Regenopause and Sex Magic: Crone Wisdom with Melissa Louise

Erin: Welcome to Hotter Than Ever, where we uncover the unconscious rules we've been following. We break those rules and we find a new path to being freer, happier, sexier, and more satisfied in the second half of our lives. I'm your host, Erin Keating.

I am so glad to be with you today and I am so excited about this next guest and this conversation. I'm just gonna get right into it. I'm gonna spin spare you the formalities of the traditional structure and format of these episodes where I divulge things about my personal life. In the very beginning of the episode, before I introduce the guest and get into the interview, I'm just going to start talking about Melissa Louise. Okay, that's not entirely true. I'm going to reflect on myself first.

You know, sometimes I like to think to myself, Erin, you know, you are really living your life outside the box. I mean, I have gone out on a limb and sort of closed the door on my corporate entertainment career that was such a source of pleasure and identity and stability and prosperity for me for 20 years. And I'm willing to live on savings and sell my house in order to not go back to corporate life. I think I got divorced. I really needed to do that and I did that. And how bold that was of me to just take that step and that action for myself. And I've been open to lots of different relationship structures over the past few years and I'm living this like very self determined life. I lived a super conventional life for the past 20 years. And then I decided I didn't want that.

I didn't want the job, I didn't want the marriage. I didn't want a conventional way of thinking about love and relationships. I didn't want to age gracefully. I didn't want to keep my mouth shut about things I had been keeping my mouth shut about. I didn't want to lie anymore. You know, I really like have come to think of myself as a little bit of a badass, actually. And I'm proud to be bringing back my inner rebel and be willing to put my money where my mouth is in terms of reinventing how I live my life and how open I am about what's going on with me rather than holding my card so close to the vest. And then I meet someone like my guest today who is genuinely living outside the box. And I think, oh my God, Erin, you are so square. You are so not wild. You are so not a rebel. It is not a contest. I know, but, oh my God, Melissa Louise.

Melissa Louise, who I talked to today is all of those things and her way of thinking about love and sex and patriarchy and what it is to be a woman and what our relationship is to our bodies versus the stories we're told by our culture and how warped things have gotten from a more organic and natural state of being and living to this version of late stage capitalism, this artificial and manufactured world that is Trump's America in 2025, where a corporation is a citizen and all of our food is processed. Unless we want to pay a hundred percent more for food that is quote, unquote natural. The idea of what is natural has been lost. The idea of what is organic is only what we see in a grocery store aisle. Oh, my God.

So this conversation with Melissa Louise really, really set me right in the way that she thinks about women and our bodies and our relationship to the earth, our relationship to the universe, the moon, our cycles. Wow. I mean, for me, this was a bit of a mind blowing conversation. And if you are willing to have your mind blown, Melissa Louise is gonna offer us a new paradigm. And I hope you take something from it.

Let me tell you a little bit about who she is and what she does. Melissa Louise is a pleasure advocate and erotic blueprint, sex, intimacy and relationship coach, supporting men and women to feel alive, orgasmic and turned on, no matter what their age or relationship status. Her personal journey was a rebellious awakening, realizing that in her 40s, while raising her son for five years in the jungles of Costa Rica, that she had been living a life that was entirely expected by others. We get into all kinds of great stuff around menopause, which Melissa Louise calls regenopause because she sees it as a powerful regenerative upgrade into the crone phase of life, rather than a debilitating bodily decline. And she says that menopause is largely a social construct, construct designed to make women feel weak and controllable. Your body is not, she says, inherently failing you.

We talk about how society is run on the male sun cycle of 24 hours rather than the female lunar cycle of 28 to 30 days. We talk about sex as creative energy and how sex magic connects you to your ability to manifest your desires, including financial abundance, making sustained sensuality a powerful tool, tool for life success. We talk about menstruation and the fact that the egg actually chooses the sperm in reproduction. Rather than the story that we've always heard of the strongest sperm making it to win the egg. We talk about the critical importance of pleasure in our lives. This is straight back to episode one of Hotter than Ever and how pleasure is our birthright.

We discuss the difference between love and monogamy, which we often think are the same thing about the role of male ejaculatory control in pleasure. You should hear what she puts on her online dating profile. Oh, my God. Melissa Louise says that older women are the wisdom keepers in so many culture. Why are we not that in ours? All right, And I really mean this. Let's get hot.

Melissa Louise, welcome to Hotter than Ever.

Melissa: Oh, my goodness. I'm so excited to be here. So thank you, thank you, thank you.

Erin: I'm so excited to talk to you because I think you bring a really deep and profound perspective to the conversation around pleasure and intimacy and relationships and also to menopause. That I think will be really thought provoking for. For the hotter than ever listeners who are women over 40 looking to live their best possible lives.

Melissa: Yeah. Awesome. Yes. Yes. Let's bring it on.

Erin: So I want to start with your story and how you came to do the work that you do.

Melissa: Oh, this question, every time I get asked, I just feel quite in awe. You know, I kind of feel like I fumbled along, but I got to a point in my life. My child was about 6, 7, where I'm just, you know, I'd left Australia. I was raising him in, I was in Costa Rica, about to move to Peru, and I realized, like, for many different iterations of my life is like, I'm just existing in a life that other people expect me to do and for me to be accepted or to be hurt, whatever. It's like I just, like I'm so overdoing all of these things and pretending I want to go and be something when what I really want to do is talk about how the hell we all got here and the subjects that no one will talk about, because we all got here by sex and we all got here by menstruation.

And I being raised in the 70s and 80s in Australia, you don't talk about menstruation and you don't talk about sex, but if anything happens to you as a woman, you're in trouble. And that it was always that stuff that, you know, in the Christian upbringing and, like, you know, if a girl's pregnant, oh, my God, it's. No one talks about. Oh, it takes a man. And when we, to be really honest, too, around sexual abuse, you know, being raised in the church, sexual abuse was always a girl's problem, the girl's problem, and the man's problem. I was never raised amongst conversations where men were being truly brought to their knees about their behavior, their wording and their actions.

And so I was very angry as a young girl, like really pissed because I could sense all of this around me, but no one else was talking about it. And because I was asking all of these questions, I was the weirdo and I was the dangerous one. So I spent many decades in that realm of like just going fuck, like I wasn't impressed by much of society around that. And then of course it's the other end where women's bodies were used for advertising. And if you wanted to sell anything, you sell it with stuff, sex. But we're not going to talk about it. So you know, there's that wonderful saying, everything's about sex except for sex.

So I, I remember there was this whole red tent revival thing going online and I remember exactly crossing the Nicaragua border. Like it's all a bit fantastic actually, how I just went, enough's enough. And it was just this space where I got into this online space with this woman holding this and I just went, how is it that I've got a seven year old child, I'm in my 40s, and this is the first time it's really been spoken to me about my body, my pleasure and my menstrual cycle, which is the reason I have this human that's attached to me is because I have a menstrual cycle, for goodness sake. And I've got a womb. And it just, I just went, yeah, enough's enough.

So it was a rebellious thing and it was just like, if I'm going to exist in the next few decades, like keep on living my life, I don't want to pretend anymore and lie anymore. And I'd rather be vilified and sort of placed in the corner as the weirdo talking about shit that I really love than just kind of skirting around. So it was just, for me, it was a line in the sand going, things need to really change about how we converse about the things that we're all trying to do and be.

Erin: And the things that are part of our existence here on this planet, that we're born into these bodies, we're born into this life experience. And then we're told, no, don't talk about the things that are totally natural.

Melissa: Yeah, and then shamed for it. That's also to the shame and the guilt and the undercover. Like, yeah, as we know, like it gets quite insidious. But yeah, definitely. I mean, I don't we weren't. News flash. We weren't dropped by the stalk. If anyone else I know, I'm really sorry, darling. It wasn't a big bird.

Erin: God, it's so dumb. It's so infantilizing.

Melissa: Well, kind of like we come from the rib.

Erin: Yeah, exactly. Like, what is so scary here? So you dropped, like, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Australia. So you currently live in Puerto Vallarta in Mexico. How did you come to sort of make this transition internationally? Because I think a lot of people listening to this podcast have fantasies about picking up from where they are and moving to a totally different country. I'm currently in the process of trying to get Irish citizenship because my grandmother was born in Ireland, and I want to be able to live in and work in the eu. I want to have choices right about. In the. In the next chunk of my life, especially after my kids go to college. I want to have all the freedom in the world. And it sounds to me like you've invented that for yourself.

Melissa: Yeah, you know, it's really wonderful looking from the outside in, and I'm here in my head, hanging on with white knuckles. But, you know, when I had my child, before I'd had him, I had spent a lot of time hitching around the world from the age of 17. I got the hell out of Australia. I went to South America as an exchange student in a program that was based on, not on, what do you call it, points and testing. It was based on personality. So I got in, you know. Yeah, she can handle it. We don't need your. Your high school scores. I went awesome. And I ended up in South America, and I felt at home.

And for me, that was, you know, my mum and dad always say it's the worst thing that ever happened to them. And for me, it's like the best thing that ever happened that you left. Yeah, because I never went back. I never went back to Australia really to live very well. I was always trying to accept. Trying to get out, that that opened up the whole world to me. And then I would see, especially in Asia, all of these women from Australia and that raising children outside of the system. And I never liked the system. I was always against the system, and I never wanted to have children.

So then when I had my son for me, and this is my story, I was looking down the barrel of a gun of 12 years of being a soccer mom, and I couldn't breathe. Like, it really sent me into shock and panic and. Because around me, I didn't see, like, in my travels and everywhere I'd seen like, people alive and children alive, but I didn't see it in front of me in suburbia. And seeing as I was always leaving suburbia and hitchhiking somewhere, I was just like, ah. And I had this really incredible female friend who was a masseuse and she was massaging one day and I was howling, I was howling at the point that I was pregnant, that it felt beige to me. And she was massaging me. And she had a 12 year old boy. And she told me this story of how, like, Babe. She's like, Babe. I took, I think his, even Aaron was her son's name. He was 12.

She had taken him out for dinner the night before and had given him a little, you know, they shared a glass of wine over dinner and let him order. And I'm like, oh, And she's like, Melissa, you don't have to stop traveling. And so then I got the Continuum concept book. I got all and I started researching and then I was like, I didn't want to give birth in a hospital. I wanted to do home. And suddenly, like, once I started reading a book, once I could talk to one person and moved on and on I went, oh, hang on a minute. I've been preparing for this. Like, I can raise my child in a different way now. I'm not saying one way is better than the other because I also have a teenage boy that is like, he wanted to be normal. And I'm like, sorry, isn't that the way I spent my whole life? Wanting to get off the land and wanting to go to different schools and I wanted to travel with my family, so I went at 17. So then I continued that with my child.

Now up until the age of 12, he loved it and it was amazing. And I also lived this life that was, we hitchhiked a lot. I did a lot of trade. Like, it's not, you know, I didn't have this beautiful Instagram life that I was getting paid every time someone hit on a video. I used to make chocolates and sell them in the streets. I did chocolate massage for wedding parties up in the mountains of Peru. We lived on retreat centers for trade where I would cook for everyone and then look after all of these children with my child amongst me. And then other, you know, we would work. He was working with a machete at the age of seven in gardens in Costa Rica. Like, it was.

Erin: That is so wild.

Melissa: It was really, really wild. And up until the age of 12, it was freaking amazing for a young boy. And we lived in Costa Rica for five years where he hunted. He was hunting at the age of 11, taught by SAT, like really well done and hunting for food because he wanted a dog. And as we got a dog, you got to bloody well look after the dog. So it's a really big life lessons. And I did spend, you know, I spent you know, a lot of time really creating this life where I also. And when we get to talk about regenerapause by me living in the jungle, drinking water, completely clean food completely clean, having my feet on the ground, bare feet for five years really allowed me to transition into regenerapause because I was connected to the earth. And during those five years I met so many and do you know who the wildest people doing this is? Women.

The women I meet on my travels in Peru, Costa Rica, it's women. It is single women that have just walked out. And so I met so many women that had healed their own like eyesight and supposedly non reversible damage to organs by just being on the land, walking, bare feet on the land, like returning to source. So it really opened my whole being and my eyes to the power that we have inside of us. Like we do have everything inside of us and you know, it's not for the faint hearted that way. Now I live in a city in Mexico and life is very, very different to how I raise my kid. And yeah, I just, I fumbled my way through it. Like I have so many people reach out like --

Erin: Don't we all?

Melissa: Yeah, like it's like everyone else is, you know, it's like I just chose it. So six of one, half a dozen of the other. I chose this and it was wild and amazing and exquisite and incredible life lessons for my child and for myself. And also was hard work. Just as I've gone and lived in Vancouver and stuff. Freaking hard workin 9 to 5, Monday to Friday trying to pay rent. That is also hard work as this was. So it's just choosing.

Erin: Tell me what happened when Your son was 12.

Melissa: We went to Canada, we went to Vancouver and he was in a city with supermarkets and skate parks and kids in uniforms. I went, oh shit, I brought you to the wrong place.

Erin: Because he was like, this is for me.

Melissa: He was like well what happened was he was going to skate parks and he was there on his own or with older, you know, older people, like men and stuff. And then when school was out, the kids after 3 o' clock were there and they're kind of saying which school do you go to. He's like, I don't go to school. And then it's like, what? So he was kind of, he was, he was the odd one out and he didn't want to be the odd one. He wanted to belong, you know.

Meanwhile, before 12, he was raised with food fights for every birthday. He was raised hanging onto there, you know, sitting on the bonnet of a four wheel drive, going through the jungle, hunting like it was wild and he loved it. And then once he got into city life at that age and also coming into teenagerhood, he wants.

Erin: Sure.

Melissa: So he just went through a change and all of that

Erin: I asked because my twins are 14 and, you know, I'm seeing them change so fast and I'm just, we're just getting the first glimpses of them being attracted. They're both straight, so they're both attracted to the opposite sex and the flirtations and the, and all of it. And we're inside a conventional container, of like the San Fernando Valley house in Los Angeles. And even those rites of passage, even those transitions are epic for them. So it's, it's fascinating to imagine your son having such a huge swing, a swing that you chose for yourself. And then he wanted to choose something for himself and he's now, he's now on his own right?

Melissa: Well, he just turned 19 two, three weeks ago and he lives in Belgium with his father. So he, he made the decision to visit his father two and a half years. Well, yeah, two and a half years ago. And then decided to stay, decided to immigrate. So now he's on his own. New trajectory, learning new languages. He went to school for the first time. That was really funny. So excited to going to school on the first day. He's ringing me two, three. So that's Monday, Wednesday evening. So he's like, excitement. This is the best Wednesday evening. This sucks. I went, dude, that's three days. He's going this. And he goes, oh my God. And I said, you're welcome, honey, you've got one year. I said, you only have to do one year event. But it was just funny to watch that nose dive in three days.

Erin: Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Well, I'd love to pivot this, pivot this conversation to a word that you said just moments ago where you were talking about going through what you call regenopause. We've talked on this podcast about how menopause needs a rebrand because the language around it is garbage and it's everything around women's bodies and women's reproductive health. All the words are bad. Like they just aren't hot and I don't think menopause does justice for the, you know, to sort of dig into your etymology, the regenerative possibilities of this period of our lives. So please tell me where this word comes from and what it means to you.

Melissa: So I first heard this word two, maybe three years ago. I stumbled across incredible podcasts of two women which I can't remember now. And they're in England, like in the uk and they do really deep work around supporting women in their cycles, which I had start. I was way in this track, like years and years ago. So when I heard, and I'd always said it's not like I didn't understand menopause because I'm like, we're not putting men on pause, but when we look at the etymology, it's like really clamping women down. Once again, you're pausing in your life. You're going to put your sensuality and your sexuality, which probably wasn't even being properly looked after anyway, on pause. And so, like, this is your issue, you're putting men on pause. So any rupture or anything that's going on, the relationship is the issue of yours, because you want.

Erin: Your body is breaking down.

Melissa: And once again, this perception that we are the, you know, the bully tactics, that a woman's body is against her because that's how we're raised, that our body is against us. So it's also just another layer of, you're the problem, you've birthed us all, we're all here because of you.

Erin: Right.

Melissa: You're the problem. So when Regenerapause came into my world, it's like, oh, my. It's still got the word pause, but regen is like the regeneration. Now when we actually look at the mammals, the only mammals on the planet that exist for a long, long time, once they finish giving, you know, they don't birth anymore, which is, you know, the elephants, the whales and there's a few different, you know, species of whales in there and humans now the women, the mate. Once you finish bleeding in all of these species, these three species, us, the, you know, the mammals, sorry, the elephants and the whales, we are the wisdom keepers. So these, so the, the female elephants in the crone stage, which is once you finish bleeding. And the whales, they're the ones that hold all of the wisdom and the knowledge and they pass it down now that also in many cultures, this is when women take counsel.

So if you're looking at the red tent culture, the crones being in the red tent, passing down the knowledge to the girls every single month. And even when we look at, you know, the indigenous cultures up north, when we look at north, coming from Oaxaca, North America, like what they call the us, North America, Canada, Alaska, it's, you know, when we're looking at that time in the month when women go into the tent, the crone women would have counsel with the chief. So we also. We always get told about the chief of a tribe.

The chief of the tribe is governed and counseled by the crone women. So he implements. So the women are about to go into the tent with the bleeding. They. They counsel with the, you know, the chief. The chief gives to the women what they meant, what to pray about. So whether there's like drought, whether there's babies dying, whether there's rupture between two different tribes, whether whatever's going on in the tribe, it's given to the women by the chief and the women take it into the red tent and they pray and they sing and they. And they wait because women are releasing DMT when they bleed. This is all of this stuff. We release dmt. Men have to take mushrooms and ayahuasca for that. We have it in our bodies.

Erin: What is DMT for the listeners who don't know?

Melissa: Yeah. Really, really long words. But it's the, it's the part in mushrooms that gives you the psychedelic. You know, it's the psychedelic vision. It's like your communion with God. If you're going to take plant medicines that way to. In a spiritual aspect. Yeah. So we release. Every time a baby's born, it's released through the pineal gland. So that's when boys have it the. Through their birth. Which is why Cesareans too are like, you know, these Caesareans are amazing. To save lives, that's what they're for.

Erin: Amazing. For twin birth, when one of them is breached. That was my story.

Melissa: That's the things like that there to save lives. But when we're we're having a look at generations of babies being planned to be C section when there's no need for it because it's just convenient. So we're cutting off.

Erin: Mainly convenient for doctor schedule.

Melissa: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So DMT is released through the pineal gland through birth and then through our menstruation, it's through the cervix on. Generally on the first and second, sometimes second day of bleeding. So the women go in and they pray and they wait, you know, see what the answers are. Like this, you know, spiritual aspect and connection to the universe through our bleed. Then when the bleeding time, the red tent time is finished, the crones go and have counsel with the chief and inform the chief, this is what's happening in the next moon cycle. This is the way we're going. And then the chief takes that information and implements it. So it's always half of the story is his side of the story. The chief. The chief makes decisions. He doesn't make it. No chief of any tribe makes a decision on his own. Are you serious?

Erin: No CEO makes a decision on his own.

Melissa: Yeah. So the regenerators. And when we're looking at upgrading, there's actually as we're coming through perimenopause, there's so much happening in our brain that's getting an upgrade. And basically what happens is as we stop being available for birth, because that's a lot of energy. And when we stop bleeding and our womb starts preparing for the possibility of birth every month, what is available to us as far as energy and knowledge and you know, excuse me for swearing, but the fact that we just don't give a about when I say to it, it's like trying. We don't need to fit in anymore because we don't need to be aware of, oh, I need to keep safe for my roof over my head and for my children to be looked after.

Like when we get into monogamy and we're getting into like all of this stuff around, you know, what truly polyamory comes from and how that was community based living because we live in a secular existence which a lot of people call monogamy, but it's actually monopoly. Monopoly. I call it because monogamy is a decision between two people. It's an agreement between two people. But our current iteration of monogamy in our culture isn't an agreement between two people. You sign a piece of paper that dictates to you how to live from an institution. We're agreeing to agreements that we're not even looking into and we're making assumptions that we're all doing the same thing. It's not between two people. We're agreeing to what an institution tells us to do.

Erin: Well, it's really like you need a marriage license, you need to be certified by the state, you need to. Right. It is a, it's a tax implications, it's an ownership structure. I don't think we like to think about it that way. I don't think the, the like average person in America, which is where most of the Hotter Than Ever listeners are, you know, think about marriage or monogamy or any of these things as a sort of contractual institutional thing. I think we are raised with a sense of romance around it. And when we first talked, you said people equate monogamy with love, they think love is monogamy, monogamy is love.

You know, I mean, I like to talk about polyamory and, and all of that stuff on this podcast. I've never been poly. I'm in the first stage of my life where I'm dating and having sex with multiple couple people concurrently. I'm just honest about it. And one, one poly coach said, she was like, that's great. Just call it casual dating that you're dating casually. You know, you don't, I don't think I'm ethically non monogamous. I don't, I don't relate to the language of all of this. And I don't think I have the negotiation ability to be in multiple love relationships at the same time. At the same time, when I think about the fact that monogamy and marriage are these sort of institutionally endorsed structures that serve to reinforce the patriarchy, and they came from the social control mechanism of the patriarchy. Sorry to the listeners who don't like when I talk about the patriarchy. I wouldn't have to talk about it if it wasn't here, if it wasn't controlling everything so aggressively right now, especially.

We are, I like to think we're in the last gasps of the patriarchy. I don't know if that's true, but what it feels like is a radical resurgence of holy look at how far women have come. We need to put a stop to this because somehow women's agency reduces men's agency. I don't really get that formula. Um, but I'm curious to talk to you about the notion of menopause and, and monogamy and sensuality and sort of how it ties into your philosophies around how we should live and how we can live and how we can, how we can shape our lives in ways that are more beneficial for us as women, as sensual creatures in the second half of our lives, especially for those of us who are in relationship with men. Like, how does that, how should it all go? It's clearly not working. That well, for us as currently structured, like if you were to shake a crystal ball and have the world according to Melissa Louise, what would it look like?

Melissa: So much fun. Are you serious? I mean that's like

Erin: I'm coming by the way. I'll be there.

Melissa: Amazing. So if we're gonna speak about, like to speak about menopause, we need to start at a girl's first bleed. We currently, currently live like we're not wanting to use a patriarchal word. We live in a masculine project run society. It's run by the masculine project, it's run for men because we are governed in our current system only by the sun. So I work week. Everything is governed by the sun, like the sun calendar and that

Erin: 24 hours in a day.

Melissa: Yeah, 24 hours a day. And this whole seven day week thing, which I still. Anyway, which is interesting. But that's a man's hormonal system. Yeah, what a man's hormonal system goes in 24 hours. Our body goes in 28 to 30 days. So we have all been shoved and shoveled and constrained into this 24 hour construct, which is why women are so much sicker and why.

So menopause is a made up construct from our culture by the way, too women's body. Like, let's just get a reality check. Do you really think the creator, however you believe who that is, the sex of the species that births the species, do you really think their body is going to be so freaking weak that it's just problematic for 70 years? You know, like, like it's just so phenomenal to when you sit back and go, hang on a minute, like, like there's no other animal species where you see the female of the species, like you know, just fervorously fawning and exhausted and in so much pain. Animals would die. Can you imagine a rabbit, it would just die. Guinea pigs die. Birds in its swallows, eagles. A female eagle would just lop itself. It would die because of the pain. All of this stuff, our bodies are not designed. I'm sorry, I actually don't know the, the cycle of the bleeding or anything with, with birds. But anyway, they're sticking with mammals. I've just thrown the eagle in like,

Erin: No one knows that. It's not known.

Melissa: It's not my wheelhouse. My wheelhouse is so many things. But can you imagine like we've just. Whale season is just finishing here out the front of my, my office window. None of those female whales would, would exist through menopause. Their bodies are not Made for that. And neither are ours. Our society has created menopause. So the very first time a girl bleeds, the majority of women or girls in our culture, no ceremony, it's wrapped up in shame. You speak to 8 out of 10 girls, like they're hiding it. They're too scared to tell their mom and dad. They're crying because it's like, oh my God. Like it's met with shame and fear and disgust.

The majority of young girls in their twenties that won't even place their fingers inside of their vagina, they've got to have these applicators if they're going to. And also the products. So actually I was speaking with a client about this the other night, like when they, when it was finally came out. Oh, by the way, there's arsenic in tampons. You know, her partner said, oh my God, they're going to take it all off the shelf. And the girls, the woman's like, no, that way they're not going to remove that product. Are you serious? It's fantastic.

Erin: It'd be nice to think that that's how things worked, but it's not.

Melissa: So when we look at men, we if, when we're speaking about menopause, we're speaking about a man made issue to keep women weak. Because once a woman is not going to birth children, she's not controllable anymore. So how do we control her? We have her fucking ill for decades. Yeah. So getting back to the first bleed. So a young girl gets her bleed, 13, 14, she's got to go to school, she's got to hide it. If there's any blood on her, on her, she's shamed, she's bullied, so her whole nervous system is this thing. She has exams, she's still got her study and she's still got to think when a woman is bleeding, the days leading up in her Crohn's stage, the dark moon stage before a bleed is silence inward because she's about to start downloading communal with spirit. And once she starts bleeding, all of her hormones come back in. So when, if, when is a man exit?

When is a man completely, you know, first thing in the morning when, like, you know, don't give a man a list in the morning because they can't. Like, if you give a man a list at 8 o' clock in the morning, you know he's going to forget to pick up the milk and we all laugh about it and we emasculate men for it. That's what they do to women all the time in their bleed. So everyone, everyone knows not to. It's best not to have a, you know, whatever meeting with a guy at 7 o', clock, 8am in the morning because he's going to forget everything. Well, guess what? That's our dark moon stage. And we have to exist, we have to feed children, we have to rock up, we have to keep on doing because if we don't, it's like you're going to lose your job. But we accept when men can't function. But we won't accept the cycle, which is the moon, the governed by the moon cycle that has the whole effing planet of human beings here. So it's not in consideration.

So then also too, we have pain in the menstrual cycle. Pain is just a message. And we have all of these issues with ovaries, with the womb, with our uterus, with reproduction, with reproduction because we're not resting. You know, they're willing to talk about all of these other diseases that are based in cortisol and based from stress. Well, so it. So all of the issues with a woman's body is come from stress. Because day one, we're not acknowledged or honored or even revered for bleeding. So then we get. So you have decade after decade after decade of that and women having to work, work, work, work in a way that is very masculine structured. And then shamed for not being able to work that way. And then so they have to push more. And then we get to this thing that they call menopause.

Erin: Wait, but let's not forget the part where we have children. But if we want to succeed professionally, we have to pretend like we don't. I didn't know that 8am thing, by the way, about men first thing in the morning.

Melissa: Yeah, Men it's just in their hormonal cycle. So the best time to have a, you know, it's 10:00am, their, their testosterone, 2:00pm. For a woman's body and a man's body to come together, 2pm is the best time to have sex. You think of all of these Latin cultures, they don't have siestas in it. When I first started coming to Argentina in 1990, that's why there's so many children. Everyone's at 2pm, they have lunch, they snooze and they roll over and they open their shops.

Erin: This is a revelation.

Melissa: I know, I know. But now they're not having as many children because they're all working through the day. I guess it's like, what are you guys doing?

Erin: I love this data point so much.

Melissa: Siestas is sexy. Siesta is code word for sex.

Erin: Oh my God, I want to siesta right now. It's two o' clock here. It's always two o' clock for me.

Melissa: That's your new code word.

Erin: Yes, 2pm ladies, listening to this podcast. Tell your partners, tell your lovers. Yeah, babe, it's 2:00pm. But yes, I mean, that was my experience in corporate life because the corporate system is. Is a male system based on, you know, military structure, hierarchy, all of that. Right? So just to sort of get into your metaphoric headspace, like, you know, I felt like I couldn't succeed if I talked about the fact that I was a mom, that I had, that I had needs in terms of my home life and my children's care and well being. Like, I really felt like I had to emulate the masculine and really deny that part of myself. Even though I was on a team full of women, I was the first one on the team who had kids already.

But then as I stayed there, women on my team started having kids. And then the conversation became more open, and then the conversation became more inclusive of our bodies and our cycles and our, our needs. You know, and people were going through fertility issues and people were freezing their eggs and people. And we were having a much more open conversation. But when it was just women who were not there yet and were just driving, driving, driving towards career success, it really was for, I would say for 15 years in my career, like before I had kids, and then really into their elementary school years, I shut the fuck up about it because I wanted to win.

Melissa: Do you know what's really interesting about that? And for me, that's so painful that, that this is how we're required to exist, but we're giving birth. And I'm not into, like, you know, this is me looking at the way the structure is set up. We're giving birth to the next consumers, which is what all of the. The companies are about. So it's like we're not allowed to acknowledge that we've just birthed your next consumers, which you need to keep on making your money. So this is where it's just so

Erin: That's so dissociative. The collective is so dissociated from the individual, though. Like, that seems like, oh, well, you just had a kid. That's a drop in the bucket. That's not really directly related to the consumer culture that we are in. Everything is sort of, I don't know, separate. Everything is separate.

Melissa: So can I drop another little truth bomb here? Because when we're looking at. When we're looking at the way that we have been bullied into believing how things need to be, it's also, we. I don't know if you've ever heard about the Sperm wars, the book called the Sperm wars, and I can't remember the author.

Erin: No, but we'll drop it in the show notes.

Melissa: So we've also been told, you know, that the sperm. Because when we're also looking at fertility issues, this is a really big thing for women to understand, you know, because the woman's body is medicalized through menstruation. Just take the pill. Like, don't rest when you meant to rest. Oh, you've got pain, take this pill. Let's start controlling your menstrual cycle through the. Through these chemicals. Like, we'll control it instead of understanding it. And then this fact that a sperm goes in and impregnates an egg, a sperm does not impregnate an egg at all. And I'm going to tell you what happens in a moment.

But also, too, when we're looking at fertility issues within a couple of years, how the woman's body is medicalized. Because, you know, women, we've been made to believe we're the problem. So when you look at a sperm count in a man's ejaculate, they look, oh, look how many sperm he's got. Doesn't fucking matter how many sperm. It's actually about the king sperm. So just like how we have a beehive and you've got the queen bee and all of the worker bees, we have the king sperm and all of the other sperm that run around killing other sperm to make sure the king's sperm is catapulted through the cervix to sit and hover in front of the egg to be chosen, the egg reaches out and sucks in the sperm she wants. Now, in natural selection, there will be three or four different sperms there.

And so the woman, the female egg sits and works out which is the strongest of the fittest. And we don't have that anymore. Through monogamy, you don't have the strongest of the fittest. You just have the same one rocking up every month. And so how many times do we hear about this where couples are together for like six, seven, eight years trying to have a kid, they separate and she Gets pregnant like that, or he is able, you know, his next partner gets pregnant within eight months. So it's not so much like we've also. Monogamy also diminishes survival of the fittest in our culture. Now, I'm not saying that we all need to be polyamorous, but we just have to look at how ill our culture is. We have so many hospitals, we have so many babies being born with many issues.

My son, you know, born with so many allergies, all of this stuff. So we've created a culture where all of these natural selections have been taken out, which I'm not saying is right or wrong, but the. The part that we are told that the man gets to do what he wants and the man chooses. And the masculine project should not say man. This masculine project idea where it's actually, we choose all the time, the egg chooses. So this also when we come to fertility problems, and I was listening to, like, I'm so terrible with names after I've listened to stuff. It was a male doctor that. And actually an ex client of mine sent it to me where he was talking about miscarriage is actually the majority of miscarriages because of the man's sperm. It's not the woman's uterus problem, it's not her problem. It's actually the. The quality of the sperm because they just don't count most of the time.

Erin: Yes, I, I did fertility stuff, I did IVF. That's how come I have twins. And yeah, it was kind of like we were many cycles into IUI and I was. I had taken Clomid and I had done all the things I'd done the escalator of fertility treatments. And it was like, oh, we should check your husband's sperm. Are you fucking kidding me?

Melissa: I'm sorry. It's not funny because it's so painful what you've gone through.

Erin: But it makes sense. It makes sense, right? Like, given what you're saying about how women's bodies are pathologized, it's like I was the problem. Why have inconsistent cycles? I was kind of, you know, my cycles were like, sometimes 30 days, sometimes 32 days. Like, it's always been like that for me. And, you know, maybe we just. I just couldn't get the timing right, you know. I just couldn't get the timing right, you know. And when you talk about the natural selection piece of it, my experience of that is so medicalized in that we did IVF. So they took out the eggs and they took out the sperms and they put them in a dish. And a bunch of wonderful scientists did the natural selection for me, right? We let the embryos grow in the lab and then we waited as many days as was the longest they could go so that we could see which ones were going to thrive. And it went from 18 to 12 to 5.

And then there were two that the scientists were like, these are the ones that are naturally the strongest and that's natural selection today, right? But super science enabled. They put them back in thinking, we get one, I got two, I hit the jackpot. And then I tell them my kids, the reason they're so attractive is because they were chosen by scientists. But, you know, that's my experience of natural selection. But when you talk about the, the egg and the sperm hovering around the egg and the egg deciding to suck in, you know, one of the sperm to be the king sperm that fertilizes her or it's like a dating app. I mean, that's how I feel on a dating app, is like, there's a ton of suitors, there's a ton of sperm hovering around. And then I decide one day, you please. That's where my natural selection is, mediated by science and technology.

Melissa: Oh, my Lord, how much fun. You know, it's just when you're talking about, say you couldn't get your, you know, your days right, your selection right? And it's just like, do you not just like now when you understand this? Because sperm can survive for five days. So that's also too. When we're looking at three days of ovulation. Now, if the sperm is sitting there two or three days before your ovulation stage, and it's sitting there waiting, you know, sperm is strong, you know, survive a little bit. It's like, men are strong. Do you mean it's like, of course and they'll hover and if it's the right fit, the egg will choose.

And then as you say, like, you know, we're medicalized, we're made to feel like it's our problem, all of this stuff, because you can't medicalize a man's body like they can women's body from the, the current cultural structure. So we are just sitting ducks and that's, you know, we become a sitting duck as soon as I, I always say as soon as a girl is born, I think they all just go, yes, we have freaking seven decades of money ahead of us. You know, it's just like, it's awesome. We're gonna make it feel like it's

Erin: But I don't think it's that conscious, right?

Melissa: Yeah, I'm sure some of it is.

Erin: But, you know, but no one would cop to it. It's like, you know, the guy who was murdered from United Healthxare, who was running this big insurance company, and people were like, well, it's you know, Luigi Magione, it was like, it's you. You're responsible for people's health care getting eliminated. And he's like, I'm just here doing the job that I am doing. And I feel like people dissociate their responsibility to the larger systemic stuff because they don't own that. They are part of, you know, creating a culture that is medicalizing women in order to profit, you know. Or medicalizing illness and denying illness coverage in order to profit. You know, it's. It's very easy to abstract societal ills.

Melissa: Speaking on that, like, that's also one part of monogamy that I've really started thinking. I think about this stuff a lot. Like people say, what do you do? What do you do on your spare time? I'm like, think. I sit and I ponder and I come up with these things. And it's one thing that I've been sort of really ruminating on, how monogamy also really does not support men. You know, we understand that, you know, in the just rise revolution, marriage came about owning the woman. So that woman's womb was owned so that the land and the order, the companies can be passed to their children so they knew who their son was.

So we need to own the woman so she doesn't wander off. We can't have women wandering off for joy. So. So then in that construct, the man is also very isolated. So let's bring out. So if we're looking at polyamorous, which are polysexual society, because polyamory, if we. Polyamory is like getting all of my love needs met. So love is also intimate need. So it's also our friendships. It's also, you know, I kind of say there's a level of polyamory that we're not really leaning into, which is, you know, you have a really dear friend that you might go and see horror movies with because you're, you know, your partner. The Father of your children is that will not watch horror movies, right? And you've got 30 years or 40 years ahead of you, you're not going to. I mean, many people do, they stop doing all the things they love because this one person doesn't do it.

So we sort of sit in this existence where we meet, as opposed to living full lives. And so what we have in our current sort of expression around sexuality is the aliveness of life is being really funneled once again into sex. So now let's have more sexual partners. Let's be polyamorous, but it's actually poly-sexual, as opposed to, like, well, let's also broaden that. It's like, even though you're married, why not have a, you know, this also takes a lot of maturity. Why not have a male friend or another female friend that you just go into the horror movies with, but you're not going to do with that husband, but you're not going to give it up type thing? But, you know, I think many people are not there for that sort of stuff.

But getting back to what I was speaking about in community, in a sharing culture, which is where polyamory and polysexual comes from, if we're going to share our sexuality and we're going to share our sensuality in our sex, see, that's what we're doing. We're just sharing sex. Yet the sharing of sex, which so many people, you know, talk about, how natural it is, which yes. And when we're looking at the survival of the fittest, and we're looking at the sperm wars and all of that, like, yes, a woman's womb will have sex three or four different men. And when we're looking at the primal aspect, how men don't make noise like women make noise, all of this stuff, it all leads to the, yes, women. The conscious conception is about women choosing lots of lovers. When she's ovulating to make sure her dream comes true with the child that comes through. But it means everything is shared. So child rearing is shared by the whole community. Shelter is shared by the whole community. Food security is shared by the whole community.

So when we're looking at communities where it's polyamorous and polysexual, men go out and grow food, collect food and hunt food for all children, not just theirs. If they're building shelter, all men will build structure and shelter for one family group. But it's not just those five men that are building. It could be 40 men taking part in building. Then they all turn and build over here. So not only are they sharing sexual partners, they're sharing the whole gamut of life. So you don't just go and get food for the woman you're fucking, you get food for all women, all children and all children are safe, not just yours. So now living in this monogamous type structure, men don't have support either. So men are not supported by other men.

So my theory and what I'm talking, I'm sure get lashed down. But men are conditioned to consistently make decisions that they probably wouldn't if they were in integral because they. It is up to them for the structure, for the housing, for the. The food, security, everything, like all of that responsibility, that's what I was looking for. All of that responsibility that a whole village used to take care of with him, he now has to take care of.

I'm just staying in the quintessential man, woman in a house, woman's look, you know, looking after children. So now every decision he makes he has to make just to keep his kids and women alive. So he's making decisions against the environment. He's making decisions not even considering, oh wow, fuck, are my kids going to grow up at the age of 25 and have clean water. These are things that no one considers anymore because they just have to pay the mortgage and it's just on him. So we have men stuck in adolescent behavior which is non consideration of the better good of community and not actually making decisions. The only decisions that I hear about when they're thinking about their grandchildren, it's money. I've got to have a wealth thing. For me it's like, well how is that wealth actually fucking accumulated?

Erin: Well when you say like everything is on him, I feel like that's not a real reflection of how life is these days.

Melissa: Not these days.

Erin: I'm talking about most women, you know, contribute half or more to the household in addition to carrying the domestic labor in addition to being responsible for most aspects of the well being of the family. So maybe that's like what things were like for a century or so, you know. But that is a reflection of a myth about American culture that some people would like to be true. You know, that if women just stopped working and had a lot more babies then somehow men would be more empowered. But I don't think that that's real. And I also think you can't put the genie back in the bottle, us being the genie, you know.

Melissa: Well also too, it's like, it's how if we think of, and I was using that as an example of how monogamy, how monogamy doesn't suit men as well. And to bring to the point, I mean, I've just really shared this really immense way that, you know, men have to work and women are doing that, plus all of the emotional labor, plus raising the children. The majority of men in relationships are still just doing the one thing. And they're going to work and still doing everything else.

Erin: And in your coaching practice, when you coach people around intimacy and relationships, a lot of your clients are men. So what are they coming to you for?

Melissa: I feel the men that come to me are so damn ready because they're either afraid of losing their partner, they're really at the end going, I really want change. Because my coaching containers are, you know, four months to six months to a year long, these men are effing ready. So I get to see, like, when I'm speaking with people that have, you know, discovery calls with me. It's like, it's really obvious. The men that are not ready because it's like, okay, I just want to have more sex. And it's like, would I have more sex? It's everything. How do you treat someone differently? How do you treat yourself differently?

So I feel very blessed that the men that I get to speak with and I get to work with are really awesome humans because they're so ready and they're in the place of being really accountable and responsible for their part in the relationship. So I get to see really good humans, really good men. But also too, it's like the amount of pain it's taken to get to that is really heartbreaking too. It's so heartbreaking to be at that space. But that's also how we conditioned in our culture. Just work more, work more, work more.

Erin: And then we change once we're in crisis. You told me that you teach men how to separate their orgasm from ejaculation, which is something that I've come to be aware of in the last couple of years in my own sexual awakening. But I. I don't know that that's a thing that people even know is possible, that women don't know that it's possible for men to have orgasms where they don't ejaculate. And certainly men don't know about that. So what's their response when you start to talk to them about that

Melissa: Some men are like, really, that's possible? And then also to this perception that it's really difficult. It just takes practice. Just like if you're going to play soccer, all of that stuff, you've got to learn to masturbate in a different way. And you know, sometimes two men who come and work for me, they've been on my email list for a long time, so they know the jargon and they've seen, seen it, da, da, da, all of that. You know, one of my biggest joys is when I get to work with a male client who's just never heard of it before or kind of heard it once and just thought it was rubbish. And then once I start going through systematically, this is how. And then also the changes in their health, the changes in how their brain works, the changes how they feel about themselves and just how it just completely opens up their whole new world. And also how they can show up with their lover or with their partner. You know, it's, it's pretty astounding. It's, it's really beautiful.

Erin: Because if you can orgasm without ejaculating, I mean, my experience with men is like, I'm gonna stay away from your dick for a while because once we get there, like you're, you're gonna want to ejaculate and then we're finished. You roll over and we're done. And I'm like, you do, do, do. I'm ready like so like, you know, if you can, if a man can orgasm without ejaculating, does that mean that they can keep their energy going sexually?

Melissa: Yeah, so the process of learning to separate, for me, it's having ejaculation choice. So if you are training your system, you are practicing and you're building because it's so powerful. So if we look at the other way, as you say, you've got to stay away from his and you know, you've got to do all of these things because once you go there, it's all over. To me that, that is such a weakness.

Erin: Agreed, agree. I think with long term partners we figure it out. But you know, if somebody's new, that's what they're excited about.

Melissa: Yeah, and so for a man to shift from that, he becomes truly in his power. Because he's able to handle chaos so that you know what it feels like to be inside of a woman, the hotness and that he can handle that. Like he just, it's like the Viking, it's like he can handle it. He's at, you know, his emotions or the sensations are at war and he's stable. And it's amazing, you know, it's like, so then he. So then what that means. Because we also look at a lot of stuff, sex, like as we look at pornography, as we look at how sex is, like, depicted in movies, it's once again the masculine project. He gets off and she's may or may not, you know, and once he's finished, it's over. So she needs to either just accept that or sort it out herself type thing. Like, these are all like arbitrary sort of, you know, constructs.

So a man who's able to move his energy, handle their energy, bring it up through his core, bring it up into his brain, his strength, his power, his virility. Like when he's able to do that, what it means he gets more of his lover. She now can, like now come all of the different types of orgasms that are available to her. And that's one thing when men say to me, oh, you know, I want to fuck my woman wide open. I said, really? Are you ready? Because if you do that, you need to handle her. Because once you've done it once, she's going to want more. And then what comes from that? You're going to have more of a woman in your life, which means you're going to have more wildness, you're going to have more vibe. A lot of men actually don't, they don't know how to handle that. So it's these sexual things, like, I just want to fuck her and I want to see her ejaculate. And it's like, oh, honey, that's just a little visual for what the incredible storm that comes with that which doesn't end. Are you ready?

Erin: No, they're not. They're not. But what we need women like you training them out there, making these men into Vikings. Because I think what we are, what not, we are all. But I will say a lot of the women I know are craving in the men that are in their lives, is someone with that self mastery, is someone with that ability to hold space for our pleasure, for our expansion, and to be in awe of us in the way that they are supposed to be, you know, or that I certainly hope that they will be. And now that I am more aware of what is possible erotically and sexually, like, it's very hard for me to feel impressed with most men and the game they bring, you know, because unless they have some sort of expanded consciousness around this stuff. And you can call it expanded consciousness or you can call it something less woo than that. But like, you know someone who has incredible sexual self awareness. Like, I don't even know how to put an ad on a dating app for that. Because if you don't have it, you don't know you don't have it.

Melissa: I have on my profile. There's a few things, I won't miss the other ones. But one of the things is like, you know, if you don't have ejaculation, check choice do not apply. That's what's written there. And I have so many guys go, oh, what's ejaculation choice? I went, yeah, yeah, don't know what it is. If you don't know what it is, then we're not getting so, oh, teach me. I said I'm not dating to teach. You can pay me for that and be client. But why would I want to go out to dinner with you knowing that you can last three minutes? No, you know, like you've just told me that and. But okay, so it's easy. Like we as women can sit because it is, it's very, very frustrating.

The Taoist culture speak about, you know, sex is designed for the female body to feel more. We have a culture that sex designed for the man to get off. Like, that's our modern cultural sort of like visualization in movies and pornography. It's for the man to get to do and have what he wants. That's the visuals that we generally get. Whereas sex is designed for the female body to feel more, which means the man has to do his spiritual work. Now in our culture, men are not even shut like they are so, so emasculated and weakened. I mean it's, it's actually as much as it's frustrating, that's so fucking annoying for us as women. It's really painful because the men are not taught this. They're not given this incredible. Because for a man who's in that practice, he's going to make more money and he doesn't have to work as hard. This is also the whole thing is like keep them in the rat. It's like, dude, dude, if you can last longer and you use your masturbation and you fuck your woman wide open, you guys just don't have to work as much.

Erin: What do you mean by that? How is that related?

Melissa: So this is sex magic, you know, which of course you know. So sex magic is that sexual energy is creative energy and money is xreation. So the two are connected. So the more you're in your sexuality, I mean, you know, so many tantrics speak about this in women's work. It's like when, when you orgasm. So when you're orgasm, especially if you're a couple and you're going to come together so you know, all of this incredible like arousal for hours and then you both come together at one stage. Even though she's been coming a lot come together in that moment you think about what you want. And you may even have a vision board.

So you're masturbating, and this is what I give my clients, men create a vision board. You want to live in Portugal, you want to take your family here, you want to have this promotion, you want to do this as a job, Put it on your vision board and masturbate in front of your vision board. But don't eject like razor all up and just keep visualizing visual. And we're using creative energy and so this is magnetism. So yes, it all sounds a bit woo woo. But it's science. Like what I love is like when I have male clients that I'm starting to lose them, I go, have you heard of Dr. Joe Dispenza?

Erin: Oh yeah, right.

Melissa: Yeah. It's like he talks about that but he just won't say the word pleasure. I've been, I've listened to some of his stuff and said, fucking say it Joe, just say it, say it. But so he, in his way in and he's an expression, he's, he's talking about the same stuff. You know, when you visualize and he's got all these meditations, it's like so bring pleasure to it. Why don't, why don't you have the men masturbating and why don't you have the women like self pleasuring?

Erin: Well, because we live in a, we live in a Puritan derived culture. You know, I mean those are the founders of the nation and that is the legacy that we live in. And I am so grateful for you and for your perspective and your openness and your reframing. Because I think this is not a conversation that has been like other conversations I've had with people on this podcast. Even though we've covered some of the same stuff, your vantage point, the, the larger sort of socio cultural perspective is extremely valuable. And you know, I, I would just like to say like hotter than ever. The, the purpose is really to give women permission and ideas for how to do things differently in the second half of their lives. Yeah. And what, what is it that you want to say to the listeners? What do you want them to take away from this conversation about what is possible in their own lives, their erotic lives, their intimate relationships, currently or in the future that will help them live their best lives?

Melissa: Oh my goodness, the word freedom keeps coming up. I think one thing that I'm always trying to implore with people is if we're living very, very separate from our sensuality and sexuality, we are living so separate from our greatness. You know, we've talked both about the women's side and the man's side is like we are designed to be so much greater than this. Our human experience is really beautiful, really incredible, and yet we're taking apart, we're taking part in an agenda which is to keep us really separate. So systematically, moment by moment, part by part, really starting to deconstruct that pleasure is something that we get to win. The fact that you were born and you're breathing your birthright is pleasure. Our hormones as women need it. Like our testosterone levels are so minute compared to men, so our body needs pleasure to reboot our hormones. It's also when we're looking at the structure of how we ask to work.

So my thing is bring pleasure back in. And if you're a couple living together or you're about to start a relationship, your sex and your intimacy and your sensuality needs to be in the center. Like that is your power move, your power moves, not another suit and stilettos. I mean, have sex in stilettos and in your suit, you know, go for it. But the power move is not just another, you know, I've got to get an another rank and something. Your power move is having your sex and sensuality in the court. Because that's why we're together. It's why we go out and dates, is to see if this sensuality can happen. So really talk about it, become comfortable with it. Because you're only here because of it. There's so much to be said about that, but it's bringing pleasure back into. Because we only have today if we wake up tomorrow. We're so fucking lucky. So how can we make this moment more pleasurable? Even if it's slowing down to each other, the food, even if we get to like, you know what we're going to eat sitting cross legged on a beautiful rug and we're going to just look into each other's eyes before we eat, rather than just the, you know, just whatever it means to make this moment more pleasurable. Do it because fuck you've only got right now. You really do.

Erin: Melissa Louise, thank you so much.

Melissa: So my pleasure. So thank you so much for having me. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Erin: Thanks for listening to Hotter Than Ever. I hope that you enjoyed this conversation about all things sex and pleasure and the power of being a woman in midlife. I hope it blew your mind at least a little bit. Is there someone in your life who needs to hear this conversation who needs a radical reframing on what is possible for us and how we think about getting older, our bodies changing, our roles in society shifting? Is there someone in your world who needs a powerful dose of sex, magic and woo? Share this with them and then follow up to hear what they thought and then DM me to tell me what they said.

Hotter Than Ever is produced by Erica Gerard and Podkit Productions. Our associate producer is Melody Carey. Music is by Chris Keating with vocals by Issa Fernandez. I am going to change my online dating profile. Clearly I have not been specific enough.