hemodynamics. When they get turned on which is very easy for them because they're testosterone dominant the blood quickly flows into the penis and has to flow in enough to lock off, to close the blood vessels so that it holds the blood in to create the erection. What nobody ever talks about is that women have. If I took all the erectile tissue out of the banana and I put it on your hand, it would fill up your hand. If I took all the erectile tissue out of the vulvovaginal complex and put it in your hand, it would fill up your hand too. We women have as much erectile tissue as our male-bodied partners.

Susan Bratton: 19:14

The thing is that it's also in three erectile tissue chambers, if you will. One is the clitoral structure, which we know the most about. Most women are aware of that. The little nub is just the tip, the glands. It's their little penis. It has a shaft, it has arms, it has legs. It wraps around the vagina. But they don't really know that.

Susan Bratton: 19:37

The second sponge is called the urethral sponge and people call it a G-spot. But it's not a spot, it's a long tube of spongy tissue that wraps around the urethral canal. The men have exactly the same thing. It's called the corpus spongiosum and literally their urethral canal comes down their penis and out. They ejaculate and they urinate out of that tube and it has sponge around it. We have the same exact tube. We also ejaculate and urinate out of our tube, but ours is inside, but ours comes, ours is in.

Susan Bratton: 20:10

If you open up your little labia, your inner labia, what's inside there is the exit of your urine and your vaginal opening and that's the tip of your urethral sponge, right there and it actually likes to be pleasured. That little spot, just like the entrance to your vagina, likes light touch and pleasuring. That's called the introital sphincter. These are sphincter muscles, sphincter system.

Susan Bratton: 20:37

So what's interesting is there's a third spongy tissue, just like the male body, and it's called the perineal sponge, and it's this little spongy thing between the bottom of the vagina and the rectum sandwiched in there. And all three of those tissue structures have to get flooded with blood. But for the male partner it takes two or three minutes for him to achieve an erection. For the female partner it takes her 10, 20, maybe even 30 minutes, depending on frequency of sex, how often she becomes engorged, et cetera. So our female bodies, we need our lady boner, our clitoral erection, our engorgement, our tumescence. We need that as much as our male body partners. But everything's focused on the male erection and women are getting left behind, which is like malarkey to me. So this is why I think it's very important to understand, because it leads to women thinking that they don't have a libido and it must be hormonal, when in actual fact what has happened is they have been having sex before they're fully erect their whole lives, because they don't understand these mechanisms.

Susan Bratton: 21:55

And what happens is that when those little bags of tissue don't fill up and deflate and fill up and deflate, and fill up and deflate from blood flow. They atrophy, they shrink. And when they atrophy and shrink, the same thing happens to the penis. They atrophy, and then the blood vessels and then the capillaries retract, and diabetes exacerbates that, by the way. Right right, diabetes makes your nerves retract and your capillaries retract and so when they retract, it shrinks the tissue even more and the tissue keeps shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, to the point where a lot of women, by the time they're 40 or 50 or 60, they can barely achieve a single orgasm because they've literally never had the blood constantly flowing completely to all that tissue, because they didn't know that they needed 20 minutes.

Susan Bratton: 22:56

For most couples, when 20 minutes is up, he's already snoring. By the way, snoring is an interesting thing because testosterone replacement exacerbates snoring. So here you are living with a man who's already snoring and then you get him on testosterone because he's turning into your grandmother and you know you're trying to get him to work out and build muscle. But you got to do something because you don't want to be living with your grandma, and then he starts using testosterone and then his snoring goes through the roof. Then your sleep goes down even worse and you got to kick him out into the other bedroom. So it's an imperfect situation and I wanted to address that because you talked about that earlier. Around you know, uh, husband's snoring and you're sleeping. So important, important it is. What you ultimately do have to do is you have to go into separate rooms when your partner can't solve their snoring issues, and there are a lot of things that can be done to solve snoring issues, but not all partners are motivated to fix things you know.

Susan Bratton: 23:55

So you have to deal with what is in your marriages and your relationships as well. But I think that, if women, one of the reasons why women give up on their sexuality is that we've been having sex with a flaccid erectile tissue structure and we've and here's how this works. Okay, so just to finish it off, because I think this is like.

Sandy Kruse: 24:18

So I find this really helpful for people but it's also very new, I will say say because the majority, you know how we always talk about, how foreplay is so important. Yeah, this is one of the main reasons why it is so important for women. You need the time Right Cause we need that time, but most women listen. The reality is, Susan, you see women my age, our age, who either stop having sex or do the mercy sex thing. Yeah, and they're done that. Do you think that women and men, or can you stay in a marriage that has no sex at all? Because I this is totally my opinion I can't imagine being in a marriage with no sex or that mercy sex that happens once every six months or whatever.

Susan Bratton: 25:27

Yeah, lots of people are in marriages that they don't have any sex and they've given up on it. A lot of people cheat, have affairs on the side. A lot of people have a don't ask, don't tell. A lot of people are too sick to have sex. I mean, if you want to talk about libido, desire and arousal, libido is your physical health, desire is your mental and emotional health, and arousal is how your body works compared to your partner. And most women have been having sex and being treated like men, like even the whole notion of foreplay is bullshit. Foreplay, no, I need you to play with my boobs, make out with me, rub my feet, go down on me. That's sex. Sex isn't intercourse. That comes from religious patriarchy. You know, the only reason you should have sex is because we're making more babies for our cult. Some people don't find that opinion very popular, but if you think about it in a broad spectrum, you might.

Sandy Kruse: 26:27

Handmaid's tale people Handmaid's tale.

Susan Bratton: 26:30

I want to go back to the biggest sex organ for a second too, because I think it's a really important part that stitches this whole thinking together, because I want to rewire your thinking completely about your approach to your sexuality. At this point, you know your, your midlife, and you're like I'm listening to you suze, I'm listening to you, sandy. What do I need to do? And one of the most important things to understand and this is the work of my friend, dr Nan Wise. She's a neuroscientist, sexologist, and she's the person and I'd love to introduce you to her. She'd be fun to have on the show.

Susan Bratton: 27:02

Yeah, she, she wrote a book called why Good Sex Matters, which is excellent, but basically she's the person that worked with Beverly Whipple and Dr Barry Komisarek to put people into MRI machines and look at where their brain lit up when they had orgasms and where they were touched in different locations. And so most people think about sexual pleasure as either being intravaginal or clitoral, or maybe both, and different people feel different sensation in their vulva and their vagina depending on cultural programming, how they've been touched, when they've been to. All these different things affect our pleasure states and often women feel pain, numbness, shame, not pleasure, being stimulated in their vulvovaginal regions, and that can be fixed. Because it's your brain that is your biggest sex organ and the reason that it is is because it processes sensations. It lets you know when something feels good. And, going back to the erectile tissue, I want to close the loop on this because it's very important. Thinking it's a whole new way of thinking about your body and your sexuality is that if your erectile tissue, if your lady penis, which is all these nooks and crannies inside you that takes 20 minutes to get an erection, penis, which is all these nooks and crannies inside you that takes 20 minutes to get an erection, if your lady penis is already, if your partner's already snoring and you haven't even achieved your erection yet, then you have a flaccid. Let's call it a yoni this is the word I like, y-o-n-i like my little yoni.

Susan Bratton: 28:50

Yoni is the tantric lovemaking word for the female genital system. It's emotion, it's spirituality, it's a multi-dimensional word for your feminine pleasure center and it includes all the erectile tissue structures the labia minora, majora, the mons, the urethral sponge, the perineus, all the parts, plus how you feel about them and how they need honoring and they need patience and they need reverence and appreciation. They are the seat of creation and that's why your sex life is a part of your creativity. It can fuel your vitality. It can actually supercharge your vitality when it's given what it needs. And what it needs is not what we've learned, seen in the movies, watched on porn or been told by anyone. What it needs is 20 to 30 minutes of concentrated attention and pleasure so that it starts to get used to filling up with blood. Once those tissue structures are plump from blood flow, they have more surface area. They're literally bigger, just like an erect penis is bigger than a flaccid penis. It's our penis, basically inside us, all in these nooks and crannies, and when it's plump and it has more surface area, when it is touched it sends more pleasure signals to our brain. Our neural pathways get enlarged, extended, expanded and we can literally feel more pleasure.

Susan Bratton: 30:36

So once you start and the solution to getting this is yoni massage, vulval pleasuring using vibrators I've got certain ones I highly recommend for yoni massage. One of them is called the Leia 3. And it is like a cupping hand and the vibrations actually penetrate into the erectile tissue to stimulate your brain, bring it online and send the signals to your body to fill it with blood, to plump it up so that your everything starts to feel good. Women who've never had orgasms from intercourse after all of their lives will start to do these yoni massage practices with their partner. Their partner will begin to understand their body better. They will slow down and drop in. They will stop rushing to penetrate us, they will see our pleasure, we will begin to have more orgasms more easily, that last longer and have more intensity, and we will finally begin for many women to do what I call crossing the gasm chasm, closing the orgasm gap between how easy it is for him to have his ejaculatory orgasm and how hard it is for us to have orgasms from intercourse.

Susan Bratton: 31:53

So and you can be orgasmic the entire time your partner is inside you having intercourse with you. You literally can work your way up to that through practice, but not without a lady boner and the lady boners are a funny little thing that take longer. And you must be patient with yourself because you've been playing by men's rules and you got to break it. You got to stop it because you're not doing yourself any you know any service by not living in the body that you're actually in. And even I to this day, knowing all the things I know, get impatient with myself sometimes like damn, this is taking me forever to get really turned on like I'm deaf, and then all of a sudden be like oh, I'm now thinking about my husband's penis. Oh, oh no, I'm thinking about having in my mouth. Oh no, I'm thinking about having in my yoni, oh okay, I think I'm ready to go to the next phase and he's so patient with me, okay. But we?

Sandy Kruse: 32:46

yeah, he's. You just said the word. He's patient with you, you, he has learned that this pays off, okay. Okay, I was going to ask you because, listen, I'm 54. I've been married a long time too, and you know, with men typically, patience is not common, susan, yeah but what men?

Susan Bratton: 33:11

it comes to sex? Yeah, but what men love is to give us incredible pleasure. They want us to love having sex with them. And even if we won't initiate sex generally it's just not a thing most women do You're lucky if you initiate sex as a woman. I mean, I'm a sexpert and I have great sex. And I will say to my husband I'm a sexpert and I have great sex. And I will say to my husband, I'm open to having a date later. And then I got to leave all the heavy lifting to him until I get going, and then I'm a real tiger in bed. But I learned how to be a tiger.

Susan Bratton: 33:42

I'm like the latest bloomer in the universe in almost everything that I do. And I don't even think that I'm that late a bloomer. I just think we are late bloomers. Everybody expects everything they think. You know, the twenties is your best time for sex, and after that it's downhill. It's like, oh, au contraire, your sexual maturation is just like your personal maturation. I mean, I am wiser, I am a better lover. I'm, you know, the most incredible person I've ever been in my life at 63. I just keep getting better and more amazing, and we all do if we have that state of mind and the appreciation for our wisdom and our journey and our experience and our mastery. Sex is a mastery level game. There's a never ending amount of things you can learn and that is why last year and I don't think you know about this I wrote one of my latest, one of my latest offerings and it's, it's free, it's a download is the sex life bucket list.

Susan Bratton: 34:44

It's at sexlifebucketlistcom and it's basically a 40 minute video couples experience where I walk you through. You download a PDF and it has 48 erotic play dates on it, and these erotic play dates people don't want to have sex and they don't want to schedule sex, because that means I have to schedule screwing my husband and I don't feel like it. And so, like all these experts that are like you just need to schedule, I'm like, uh, nobody's doing that, please, no, queen, no. So. But what people will do once they get started is they will be like okay, on Thursday nights we're getting a sitter or whatever we need to do to carve out the time. We're getting takeout, we're doing whatever and we're going to learn a new thing, we're going to try something new together. That's the variety, the novelty that keeps your sex life becoming more and more fun instead of swirling down the toilet. And the sex life bucket list has these 48 fun ideas and nothing is gross. There's no like let's pee on each other or weird shit like that. It's all stuff you would not be embarrassed to do in front of your husband and he wouldn't be embarrassed to do it in front of you. And you watch my video together in bed, crack your phone open or your laptop and you watch in bed and you have two printouts. You print them out at home and it has A, b and C next to each thing and the A's are oh, this is definitely going on my bucket list.

Susan Bratton: 36:20

I've always wanted to find my G spot or learn to have orgasms from intercourse, or try a vibrator while we're having intercourse, or do a lingerie fashion. You know photo shoot or you know videotape ourselves having sex or something like that. And some women are like I would never do that and that's fine. You can mark that as a B, like okay, I'd do it if you really want to. Or a C it's not for me right now.

Susan Bratton: 36:44

Never say never, because when you start having fun, you get over your body issue, body image issues because you're starting to have fun and you don't care what you look like. Your judgment flies out the door because you're too busy having fun. You start getting juicy because it's exciting and it's new again. You start trying new things, you have laughs, you have some failures. You're fun, you know it's just more pleasurable. It's not just the old in and out thing again that I don't really like and I'm kind of sick of anyway, and I think that and and one of the things that could be top on your list is I'd like to start having yoni massages. I'd like to have a yoni massage practice with you. I heard Susan Bratton on Sandy K Nutrition's podcast and she said that if we want to keep having great sex for the rest of our lives, the thing the number one thing she recommends is that we start having a yoni massage practice.

Sandy Kruse: 37:36

I need a link for that.

Susan Bratton: 37:40

Yeah, the yoni. All my yoni massage videos are free and they're at betterlovercom, and that's also where you can Sorry, yeah, go ahead.

Sandy Kruse: 37:47

You talked about. You talked about a special vibrator as well.

Susan Bratton: 37:50

So layer three, Sorry, you talked about. You talked about a special vibrator as well.

Sandy Kruse: 37:52

So we will. Anybody who's listening, we will have a bunch of links, because Susan will get me a bunch of links that we talk about in this and more and more, so you can explore.

Susan Bratton: 38:05

Well, I might, as well, tell you about one more thing too while we're at it, and that is this pleasure protocol. So one of the things that I am very, very careful about is toxin taking on. Toxins I try to use. I try to pick and choose my beauty products. I try to eat organic. I cook my food at home. I you know, I just do whatever I can do. I've got an air doctor cleaning the air. I filter my food at home. I just do whatever I can do. I've got an air doctor cleaning the air. I filter my water. I just try to do everything I can do to keep toxins and I don't drink out of plastic. I just tell me what to do and I'll probably try and do it kind of thing around toxins.

Susan Bratton: 38:48

But I was really frustrated for decades around lubricants, because I like it slippy, slidey and even though, because I have done my gains wave for her, which is the acoustic wave and I do want to talk about that with you it is so good I still like to put lube on. And lubricants are an FDA class two you know regulated industry and so they have to have preservatives and the problem is they're like the ultra processed food of sex stuff. It's basically nothing good. All horrible stuff in it because it just sits on shelves and it's all chemically and it's really gross, like KY and all this stuff. Compound organic fluorine, which is a halide that screws up your thyroid, and all the stuff in the drugstores have it. All the stuff in the grocery stores, the Walmarts, the Targets have these kinds of chemicals in them. So I found a company called Phoria and I've worked with them now I'm literally their company spokesperson, because I talk about this so much and I created something with their products called the pleasure protocol and I really recommend this for women. Now this has CBD in it what I'm about to talk about but there is a non CBD version available to some. Women can't do it. They're drug tested, they don't want to, they're living in states where they can't get it.

Susan Bratton: 40:32

But generally, cbd is a phytocannabinoid from the our organs in our tissue and, interestingly enough, a lot of endocannabinoid receptors in our genital structures. And going back to the signal to the brain, when those are stimulated by the phytocannabinoids they start sending pleasure signals to the brain. The brain loves it. Sending pleasure signals to the brain. The brain loves it. And the other ingredient that is in here is MCT oil, which is basically fuel for your brain, and botanicals. So they have these melts, which are these little kind of like trochies, these little tablets that look like a little tiny thumb or a little tip of your pinky finger that are made of cocoa butter. They have ones with jojoba in it that are booty melts.

Susan Bratton: 41:36

So if you like anal pleasuring which it took me to my 60s to start loving it, but I love it now because the thing with sex is, practice makes perfect Everything feels good once you know what to do and you're relaxed and you have pleasure. So the phoria melts can go in your vagina and they coat your vagina so you don't have to try to get lube up in there. It has this wonderful, luscious kind of coating in the vaginal mucosal lining. Great, if you have low lubrication, painful sex etc. Then you put on the Awaken Arousal Oil, just a couple drops on the outside of the vulva and that starts to send the signals Because, remember, your clitoral structures are under your labia, your big clitoral legs, literally are right under your outer labia and so that starts feeling really good and starting to get that skin going.

Susan Bratton: 42:37

And then there's the sex oil. Can I?

Sandy Kruse: 42:40

ask you a question. Yeah, so do those products help with the engorgement that you were talking about? So it helps that whole process Exactly.

Susan Bratton: 42:49

Okay, okay, yes. What it does is it helps. It's almost like pre-lubrication. It starts getting everything going, it gets the brain connected to the yoni, it gets the letdown happening, so that the blood starts getting out of your brain, your heart, your butt, your legs, your feet and starts coming into your pelvic bowl. And then the last thing is the sex oil for all the slide and glide that you want, you can reapply as much as you want, and this combination is absolutely incredible clean.

Susan Bratton: 43:21

They were one of only three brands that Mama Vonna, mama Vision I forget what they're called found that didn't have all this gunk in it, and the other two brands. One of them was one I used to recommend, but it has a couple things I didn't love. And the third one that they recommend has multiple things that I don't like, and so this is the cleanest clean. I'm going to send you the whole kit so you can have it and try it. I love it. They also have a breast oil because, if you want to start getting the blood flowing almost from the inside out, breast pleasuring, nipple pleasuring and kissing are a lock system with your clitoral erectile function. So if you want to, yes, so that you get engorged and you get your lady boner faster when you really get things going. So the pleasure protocol that's at pleasureprotocolcom and I'll give you links. I'll give you a discount code that I will introduce you to them so that you can give everybody a discount code for yourself, which will be nice. Introduce you to them so that you can give everybody a discount code for yourself, which will be nice. I think they'll do a good discount code for you too, which is really nice. I love the company, I love their products and they make sex feel even better.

Susan Bratton: 44:42

So between now you understanding that you need to have time, you need to have genital massage, you need to get the blood flow in, you need to focus on eating your leafy greens and drinking your beetroot juices or eating your beets, and then maybe taking your nitric oxide boosters and then giving yourself time. Husband doesn't have to do all the work for you. You can give yourself yoni massages with that. You can run that all around and get things going, and you can go up inside the vestibule with that vibrator. You can put it right on your clitoral structures and give yourself some orgasms. You're allowed to have as many orgasms as you want, as often as you want.

Susan Bratton: 45:29

Every single one of them is very, very good for you. It sends oxygen to your brain to get rid of cognitive dysfunction. It really helps with that. It releases neurotransmitters, it releases hormones. It's good vascularization good for your vascularization and it's calming to your nervous system. And it really helps because, especially if you're with a partner, you're creating oxytocin and the oxytocin is kind of the counterweight to cortisol, adrenaline. So you're stressed all day and you've got all this cortisol which can disrupt nighttime sleep. One of the best things you can do is give yourself a couple of orgasms before you go to bed and don't feel like it's out of the question to solo pleasure in parallel with your partner. That can be nice too. Or maybe have your partner hold you, play with your breasts, tell you how sexy you are while you use the vulva massager on yourself and when I say vulva mass know I'm sure that a lot of women are going to go.

Sandy Kruse: 46:55

Yeah, my husband wouldn't be into that. So this is where, where, where my brain is kind of thinking. I'm thinking with that stimulator that you're talking about and the lube and all of that, if you started on your own, your husband will get into it when he sees how turned on you are and then maybe, you know, be more conjoined in the whole process. Right, like I'm just saying, a lot of women, I'm sure, who have been married for a long time and I'm sure you know this too would maybe have a partner that would be like, yeah, whatever, like I'm not into it, and they just want the whole wham bam. Thank you, ma'am. That's what they've been doing their whole life.

Susan Bratton: 47:42

Well, there's two things about that. One is that every partner is different and you want to approach them differently. I often use the people code as an easy reference for thinking about different approaches to different kinds of partners. Like, some partners are oriented toward power and these tools these think about them as tools. I want to get some tools that'll give you the ability to give me even more pleasure. I'm going to empower you to give me more pleasure. I want to try some new things. You already give me pleasure and I want to have some more and do some fun things. That'd be one way. Another way would be intimacy. This is going to bring us closer and I want to try this together because I feel like it could really bring us closer. Another partner might be oriented toward peace. A lot of men like peace, and so in that way, you could say to them I really want to try these things and I'm going to go off and do them and just let you know how it goes and I'll let you know if I get more turned on right. It could be just leave me alone and tell me about it. If it affects me. That could be another way, and so, really, it's just thinking about these different styles of partners and what it is that's going to be right for them.

Susan Bratton: 48:54

For many men they like a challenge. Hey, I want to do a 30 day pleasuring challenge and I'm going to do it, sometimes myself, and sometimes I want you to help me with it and let's see how it goes. Would you be down for supporting me through something like that? A lot of men like a challenge. Other men, they really like ritual. I would like to know if we could have a yoni massage practice and I can't guarantee you that I'm always going to want to have intercourse after, but if I do have the glimmer of it, we're going to have intercourse and I think it'll make us have more intercourse. But I'd like you to try this massager on me and put these oils on me and I'm going to teach you how to do it in the order that I learned from Susan Bratton, and you know it's called a pleasure protocol and it sounds really fun and I want to try it. Will you try it with me and can we experiment and just see how it goes and learn together? Like there's a million approaches that you can take with your partner and what I don't want you to do is discount them out.

Susan Bratton: 49:56

Basically, you know how men are. I love them dearly, but they need training and they think that they know more than they do and you have to let them believe that they do. And what they want to do is they want to be respected and they want to win. So you have to set them, you have to approach them as you respect them. You're already we're already so good.

Susan Bratton: 50:21

I was thinking this could make it even better. I wanted to have more fun times with you. You know, like respecting them for a job well done is the most important thing to men. And then, when they do things right oh my God, you did such a fantastic job with that. I love how I told you one time that I put the melt in and then you rub the awaken on and just a couple drops then you use the sexo. That was really good. Oh, I loved how, when you really heard me when I said rub it up and down the labia, but also across the mons, and then not until you've done that and I'm ready, go inside the vestibule. You know, I really love how you followed the plan so well and you really heard what I said, because this is what they want, and they want us to love, to have sex with them and by sex I mean all the things and they want to to love, to have sex with them and by sex I mean all the things. And they want to do a great job. And so your job is to empower them and lift them up behind.

Susan Bratton: 51:16

Every good man is a good woman, it's so true. We make them feel competent, capable, happy, loved, respected, that they're winners. That's how we love them. That's what they need from us. We need safety, security, caretaking, encouragement, adoration. That's what we need from men. We need different things. I mean, I am a true believer in sparkle, rainbow self-expression. I am as masculine as I am feminine. I run two companies. I you know like. I manage a team of 20 people. I am a badass bitch, but I'm also a woman who loves my man to hold me and keep me safe, and we can be all those things. And so understanding what we both want and kind of moving toward that for each other really, really helps a lot. And he doesn't know. Those are the things that you need. You have to tell him what you need so he can give it to you.

Sandy Kruse: 52:23

So I want to get back into this. What did you call it? Games wave? I want to get into what you're doing now. Okay, great, because you do some pretty spectacular things. You're 63. You're very vibrant and alive and you look young, you act young, you know you're, you're I. I would say you're very and I've talked about this before, susan that when we just let things go around midlife, sometimes men can seem more feminine and women can seem more masculine. And you know you, you have all the things of. You know somebody who I truly like. I want to be 63 and be like that, like vibrant, alive. Talk to us about what you're doing, because you mentioned gains weight, like there's so many things. I know you probably can't say it all in, you know the next 15 minutes, but I will.

Susan Bratton: 53:29

Okay, let's go, yeah, so biohackers use a construct called the stack, where it's basically a series of things that you do that add up to greater than the sum of the parts that they're, that they work really well together. They're very synergistic. And my sexual biohacking stack is muscle. I am focused on strength. I want my body to be slabs of muscle. That's what I focus on, and if I have a pooch on my tummy or an extra roll or whatever, I don't stress about that either. I'm not worried about my body fat, I'm worried about my muscle strength. So that's my number one thing. And high intensity interval training to get my cardiovascular pumping, because you can't get the blood to flow where you want it to go if you can't get the blood, if you don't have a good vascular system. Vascular system will carry strength and vascular system will carry you through the low toxin thing I talked about and cooking my own foods, and now I'm a great cook in my 60s. I've just been doing it for so long, so you get better and better at it, and cooking is very easy once you learn how. So I want to encourage anyone who's still, you know, eating out of containers to try and learn some really simple cooking. It's one of the best things you can do for your health.

Susan Bratton: 54:47

The next thing that I do is I take bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. I take bi-est estrogen, estriol and estradiol compounded and I put it in my vagina. I also take progesterone orally and I also take testosterone. The testosterone is also in a cream and I put it on my clitoris and labia and I have testosterone level blood of about 250. It's good I back off on it if I start to get like a mustache hair and but I, working out, I can feel my testosterone surge as well.

Susan Bratton: 55:27

So, even though I do testosterone replacement therapy, I also generate a lot of my own testosterone too, and I think that's fantastic. I also use topical estrogen. There's a serum I like Do you know about Michelle Sands, glow Below? No, oh, this I love, so Get Glow Below is a biased dual estrogen. They also have a DHEA version for women who are like I don't do estrogen and it's a vaginal serum. I use it on my vagina as well, but I also use it on my face and my neck and my decolletage, my chest and my hand, back of my hands, my arms.

Sandy Kruse: 56:07

I've been using estrogen on my face for years now.

Susan Bratton: 56:11

I love it on my face. This is like my night cream.

Sandy Kruse: 56:14

Yeah, yes, yes, but not that kind. But I am a massive believer in that too. That's look so long. Yeah, look at you girl.

Susan Bratton: 56:26

Oh, I've had two facelifts. I've also had facelifts. I had one at 52 and I had one at 61. And so you know, I've had facelift neck lift. I are very similarly aligned.

Sandy Kruse: 56:40

Like I'm, like I would much rather do that personally than other stuff, Like I didn't mind having the the saggy skin cut off.

Susan Bratton: 56:58

That was that was right. For me it's not right for everybody. I respect everybody's choices.

Sandy Kruse: 57:03

Me too, me too, me too. Yeah, you just asked me what I do.

Susan Bratton: 57:07

So I use the Get Glow Below on my vagina and my skin and then I also go in every couple of years and I do Gaines Wave for her Gaines Wave. I've been associated with Gaines Wave for five years now and they started out doing men's regenerative erectile dysfunction reversal using acoustic wave treatments for the penis. And now they have also launched the vulval version and it's better, way better than the stuff I used to have to do with lasers and rf devices intravaginally right, because the gains wave goes all the way around everything. It goes on the whole outer vulva, mons, outer labia, inner labia, vestibule, clitoral structure, perineal area and then toward the entrance to the vagina. But it penetrates from the outside in and so it reconstitutes saggy labia, reconstitutes the three erectile tissue chambers of the vulva, it reconstitutes that clitoral structure.

Susan Bratton: 58:18

You get a nice big juicy clitoris again. That is atrophying as you age and your blood flow is diminished. So I love it. It's a series of six treatments and let me give you a promo code better B-E-T-T-E-R Better will get you a seventh treatment free, which is a fantastic. Definitely get the seventh treatment free.

Sandy Kruse: 58:42

Sorry, Susan, so you have to go in somewhere to get it done.

Susan Bratton: 58:46

You go to Gaines. You go to GainesWavecom slash Susan. There's a directory. I don't make any money off of that, by the way. It's just that I can give away the seventh for free I don't get paid by the doctors and you go there and you do. Usually you do two treatments a week for three weeks, but I personally space it out. The doctors are afraid that if you only do a couple and then you don't come back, and it doesn't hurt, but if you get busy or you don't come back or whatever, then you're gonna be like it didn't work. But it takes 90 days to get to full effect because you're literally regenerating tissue. That shit doesn't grow overnight. It took you 50 years for it to be all shriveled up. It's not going to reconstitute by tomorrow. And so you go in and you do two. You know two a week. I personally would do one every two weeks. I'm very delicate, very sensitive. For me, my gains wave schedule is more like one every 10 days to two weeks, and I get the seventh one free, believe you me. And then that lasts me for a few years and then I'll notice.

Susan Bratton: 59:58

For me I chase incontinence. That's my biggest issue, and so I get that what they call my girlfriend calls keyhole incontinence, where I pull into the garage and I'm like, oh God, I got to take a pee, and then by the time I get the key in the hole in my door I've peed my pants. Or before I get into the bathroom and I'm pulling my pants down, pee's coming out. It drives me crazy. And so the Gaines Wave fixes incontinence, loss of lubrication, vaginal laxity, clitoral atrophy, genital atrophy, labia atrophy. It does like the whole thing.

Susan Bratton: 1:00:30

Can I ask you, it's for men too. You take your husband with you, because if you've got atrophy, dude's got atrophy, and it reverses erectile dysfunction on anyone but the worst cases, and worst cases like diabetics or people with a lot overweight, heavy atheroscosclerosis. They might have to go in for a multiple times through their health rejuvenation to get their function back. And then they also should be using a penis pump, a vacuum erection device. They should also be supplementing their testosterone. Both of you should be taking your nitric oxide booster. So you know, this is the stack. It's like all that stuff.

Susan Bratton: 1:01:14

And then there's one last thing. There's a lot of women who are like I'm not sure I'm ready for Gaines Wave yet I don't have incontinence. I don't think I have any of the. You know, I don't really have loss of lubrication yet, but maybe I'm starting to get a little vaginal laxity. Maybe my tissue is thinning. Now I'm on estrogen and I'm thickening the tissue, which is great, but it may not be quite enough. I'm having a little lubrication loss. Then I recommend this intravaginal device. Do you know about the V-Fit?

Sandy Kruse: 1:01:44

I've heard of it. I think I heard you talk about it before. This is the vagina device.

Susan Bratton: 1:01:50

It's at vaginadevicecom and what it does is it goes inside for eight to 10 minutes every other day and it has three modalities. It has red light photobiomodulation, it has warmth for collagen for recollagenation and it has vibration for essentially Kegel toning. So the V-Fit is marketed it's an FDA class two device sold through gynecologists, doctors and also direct to consumers. I think Nordstrom might even be carrying it now and you put it in and you have this protocol and I just scroll Instagram, look at your Instagram feed while I have it in every other day for like eight to 10 weeks and then it kind of abates my issues and then when I need to do it again, I do it again and I like this for things that are not.

Susan Bratton: 1:02:46

You're not maybe ready to go for gains wave, but you need to do something. And one of the nice things about red light therapy intravaginally is that your vaginal microbiome is. It needs glycogen to feed the good bacteria and as your estrogen dips, your glycogen levels dip and red light photobiomodulation inside your vagina actually increases glycogen and gives the good bacteria something to eat. So women have reported to me that they didn't have an infection but didn't smell as good as it used to smell and that was from the loss of estrogen, the loss of glycogen, and using the vagina device help them actually get that going. So now they're like now I feel comfortable having my husband go down on me, and I used to just like not be able to relax because it just wasn't right, you know. So it's pretty amazing what red light therapy can do.

Sandy Kruse: 1:03:54

Oh, very cool. Oh, my God, you've got so much information, so here's a question for you you do all these things to ensure that you remain, you know, vital and have an enriched sex life and everyday life.

Susan Bratton: 1:04:17

A regular life yeah.

Sandy Kruse: 1:04:18

Yeah, it's really all contributing to my whole life. Yeah, does your husband do the same?

Susan Bratton: 1:04:24

Yeah, yeah, he goes and gets, gains waves every couple of years. He's 60 and he pumps his penis probably about once a week. Okay, maybe twice a week sometimes yeah, what's this penis?

Sandy Kruse: 1:04:35

pumping of the penis, what's the penis? Yeah, the reason I'm asking is because if you're doing all the things to improve nitric oxide, do you have to do that? Um, and you have you good, like we were talking about good, clean arteries. Doing all those things eating well, exercising Do you still need to do the penis pump?

Susan Bratton: 1:04:58

Yeah, penis is atrophy, they just do. You know how? You look at your grandpa and he's small. Yeah, yes, okay, well, he didn't used to be that small right yeah, like well, do you think his penis stayed the same size? I mean sorry to talk about my grandpa's penis, about my grandfather's?

Sandy Kruse: 1:05:19

yeah, but I know you do no, I I know what you're saying. I do know what you're saying.

Susan Bratton: 1:05:24

Everything shrinks we're shrinking all the time, yeah, and menopause, by the way, accelerates the shrinkage. For us, I mean, that's our planned obsolescence. As soon as we can't make more humans, make more reeling earth worms, we're like boom, destined to die. So that's why I like to push off menopause personally.

Sandy Kruse: 1:05:45

Yeah, what's that? Talk to me about that. So let me finish the penis pump.

Susan Bratton: 1:05:49

Okay.

Susan Bratton: 1:05:50

I see I have too many questions Susan, no, you don't have too many. This is once you start realizing how all this stuff fits together, you're like, oh well, shoot, yeah, okay, I can do this. And, by the way, if you literally just start on a nitric oxide booster, start on some estrogen replacement, estrogen and progesterone work well together and I like testosterone gives you balls, gives you confidence, and I like that. It lowers your anxiety, you feel more capable. You know those are good things to start with. And then using the layer to get the blood flowing in. Or a VIM. The VIM is also very nice. That's this one, this is a wand. I'll give you links to both.

Susan Bratton: 1:06:33

Everything that I talk about is that orgasmic cross training, all these tools, these pleasure tools, but these are very nice things to use. But the pump if you can encourage your husband to use a vacuum erection device once, twice, even three times a week to reverse any initial, you know, like a lot of guys, they're pushing a wet noodle and they're in total denial. They don't have vascularization of the penis anymore. You can't see the veins on their penis. They don't get hard as a rock anymore. They can't stay that firm over time. You know they're flagging, but they're in denial. Men are very, very distantly connected to their emotional body, as we know. It's just our physiology. Some men have more, some men have less. Everything's a bell curve, but they will stay in denial until that thing is completely inoperative and then be like I think I'd be having some problems. Maybe I should take Viagra, you know. So if you want to, go ahead.

Sandy Kruse: 1:07:32

I was going to ask you so because, so that can. What you're talking about, the atrophy of the penis, that can happen even if you don't have heart disease, even if you are optimizing your testosterone, even if you so, because it just happens with age.

Susan Bratton: 1:07:52

So testosterone helps a lot, because then you usually are getting nocturnal erections. What happens when you stop getting nocturnal erections in morning wood your? It means that your penis isn't filling up with blood repeatedly through the night, and so it's just lying there and shrinking. So what this basically does is it replaces the nocturnal erections and the erectile function by the vacuum. You put your penis in here and you pump to a certain pressure and it actually draws blood from your body into the cylinder, because the cylinder has got a negative vacuum pressure. So the blood has to pull into the penis and what you're doing is you're pulling in more blood slightly more blood than your penis can get on its own by filling up with blood, and then that causes the capillaries to grow and it causes tiny little micro damage. That then causes tissue regeneration and then, when the capillaries grow back out and it has more blood carrying capacity returned to it, then the vascularization comes in, then the nerves come in.

Susan Bratton: 1:08:57

A lot of women are having sex with husbands who just keep pumping away, away, away, away, away and struggle to achieve an ejaculation because their nerves have retracted, because their capillaries have retracted and they just can't feel what they used to feel. And so a vacuum erection device uh, it's at pumpsworkcom is the pump I recommend, and I only recommend one pump. Most pumps are garbage or they have a fatal flaw of some kind and, like I said, I really take the time to to kick the tires on a lot of stuff and vet the companies and their care, and this is what doctors use for their patients. But it's not expensive, it's 179 dollars. So this is a very, very nice system for men.

Susan Bratton: 1:09:46

And if you say to your husband listen, I want you to pump, I want you to just go in and pump and relax and watch a game and pump your penis or whatever you want to do, and do it once a week for me, you know, you can even prop it up on the desk and do your work while you're sitting at your desk at home. It's very easy to, and the electric pump is nice because it's hands-free and so then it just automatically keeps the pressure stable in the pump because it'll leak a little bit, because it's going around your skin. That's why you need to keep it. You know you have to pay attention to it, but the electric pump is even better. And when you encourage your husband to do what I call self-care down there. Then it keeps him firm and robust and happy and he loves his penis and guys like to love their penis. It's very important to them.

Sandy Kruse: 1:10:32

Yes, they do, they do.

Susan Bratton: 1:10:35

It's just like us loving looking good in a gorgeous outfit and sexy shoes and stuff and our hair done up and our makeup. For them, it's when they look down and they see their nice, firm penis and when they don't, they get demoralized. But they don't know what to do because they are still in some denial about it, and so they'll just revert to Viagra to band-aid it, instead of doing the simple thing, which is just draw some blood into your penis once a week.

Sandy Kruse: 1:11:01

It's like the easiest thing in the world. How long does that take? How long?

Susan Bratton: 1:11:05

does that?

Sandy Kruse: 1:11:05

take Half an hour yeah you do it.

Susan Bratton: 1:11:10

You pump, release for 10 minutes. You pump it up, you pump, release for 10 minutes. You pump it up, hold it for 10 minutes, release, pump it up for 10 minutes, hold it and then release, and that takes about a half an hour and you can do it a third time if you want to. Because you're already there and, by the way, these are dishwasher you put these in the dishwasher, which is great um and um. Then at the end you can trap the blood in the penis for a half an hour after pumping and what's nice is that he's going to be really, really firm and engorged and so often it's nice to send him in before your lovemaking and be like, why don't you go do some pumping and then I'll meet you in the bedroom and he's ready to go and he's doing really well and it feels extra good to him because he's brought all that blood flow in Brilliant. And get him on nitric oxide.

Sandy Kruse: 1:11:57

Yeah, but you're saying nitric oxide boosters, stuff to help his body make it, yes.

Susan Bratton: 1:12:05

Yeah, yeah, feed him more beets, more greens and give him a nitric. I'll give you a link to this with. If you go to buy Flow now this is my podcast special where it's like the cheapest. It's cheaper than Amazon, cheaper than anywhere. Flow is the one that's made from real fruit and vegetables organic fruit and vegetables. I don't have the organic seal because it costs so much money to get that organic seal, but everything in it is organic, which is nice, so I'll send you some. If you want some, let me know.

Sandy Kruse: 1:12:38

Yeah, yeah, is that for men? And women.

Susan Bratton: 1:12:41

Yeah, I make everything for gender spectrum because our bodies work the same way.

Sandy Kruse: 1:12:47

Oh, you're just brilliant. Okay, there was another question I was asking you. Oh, we were talking about how you still get a period.

Susan Bratton: 1:12:56

Yeah, I do. Now this is going to trigger warning for those of you who have just realized that I'm 63 and I still menstruate on purpose. I am not saying you should do this. I am not saying there's anything wrong with you being happy you don't have a period anymore. Yeah, just me, okay, and I'm doing it under a doctor's care. It's completely safe. There are a lot of us out here. We just don't talk about it.

Susan Bratton: 1:13:28

But I am very, very much focused on longevity and I do a lot of things around sustaining my vitality and my energy. And you know one of the I didn't get my period until I was 17. 16 and 11 months and I got my period. I was a late menstruator. I was very thin, tall and skinny girl and I also had a lot of anxiety. In high school I lived in a very bad living situation and so I think it delayed menstrual onset. So that, I think, is part of why I've been able to go so long and all the bioidentical hormones I've been taking since my forties. I take a lot of estrogen and I love it. It makes me feel so good. I feel so good and I'm monitored by a doctor and I still menstruate and I have my period right now and I love it.

Sandy Kruse: 1:14:36

Is it a normal period, susan, or is it just every every? Four weeks or so I have a six day four to six day bleed so, and it is like a normal flow period well interesting, like it's always been okay.

Susan Bratton: 1:14:53

And in my in my 40s, in my 30s, I had a lot of heavy bleeding and it kind of subsided. In my 40s I had a couple of years of some heavy bleeding and it subsided. And I, in my 50s, I went maybe three months without a period and it returned. So it's you know, it's the kind of thing where I'm just like literally going with the flow. I'm still bleeding and I'm happy about it Because I feel like once for me personally, I have this thing and you know the Buck Institute of Longevity is doing research on this.

Susan Bratton: 1:15:27

There's a researcher there doing this as well, saying that one of the ways you can. You know there's many facets to longevity, like me wanting to have big slabs of muscle, me wanting to do HIIT, me wanting to do my own pull-ups and push-ups and things like that. Me cooking my own food and watching all the toxins these are all things I do that contribute to longevity for me. Running two businesses at 63 contributes to longevity for me. I have to use my brain like crazy. You know I do a fair amount of supplementation of various kinds. I also do senolytics. So I'm taking rapamycin and other senolytics, fisetin, things like that, that I pulse.

Susan Bratton: 1:16:09

But I feel like once you hit menopause, you start to go down toward your inevitable death. And I'm not afraid of death at all. I don't have any issues of mortality. I'm very, very, you know, aware of it. My mother is in her last years. I, you know, I'm fine with it all. It's like I'll live when I live till I don't. But I'm going to live as healthy, as switched on, as cognitively functional, as energetic, as flexible, as good balance as all you know.

Susan Bratton: 1:16:41

Great sex and creativity and moving around and seeing the world and, you know, being on your podcast and all of these things as long as I can, because I can tell you that I have never done better thinking, work, writing, creativity than I'm doing right now, like I'm doing the best work of my life. Everything is just coming together in ways that you get a wisdom in your 60s and I just have so much vitality right now and I think my periods contribute to that. They make me feel young and vibrant and vital and I like the bleed, I like period sex. I mean, that's something else a lot of women don't like. It makes my vagina feel good. I like making a mess and taking up space and I, like you know, just like the whole thing about it being like, ooh, it's a little taboo, and I'm like, yeah, it is, and I'm doing it Like I just like that whole thing. That's been like so much shame has been put on us around our menstruation, true, and I like to take that space back for me.

Sandy Kruse: 1:17:49

You know it's really interesting and I'm sure you know this research that once a woman stops bleeding, that her. We know that the research shows that her risk of heart disease jumps up to even greater than men midlife. And there's a lot. Listen, it hasn't been proven but it kind of makes sense Logically. I like to put logic in with a lot of health stuff. That's why I'm always like logic and resonance is big for me as well. Does this resonate with you or not? And for me, you or not? And for me, what you're saying actually makes a lot of logical sense that it actually keeps you younger and healthier and more vibrant. And I get it, I do get it, I totally get it. And if it triggers somebody here, then I always with triggers. I'm always like triggers are usually something that you should take a look at why it would trigger you. It has nothing to do with what Susan's doing or what Sandy's doing, or we're not dictating to do any of this stuff. We're just educating. That's all we do.

Susan Bratton: 1:19:03

I'm really sharing my experience in. I don't want people to think, well, everything else she just told me is bullshit, because she's nuts for having her period at 63. That's why I don't often share that piece, because when, when I post, I posted that on threads I'm pretty active on threads and Instagram and I posted on threads that I sold my period. It was a pile on Sandy, Shamey, shamey, shamey, angry, vitriolic pile on and I thought, well, I don't really want to trigger people, I'm already triggering them around sex you know, like I don't need to trigger people anymore.

Susan Bratton: 1:19:50

Yeah, I don't like to trigger people. I want to be compassionate and have a gentle heart and so, yeah, but you're not doing it out.

Sandy Kruse: 1:19:59

You're not doing it because you're not compassionate, you're doing it because you're sharing. It's just like a lot of this stuff that I talk about. People think I am nuts If I was to show you and turn the camera around and show you my cabinet of nutraceuticals, because I'm a big believer that because of our food system, because of our environment, because of all of that well, you know, I'm not living off the land like my grandmother did. You know I have to do that to optimize my aging. So, but trust me, I have had a lot of people get triggered by stuff that I do or that I say, and I'm like, I'm not saying it to trigger people, I'm saying it because, you know, maybe it's something that resonates with some people.

Susan Bratton: 1:20:47

That's all, and it might help people. Well, one of the things you told me before we started was when I said tell me about your audience, because I just want to speak to your people. I'm only here. I'm here for you, I don't. I don't have anything to. You know, I don't have any agenda other than to. I want to be your favorite show that you ever made. That's always. My goal is just to make you happy and to give your listeners some new stuff they haven't heard of. And you said my listeners like Beyond the Basics yeah, they've got the basics. They're here for the next things, the interesting things, the new science, the new ideas, the new concepts. And so that's why I was willing to share that with you today, because I think that your listeners can make a determination about what's right for them, the resonance, what's right for them and what's not.

Susan Bratton: 1:21:42

And there might be some 40 year old women listening going oh shit, I just want to keep bleeding as long as I can too. That's an interesting thing. It makes total sense to me that you would have more youthful vitality if you're still bleeding than if you're not, because I see the women who don't and I see the women who do, and I see the difference between that, yep. Okay, what do I need to do to do that? And all I'm doing is I've been doing estrogen biased the two, estriol and estradiol, and I've been doing it for 20 years. I'm unbiased as well, plus progesterone, and I like testosterone and oxytocin. I make my yogurt yeah, right.

Sandy Kruse: 1:22:20

Right, we talked about the l ruderi um. Yeah, and yes, I did record with dr um william davis about.

Susan Bratton: 1:22:28

He is a doll, that guy. He's amazing. I love him so much. Super gut weed seed and feed.

Sandy Kruse: 1:22:34

That's his thing. He's amazing, and I did buy one of the yogurt makers.

Susan Bratton: 1:22:42

I got to perfect it though I got to, I'm going to try again.

Sandy Kruse: 1:22:46

Here's how you do it.

Susan Bratton: 1:22:47

Okay. Do you take milk or do you try it with nut milk?

Sandy Kruse: 1:22:51

Oh no, I am 100% grass-fed whole milk.

Susan Bratton: 1:22:55

Yeah, I'm a full fat. I use organic grass-fed half and half. Okay, so I start with that. And then I take his Oxysutics Gut to Glow supplement and I just open eight of them up and stick them in and put some inulin excuse me, inulin powder in there and then I put it in the yogurt maker and I set it to a hundred degrees and I incubate it for two days. He said 36 hours. I just leave it for two days.

Susan Bratton: 1:23:21

I let it, really I let the colonization just go crazy and your first batch is going to be shitty. First thing that's going to happen is there's going to be this kind of like orange stuff on the top. That's part of whatever else is in the oxycetic. Skeptical, just pull that off. Take some of that first batch, put the whole thing in the refrigerator in a separate jar and leave some of it in the container, put in more half and half and the inulin again and then culture another round.

Susan Bratton: 1:23:51

It takes a couple of batches to get the thick, creamy yogurt and then over time you'll notice, if the taste changes, that you need to start again with a new batch because after a while the bacteria yeah, the new oxyceutics got to glow is the capsules that he, that, uh, the company that he's on the board of sells, that has the lactobacillus in it. Okay and um, that I think will make a big difference is that you re. It really takes you around you. And it's funny because I have two homes. I have a main home in San Francisco and then I have a little beach shack down in San Diego, little beach shack down in San Diego, and I travel down here with my ball jar, my little ball jar full of my yogurt starter when I come down here and I just use that to make my next batch down here. Once you get the thickness, the subsequent batches make up really nice. It takes a couple of shots right at the beginning to get the thickness that you want and the taste that you want.

Sandy Kruse: 1:24:52

I'm going to try again In the fall. I'll be more grounded to. You know we go to a lot of cottages in the summer, on the weekends.

Susan Bratton: 1:25:00

Oh, and it lasts in the fridge a long time, so tell us why we want more oxytocin and what.

Sandy Kruse: 1:25:07

So? L-reuteri is a strain that helps produce more oxytocin. Yeah body, yeah right. So what's interesting too?

Susan Bratton: 1:25:17

yeah, well, and it's also interesting. I'll say one more thing about making your own yogurt. When you make your own yogurt, um, the yogurt you get in the store is just kind of like fast processed it doesn't have much bacteria in it, it's very sugary, it's not high quality and it's in plastic which is leaching into your body and into your husband's balls too, and into your uterus. And so making your own yogurt, if you can do it, once you get it going, it lasts a long time. It's super good for you.

Susan Bratton: 1:25:46

And what's interesting, I don't know if you've seen that new essential fatty acid company, fat fatty 15. Have you been hearing about them? Okay, what's interesting is that when I do my organic acid tests and I test for my essential fatty acid profile, it's fantastic, like I have plenty of fatty 15. And the reason I have it I don't even need to take that supplement. And the reason that I have it is because I eat my own homemade yogurt every day in my smoothie and that's really interesting that my EFA, my C15, is just fantastic because it comes from dairy. That's where most people get it. And the reason that people have this you know, chronic fragility syndrome is that they grew up in the era of low fat and non-dairy, and so that's what's affected us is the ultra processed food swap outs that weren't just real cream from grass fed cows and things like that. And so it's interesting that, like I had mine tested and I'm like I don't even need to take this supplement.

Susan Bratton: 1:26:46

So oxytocin? So what happens is that oxytocin is a hormone that's made in your gut and it is basically the counter pain to cortisol, which is also called adrenaline in Europe. It's the same thing, but it's the you know, flight or fright kind of thing, and it's stress creates cortisol, but oxytocin it lowers, lowers cortisol, it calms you, and oxytocin is the hormone of bonding. So, mothers, there's a lot of oxytocin in breast milk. It gets your baby and you bonding, because otherwise there's such a pain in the ass most of the time. Little kids are such a hassle.

Susan Bratton: 1:27:28

You know you're like I don't know if I want to do this or not, and it gets worse when they get older. Let me tell you, I have a 27 year old daughter, I she is so perfect to me.

Sandy Kruse: 1:27:40

I love being a mother. I was really just kidding. Yes, but me too. But they are a lot of work they're worth it. I enjoyed it. I've enjoyed motherhood.

Susan Bratton: 1:27:46

I love it still. But it's interesting that when we have antibiotics, lactobacillus reuteri, which is the bacteria in our gut that manufacturers allows us to manufacture the oxytocin, which is the calming hormone, it kills it off really fast, like it's super susceptible to antibiotics, and we've all been given antibiotics and so we're ending up being low oxytocin producers or no oxytocin producers. So when our husband holds us and we don't feel anything, uh, it's probably loss of it's a loss of oxytocin, a loss of lactobacillus rooter. You can, by the way, you can just take the gut to glows four of them a day and fill your system back up too. You don't have to make the yogurt.

Sandy Kruse: 1:28:33

So it's just, it's way more um, um new colonizing units High.

Susan Bratton: 1:28:38

Yes, yes, yes, you just get way more.

Sandy Kruse: 1:28:41

It's way better if you can make it, if you can.

Susan Bratton: 1:28:44

But if you can't, yeah, let's take this, it's fine. You know cause, if people are like, oh, bitch, please, you know, I don't care what you do.

Sandy Kruse: 1:28:53

No, it's true. It's true, though.

Susan Bratton: 1:28:57

I get it.

Sandy Kruse: 1:28:57

You know like.

Sandy Kruse: 1:28:58

I'm lucky that way, yeah, and it's just like what you're saying about cooking. Like I, I come from a family Eastern European, Croatian. My mom always cooked European and Croatian. My mom always cooked Like. We were taught from a very young age to cook your own food. So, even though I do my best to cook six days out of seven days, as simple as some of the meals might be, it's just like the same thing what you're saying about the yogurt. If you can make it, try, so I am going to try and I will let you know. Yeah, it is easy, but the oxytocin is that good for?

Susan Bratton: 1:29:33

men too.

Sandy Kruse: 1:29:35

Yeah.

Susan Bratton: 1:29:36

Yes, it's helpful.

Susan Bratton: 1:29:37

Yeah, it's not as good as like kefir, kombucha, sauerkraut, kimchi. You know you need to keep those things in your diet too. Yes, the interesting thing, too, about oxytocin is that since I've been doing my yogurt, I have become. It makes you like people more. I am a lot less annoyed by people generally oh I need that Than I was before I started the yogurt, and it took me a few years of building up to get this way. I also have more compassion. I'm more sympathetic, I'm more empathetic, I'm more sappy.

Susan Bratton: 1:30:23

Things make me cry. That didn't used to. I didn't cry about anything. For most of my life. I didn't cry Like I was hardened Stoic. And now I am so sappy and sentimental and I mean I'll look at an internet meme and be like, oh, that's so precious. Look at those little goats butting up and I like that me better.

Susan Bratton: 1:30:50

Yeah, and I noticed that I was traveling with my husband in New York for three weeks and then I had to go to London and work with a filmmaker there's a documentary being made about my work in my life, which is really an incredible thing and I went to London and I was away for 10 days and I noticed that after about three days I had no reason to be depressed or sad or down or crash or any of that stuff. But I was like man, my life feels really flat. I should be like so excited about this and I'm just a little low, like I'm just I'm low, and then I realized, oh, I'm having a bit of an oxytocin withdrawal, I'm not getting my regular hugs and snuggles and it's actually making me feel a little less bright and happy. And I think there are a lot of people who feel anxiety and depression and I think there could be a lot of it. That's due to simple things like I also have to take SAM-E every morning.

Susan Bratton: 1:31:45

I have the MTHFR genetic mutation, where I'm a poor methylator, chfr genetic mutation, where I'm a poor methylator and I don't make, I don't convert my B6 in or B9 into SAMe very well, and so when I started taking SAMe in the morning, it changed my life and I think, gosh, I wish people knew more about, you know, genetic testing and depression and anxiety. Because what if it's like as simple as eating some yogurt and taking a amino acid and you feel so much happier and in love with your life and in love with people and it's like, oh man, I wish our health care system had this stuff.

Sandy Kruse: 1:32:24

I know, but that's why we're talking about this stuff. Yeah, exactly so. Really, for me, it's always about you know, we talk about it, and then I'm always saying I believe that people almost lost that ability to critically analyze whether something's right for you or not right for you, because I don't believe in dictating anything to anybody. And so when we have podcasts like this that are really open and honest and authentic just real people talking about our experience and our research and our education I think it really helps other people to say I'm going to look a little more into this, maybe this is for me and that's really all we're doing here, and I love it. And it's like it's an hour and a half. Susan, you are just so much fun to chat with. I love our conversations. We kind of went all over, but really I would love for you to tell everybody where is the best place for someone to start to look into some of the things that we talked about, and then you'll send some links for me and all of that.

Susan Bratton: 1:33:39

Yeah, betterlovercom. Okay, you can get on my email newsletter right at the top of the page. I send two emails a week that have a lot of these different kinds of things. They're links to all kinds of free things that I have and that gets you into what you're interested in. You can scroll through and be like, oh, that thing, that's what I'm interested in today and that'll get you going on your journey, because sex is such a vast landscape that I just like to meet you where you are and what's of interest to you, and that's what that newsletter does. It's really nice.

Susan Bratton: 1:34:08

I spend about 30 hours a week writing my newsletters. It's crazy and I have a team of people who helped me produce it, so it's very much my contribution to the universe and it's free. Then you can follow me on Instagram and it's at my name, susan Bratton, s-u-s-a-n-b-r-a-t-t-o-n. And um. That's really the. That's really the place that, if you want to like learn more about sex and stuff, if you were like that chick is cool and I just like her shit, that would be threads. I um post a lot of just like my like where I posted about my period and had the pile on. You know that was threads. That's not the kind of stuff that I post externally very much, but I have been really enjoying threads, mostly because I've been in just enjoying what's been going on in the political landscape recently and I'm I'm very, very excited about, you know, our future, our future of democracy and what, what we're doing in our country right now to lift people up, and so I follow all the news on there, which is fun too.

Sandy Kruse: 1:35:13

So that's where I am, that's awesome. Thank you so so much, Susan. Such a pleasure.

Susan Bratton: 1:35:20

Thank you, sandy, it was so much fun. I love you.

Sandy Kruse: 1:35:23

Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to share it with someone you know might benefit and always remember when you rate, review, subscribe, you help to support my content and help me to keep going and bringing these conversations to you each and every week. Join me next week for a new topic, new guest, new exciting conversations to help you live your best life.