Episode 01
Willow: We are here with Sheri Winston, the author of the women's anatomy of arousal. Leah and I are both long-time fans of this woman and her work.
Sheri's a holistic sexuality teacher. Founder of the intimate arts center and an award-winning author. One of her most well-known books is The Women's Anatomy of Arousal. If you have not read this book yet, you must put it at the top of your reading list. She's got it on audio. She's got it translated into Spanish and German.
There's a hard copy. There's a soft copy. There are all kinds of copies you can play with . She's also written other books, such as the succulent sex craft and is a contributor to a book called Secrets of the Sex Masters. So we're just so excited. Sheri's been on such a journey, and you're going to love hearing from her and learning from her.
She's going to teach you more than you ever thought you didn't know about the anatomy of arousal. So tune in, turn on, and fall in love with Sheri as much as we are, and we will see you on the other side.
Welcome Sheri.
Sheri: Well, it's a pleasure to be here speaking with both of you and, uh, sharing this with you all and your audience. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:01:29] Sheri's story | midwife & nursing school
Leah: You bet. So Sheri, how did you get into this work? As I recall, you were in the nursing field; you were a midwife. Is my memory correct that that's kind of how you started out?
Sheri: Yeah, So mostly I was a midwife, so like, okay. I did become a nurse, but that's because in the United States, in order to become a midwife, you have to become a nurse. So basically, my first calling was to assist women in birth. And I was a childbirth educator. Well, first I was a massage therapist before that and always an artist anyway, so yeah.
So I started going to births and, you know, it was amazing and ecstatic and I felt very called to do it. Like I said, in order to get legal, I had to go to nursing school, which actually included some really awful years of my life. Is that right? I was an alien. I'm such an alien because I was just like a home birth, natural remedies person, and here I was in nursing school, having arguments with my obstetrics professor about the safety of home birth. She hated me.
Willow: You were the black sheep.
Sheri: So yeah, I was totally wrong anyway. So I graduated with my bachelor's in nursing and then worked for a few more years, assisting home birth midwives, and then went to midwifery school for another couple of years.
[00:02:54] Epiphany | How teaching childbirth classes led to better sex
Sheri: The thing is, I was also teaching, so I was a childbirth educator, and I taught women how to have amazing births. So I was learning and teaching how to do things like use your breathing, right? Use your imagination, use your intention, your awareness, your sound, and your pelvic floor muscles.
I started teaching that stuff when I was 20. Sometime around when I reached 30, I had this epiphany, and I realized I had been training myself to have better sex. I didn't know it, literally for 10 years. But I was using all of those skills sound and pelvic floor muscles, and when I was with a partner who started commenting on my abilities, I was kinda like ”well, can't all women do that with their pussy muscles”
He is like, “uh, no”, and I remember really being shocked because I just assumed, I didn't think I was doing anything special, but I actually was. So once I realized I'd been unconsciously training myself, that's when I started studying sexuality, going to Tantra classes & Taoist and studied with a native American medicine priest, and all of this natural stuff about sexuality and also Western sexological research.
So I'm studying that at that point, really thinking it was so that I would have even better sex because I figured, well, I went, you know, I got this far without even trying. Let's see where I can go if I try. But the funny thing was, well, not really funny, but the amazing thing was that the stuff I was learning in the sex world, I was bringing back to the birth world.
So everything I was learning about sex was helping me be a better midwife and helping me help women birth more, you know, awesomely and ecstatically and primally, and that started me. Understand that birth and sex are not distinct entities. That's what we're kind of taught right there. You know, sex gets the baby started and then has nothing to do with it.
The more I studied, the more I started realizing that it's all integral that we actually have a baby's bliss and bonding system, and the intelligence of this system, the brilliance of it, is exquisite. And I just started seeing more and more ways that this was all connected. So when I've been teaching this information, I started understanding this anatomy in a different way and seeing things that were missing and finding pieces of the puzzle and putting them together.
[00:05:48] Final Transition | birth world to sex world
Sheri: So I was teaching along with childbirth stuff. I called these women's craft classes, which were things like menstrual health and female anatomy; the first name of that class was “maps of the clitoris," a class on women's anatomy of arousal. I was getting burned out on the baby thing, because I'd been on call for like 20 years.
It's hard to be on call, like yeah, yeah. At a certain point, I was kind of like, "Oh, I need a break." So I actually thought I was going back to midwifery. But I took a break and I was just working, doing gynecology in a clinic and, you know, in prenatal care and well-woman care and stuff like that. And I thought, "Oh, in six months or a year, I'll go back to midwifery."
Meanwhile, I decided to add a class to my teaching about orgasm for women, female orgasm, and man was that class fun to teach women about how to have orgasms, bigger, better, easier orgasms, and then my guy friends wanted to come to the class and I'm like, “no, you can't come. It's just for women.”
Oh, well, we want to learn, we want our women to be happy. So like, all right, I'll teach a class for you. about female sexuality, and that was so much fun. I mean, right? It's like they're all sitting there listening to me.
Leah: Totally, with rapt attention, hanging on every word.
Sheri: Exactly. And then I started teaching classes for everyone about, you know, sexual communication, and that just kept blossoming and it just kept expanding.
Every class I taught would lead to another class. I started teaching classes about touch and how to be more adept at giving and receiving and, you know, yin and yang, and all these other things, and so, as that's expanding and time goes by, I'm realizing I have no desire to go back to catching babies. I'm done.
I'm done with the midwife thing, and my calling now is to help people birth their sexuality. Oh, I love that, and that's how I became a sexuality teacher. Yeah.
Willow: Yeah. So lovely, and I love how you bridge, because how the baby comes in is also how the baby comes out. I've done doula work for myself for years, and it's like when a woman can get into her animalistic, raw, primal state and really just be in the sensation of it.
Yeah. That is, it just moves everything so much more effectively.
[00:08:19] What about orgasmic births, Sheri?
Leah: What's been your experience of this orgasmic birth phenomenon? People are saying more and more about the correlation between orgasmic birth orgasm, painful birth, painful pregnancies, like this pain and pleasure place. Is there anything you can shine some light on regarding those two pieces?
Sheri: I actually have some recorded online classes and this is one of them. It's a short one, a short version of that class.
So it's called the “ecstatic journey of birth and sex." Okay, so we're using the same equipment. to have sex and to birth babies. Um, it's the same altered state of consciousness. So arousal is an altered state of consciousness. And labor is a state of altered consciousness that is influenced by the biochemical soup that we, uh, create and swim in, and we have the ability to enhance our trance.
Right. I can't make myself go into a trance, but I can do things to facilitate it happening. I love it. I can create an environment where it's more likely to happen. I can create a mindset where it's more likely to happen. And so all of those things, again, can be used in sex and in birth. In fact, before I had heard of orgasmic birth, I had attended a few births.
By the way, these were all home births. This was highly unlikely to happen in a hospital birth, but I was doing homebirth at that point, and I attended some homebirths where the women, to me, appeared to be having an orgasmic ecstatic labor, and of course I wasn't going to ask them about it while it was going on.
Because I don't want to mess it up. Isn't it true that the last thing you want to do is stimulate your thinking about labor or sex? But afterwards, I talked to them about it and they reported having had about, I guess three of 'em. One woman said I was just having orgasms, and the other women described it as being in this state of ecstasy.
I asked them, Does it feel kind of like orgasmic? and they were like, "Yeah, like these orgasmic waves." So I was intrigued, to just say the least, and then I started talking to other midwives at conferences, and then I ran into a woman who I had been in a study group with, with this wonderful midwife way back in my early twenties. I learned so much from her. She was really interested, and she wound up going on to write a book and do a video called Orgasmic Birth.
Ooh, names, uh, Deborah. Something in the last name is escaping me. Is it Deborah Bets? Mm-hmm no, it's a multi-syllable name anyway, orgasmic birth. If you look up the book in the video, you will find her. And so, what can we do to maximize the chances that women will have that kind of birth?
Again, just like the same thing, enhance the trans, create the setting. There's no guarantee. However, if we create that kind of internal and external environment, even if women don't experience their labor as ecstatic or orgasmic, they can have what I call "primal labor," and primal labor means your brain is offline and their thinking brain is offline. It is out of the way, and your body and the process of labor itself are making things happen.
So I would say, give an example. Sometimes women, you know, sometimes the baby's not in exactly the best ideal position, and I could feel that and tell, and I could tell women, let's get you in this position, like lying on your side with your knee up and your other leg, and let's roll this way and we'll do this.
I had all these little tricks I could do to help them help the baby reposition. When a woman is having a primal birth, I don't need to do that. She just gets into those positions. Oh. No one is telling her what to do. She just, her body and the magic and the miracle of the intelligence of nature, is just that she's in that position.
She's on her hands and knees. She's rocking her belly and the baby will just shift without me telling her.
Leah: Oh, I adore that sensitivity.
Sheri: The attunement and prior births usually go fast.
Willow: Yeah. It's like the shockee comes in that sexual energy of the feminine essence of life just comes in and takes over. I call it the yin field.
What you're talking about, the trance space, you know, it's just really inviting and, like you said, you can't make it happen. You just create the environment and then it just usually takes its own
Sheri: course yeah, and it essentially labors actually this wonderful yin yang experience, because that first part of labor's all about surrendering, releasing, and opening. Then the second part, where we have to push the baby out, that's the yang part of labor. And that's when we are in our animal power. Yeah. Uh, there's nothing more powerful than a woman pushing a baby out, right? So we need both, and sometimes some women need more of one or the other, like when some women try to be way too in control.
They can't do that yin surrender, but then if you get 'em to the pushing part, they're great. Other women are okay with the surrender. However, they get to the pushing and they're like, "Oh wow, that's too intense." I don't, I can't do that. I'd like to respond. Yeah.
Leah: I changed my mind.
Sheri: In labor, all women change their minds, yeah? It's what I call the "I can't do this phase of labor." started saying that. That's like, "Great, well, you're saying that means you're almost there." You're almost great. Wow.
Leah: The home stretch—is that where this enhance-the-trance that a woman starts to use meditation and hypnotherapy to help create before the birth process to prepare the mind?
Sheri: It can be, and ideally it will be, because keep in mind, we have been inundated our entire lives with horrible images of birth, terrible birth stories. You know, every birth you see on TV or in a movie they're, they're screaming hysterically.
They need to be rescued, they almost die. The baby almost dies, the doctor swoops in and rescues them.
Um, or it's the comedy version where, you know, everybody panics and the husband, you know, forgets to take the go bag, put the wife in the car, you know, whatever. Right, right, right.
They're just these ridiculous stories, but they're always horrible until the woman gets the anesthesia and then she's just, oh, so happy. She's been rescued.
So we need to reprogram our brains about birth, and what I used to do was have women anesthesia,birth stories. Like I make *Ina May Gaskin's* classic book, when I was 13, *Spiritual Midwifery,* filled with these wonderful birth stories. Great one then, then we started having videos, right? Videotapes, remember the cassette? if you're old enough, you remember.
Then I would have a lending library that I could give women to take home so they could watch and see images. And then of course, when Debra Pascali Bonaro! There you go. That's her name. It's in there. Um, And when she made that video, any woman who's thinking about ever having a baby or is pregnant should watch the orgasmic birth video because when you see women doing it, it's visceral, and you are in a sympathetic relationship.
So you better understand what's going on and what you could do to get to that same place. Yeah.
Leah: Those mirror neurons from watching the video can help your body learn what it needs. Sometimes it's not this mental thing. It's really a visual thing. If you want what somebody else has, get your body next to their body and your body will learn and pick that up.
Sheri: Absolutely. Yeah. If you're ever lucky enough to attend a home birth and be in the presence of a woman who does that, that's how women would learn in the past. Right? We would go and assist other women with birth. It was how we learned, you know, the same with breastfeeding. You know, I've had women who, uh, primarily lived in other countries.
They're more of a more primal culture, you know, not a first world culture. And those women never had a problem breastfeeding. Never, because they grew up around it. They instantly held their baby and nursed their baby in exactly the way that worked, and then we have women who've grown up in our first world culture where breastfeeding is not normal and we don't see it, and we don't know what to do.
It gets missed, and so again, you know, we're sort of designed to have learned these things.
Willow: Yeah. should be passed on. Yeah.
Sheri: Unfortunately, most of us don't.
Leah: Yeah. It's amazing that there were generations where women were discouraged from breastfeeding. My mom didn't get breast-fed. My husband, Matt, didn't get breast fed.
Um, his father never got breast fed. There's this generational gap around breastfeeding that's kind of interesting, and as we make a correlation between like breastfeeding and the orgasmic experience, um, I've not, uh, gone through the baby making process, but in many of my classes, women who've experienced, um, Amrita, the female ejaculation,
One of the ways that they describe how it feels in the vulva when they start to feel the dissension of the ejaculation is when they've nursed and they feel the letting down of the milk in their breast. What can you say about that, Sheri?
Sheri: "Well, that's how I figured out the mechanism." So, first of all, I will say I did. Uh, I do have a son, and I breastfeed him, and it was an utterly ecstatic experience.
So breastfeeding is another part of the baby's bliss and bonding system that Ecstasy bonds us to our babies. It helps us tolerate them because, oh my gosh, they're just a crazy amount of work. Right. Um, so we're supposed to fall madly in love with them? This is, this is the oxytocin, which is the bonding hormone, but also the hormones of Limerence, which is the falling in love hormones
I fall in love with hormones, so I would say the best fall in love I've ever had in my life was with my baby.
Willow: Aw. I think that's so beautiful. And a lot of mothers who get to experience that are so blessed and so.
Sheri: "Well, you know, it gets messed up again." Yeah. If we understood that that's what's supposed to happen and we did everything in our power to enhance that, we'd have more mothers falling in love with their babies and more mothers breastfeeding successfully.
Yeah, and we're doing better than we were back when I was born and you were born, but we're still not doing that great. We've stalled. We still have a lot of women who don't try to breastfeed. I don't want to breastfeed. And we have a lot of women who think they have failed at breastfeeding. Mm-hmm.
And what they have experienced, unfortunately, is that our culture has failed them. They didn't have the information and support they needed to understand how breastfeeding works and how to enhance that. And they didn't have the help or the support they might have needed if there was a true problem, which is not that common.
Right. Some babies are tongue-tied; their tongue, the little, um, yeah, the thing under the tongue, the frenulum under the tongue, is too tight. They can't nurse properly. Right. If that's identified early and taken care of, then everything's fine. Most women are not succeeding at breastfeeding because they've gotten the wrong information.
They don't understand if you give the baby a pacifier or a bottle, they're going to suck the wrong thing on your nipple. Right. And then the whole system's going to fall apart. Right. So we're failing women in that sense. Um, there was somewhere we were going. Yeah, a female. Oh, they're letting down female ejaculation. Yes. Okay.
[00:21:28] Female Ejaculation
Sheri: So, so female ejaculation. So let's go back before anybody had ever heard of female ejaculation. Right. And I was about to take us back. Take us back. So I, um, first heard about it. About Annie Sprinkle, mm-hmm, who is a feminist porn hero, right. Um, yeah. And she was ejaculating, and I remember thinking, Yeah, right. It's just pee. This is bullshit, right?
So I didn't believe it. But in my practice, I would meet women who would tell me that they had this experience of liquid gushing out. And at first I used to say, "Oh, you're just juicier than other women." Just enjoy it. There's nothing wrong with you. By the way, I had women who were treated for urinary incontinence, by the way, mm-hmm, including and up to surgery to fix the problem.
Sheri: Jeez, I have heard of that. Yeah. So at that certain point, I started wondering, "Well, maybe it is real for some small number of women." Then I was lucky enough to meet a woman and have a brief affair with her. And she was an ejaculator. And the first time we were going to bed, she said, "Oh, I need some towels."
I'm getting some little towels. And she's like, "No, I need big towels." Like, oh, okay. So I got up to see it up close and personal coming out on the white towels. It doesn't smell like urine. It's not yellow. I'm like, okay, this is real. You are one of the lucky women who can do this thing, but I hadn't experienced it. And I didn't think I could. But at that point, I was really going deep into the sex world. So I learned about sexuality and I started meeting women who started telling me. I learned how to. I didn't usually ejaculate, but now I do. And as soon as I heard that, I was just like, "Oh, well..." I've learned all this other stuff. Yeah.
Leah: It's teachable.
Sheri: I've learned how to have orgasms and how to have orgasms in all different ways and how to have lots of them and mega orgasms. I was like, well, if I learned all that, I can learn this too. There was no information. There were no videos available. I mean, there was nothing. So I'd say it was probably over a year or two, a couple of years.
And I, uh, started experiencing it. Uh, first only with like, like a marathon, you know, like a marathon sex date, where you just were at it for hours, you know, doing all the different things and, uh, eventually just gushing. And I remember the first time it happened, I was like, "Whoa, that's it."
Leah: Oh my God,
Willow: And that speaks to two things, also, like creating the environment. You know, if it's something your body's never done before, you want to create the environment for that yin to flow through.
Sheri: Absolutely. So then it got to the point where I was able to make it happen more often. Once it started, I was able to do it. Then it started happening all the time. At a certain point, I was like, "Wait, sometimes I need to turn those off."
Then I had to learn, like, if you're in somebody's car or something, right. Um, where you're like, "Uh, and the environment is not prepared for it." Yeah,
Anyway, I kind of learned to try out in the world. I was trying to research this and figure out what's happening now in the world of Tantra. As I'm sure you know, people would be like, “oh, it's a gift of the goddess _____." Like, yeah, sure. It is. But where does it come from? That doesn't help me in terms of the physiology of the anatomy. And I want to know what this mechanism is, especially because most doctors and medical people who need sex teachers and so forth are saying it's not real.
So I knew it had to do with the urethra sponge, which is the erectile tissue that surrounds the urethra, that tube of erectile tissue. I was aware of the glandular structures that were within it at that point. And then I'm tuning in as I'm getting ready to ejaculate, and all of a sudden I'm like, "Oh my gosh, it feels just like a let-down."
So when you're breastfeeding, you get this microscopic tingling inside your breasts, just before you have big gushes. And all of a sudden I was like, "boom, how do we make breast milk?" We've got glandular tubals with a single cell wall, surrounded by capillaries with a single cell wall. The watery part of our blood can diffuse through a single cell membrane.
As a result, the water in our blood It goes through the capillary wall, through the wall of the tubulars, and mixes with the substance that those cells produce. This is what makes it a gland. It produces a protein or different kinds of proteins. In this case, in breast milk, the breast milk proteins, and out it comes. That's breast milk.
How much breast milk can a woman make? As much as she needs, as long as you continue to stimulate mechanical stimulation of the areola and hydrate, you can make all the breast milk you need. You have two babies, each sucking twice as much mechanical stimulation. You can make twice as much milk. This is another reason why women so-called "fail at breastfeeding," because people don't understand the supply and demand.
Like how we make milk. As long as the baby's sucking If the baby's sucking on a pacifier, we're not getting the stimulation. We're not gonna make as much milk.,
Leah: Something so fascinating: my best friend and her partner are here in Sacramento. They are a married couple and both women are nursing the baby. One of them had to go and learn the whole nipple stimulation. And it's been this incredible experience for them both to feed the baby. Awesome. That's good bonding. You can be, um, menopause could have come and gone and you Yeah, you can still nurse. Male partners can nurse. And this is a little bit unknown.
Sheri: A little bit. Okay. a little bit. Well, I just think, but in traditional cultures, again, if a mama died, grandma would pick up that baby and start nursing. That was a survival thing, right? Yeah. So it's pretty amazing. Right. Anyway, once I connected that up with, then I was like, oh, I get it. I know how we make Amita. We make it because we've got glandular tubules in that tube of erectile tissue. Surrounded by capillaries, the erectile capillaries, the watery part of the blood diffuses across the membrane, mixes with the proteins the cells make, and those glandular tubulars empty into the urethra.
Then it can squirt it out the peel, or we can hold it in and it will back up into the bladder and come out the next time we pee. Yep. And so now I believe all women, if you have any amount of arousal, are making at least some small amount of that fluid with the appropriate stimulation of that tissue with lots more enlargement of those erectile capillaries. Then you'll make a lot of fluid.
So I think all women are ejaculating. Just a lot of women aren't getting that kind of stimulation that they need. They're not having, uh, that, you know, a deep arousal and, and massive orgasms. So they're not getting the huge gush, but you could.
Willow: Yeah. And also, Amita could come as a flood. It could come as a gush. It could come as a squirt. It could come in, you know, it could come in. And
[00:29:29] The truth about the female G-spot and other poorly named parts of anatomy
Leah: So, what do you have to say about the reports that the female G spot is actually the female prostate gland as compared to the urethral sponge?
Sheri: Okay. So the female is the default setting for embryos, basically starting out with female equipment.
And if that body is going to become a penis owner, they get slacked with those male hormones and things change. So it would be more appropriate to say that the prostate is actually the male urethral sponge. Okay. Mm-hmm, that would be actually more anatomically and embryologically accurate.
So the prostate gland is a glandular and erectile structure just like the urethral sponge. Okay. What people are calling the G-spot is just the bottom of that sponge. Okay. It's not a separate structure. So when somebody says the G-spot, they're just talking about the part of the urethra sponge that you can reach from inside when you're rubbing up against the roof of the vagina. And that is the bottom of that cylinder of erectile tissue that contains those glands. Um, but like I said, it would be more appropriate to, um, name the male body part after the female body. Because that's how we all started. Also, I'm just so sick of our body parts being named after men like this and also sometimes inappropriately. Mm-hmm
Because, for example, our uterus moves during arousal. It also moves during the fertility cycle.
And it's one of our ways of gaging where we are in our cycle. Um, but during arousal it gets pulled up and forward, and then during orgasm it bounces up and down. And it does that because there are two structures that are called the round ligaments, and in male bodies, they are ligaments, not female bodies or male bodies, it's a muscle. Like a rope surrounded by a fibrous sheath, they start on top of the uterus. They go over the pubic bone, and the other end attaches to the muscle that goes around the vaginal opening. So just these other interesting connections, and that's what moves the uterus. Okay. So they're called round ligaments, which is completely incorrect. They're muscles with a fibrous sheath. So why are they named round ligaments? Because that's what they are in male bodies. What should we name them? Yeah,
Willow: whatever you're going to call them?
Sheri: The uterine muscles are round.
Leah: The round uterine muscles, everybody. Yeah. Got that? Good. And so you made anatomy class so much fun.
[00:32:27] The Magical wonders of an Aroused Cervix + Cool facts no one taught you about Sperm
Willow: I know that's sexy. So that's what moves the uterus up and down, not only during your entire monthly fertile cycle but also when you are aroused and when you're having an orgasm.
Willow: Now tell us a little bit, like, why does the cervix go up and down during orgasm? There's something about fertility there, right?
Sheri: There it is. You are so right. So here's the thing. Mother nature wants us to make babies, right? This is the template, whether we want it or not. Right. Right. The fundamental template is going to always be about reproduction.
And so in order to maximize the chances of getting pregnant, we've got this brilliant system in place. So in the ideal fertility scenario, um, you would have a vaginal owner and a penis owner, and they would be having intercourse. The, uh, vagina owner would be in a high state of arousal. So her uterus is picked up out of the back of her vagina.
So that penis is not hitting it, because that wouldn't be like that. Okay. Yeah. So she's nicely aroused. The penis is going in and out. There's this beautiful bowl right there at the back of the vagina. Ejaculation happens. And then, again, in the ideal fertility scenario, the woman has a rip-roaring orgasm and her uterus.
Now remember, there's this bowl in the back of the vagina, and now her uterus is going to go, ah, and suck up as much semen as possible. Because here's the thing: semen is fragile. Delicate. Fragile. And it cannot live very long in the vagina. The vagina is very acidic and it's a hostile environment for sperm.
They're not going to live long in the vagina but during the fertile time of a woman's cycle. So, for about five days of her cycle, her cervix is open more. And the glands inside the cervix are producing, uh, what I call fertile flow. It's traditionally called "fertile mucus." It doesn't sound nice. Um, fertile flow.
And so what happens when that fertile flow comes? Is that, uh, slimy, slippery substance that acts like a slip and slide? It literally forms channels for the sperm to go, zoom, zoom, zoom into the cervix. Cool. The more sperm you get in, the better the chance of making a baby. Not only do they go into the cervix, but inside the cervix are these little pockets, and they're called cervical crypts, but a crypt is a place you go to die.
So I call them the sperm hotels. Much, much more appropriate. Because the sperm can check in and hang out in the sperm hotels for up to five days. Oh my, the egg is only good for a day. You've got maybe 24 hours of a good egg, but now you've got five days of sperm going after the egg. Right. So what if the sperm is there a day or two early? No problem.
Sheri: Right?
Leah: Right. Go ahead and hang out at that pool. Enjoy your stay.
Sheri: Exactly. They get room service. We nourish them, we feed them. Um, and so that's right, but that movement, because also what you've got, partly because of the shape of the head of the penis, is that you've created a bit of a vacuum inside the vagina. It's like a little negative pressure.And so when that uterus dips into the pool, it's actually literally sucking in semen, as well as having it slide up the slip sides. So again,
Willow: Pretty amazing!
Leah: I find this so sexy. I wonder if...
Willow: Our bodies are truly amazing.
Leah: Yeah. Like I think, I think once you're mind... It is sexy... It kind of opens up to the amazing world of sexuality. When you've stopped having that sort of visceral reaction to shame, fear, and dirtiness,
Leah: And some of that stuff that many of us have been groomed to feel about sex from a young age.
After that, conversations like this and learning about how miraculous this whole mystical yet increasingly understandable system is will be possible. It's it's you get to keep the magic, even as you start to learn the truth about what's really happening. It is sexy. I'm turned. Take a look at me, you know? Yeah. I'm probably not going to ever have a kid, but I sure do like that I was born to do all this crazy, cool, shit.
Willow: Yeah. that your body is capable of that. So I've always been, um, curious about Sheri. I wonder if you know? Uh, is it true that you can kind of, you're more likely to have a female child post-peak ovulation moment because those swimmers are the female swimmers are stronger swimmers.
Willow: Is that true?
Sheri: Yeah, it is. Now it's just a little shift in the statistics, so it's not going to be dramatic. It's not for sure. But female sperm is hardier than male sperm. So if you're ovulating and you have sex right when you're ovulating, it's probably going to be about 50/50. Right. But. If it's, if it's, uh, you're having sex and you're ovulating a few days later, it's slightly more likely.
But here's the thing: this is so cool, you'll love this. Do you know that we have three kinds of sperm? There's a third. There are three kinds of sperm.
So there's the, the, the athletes, right. And the third job is to zip up and try and get there and fertilize the egg.
There are also a few blockers. And they do their job by hanging out in the cervix and in that fertile mucus and keeping any other sperm out. Like goalies.
Leah: and is it looking out for its... uh..., for other guys
Sheri: or for other guys, other guys' sperm. Yeah. Additional sperm from And then there are fighter sperm, and they're like little pac men, and they eat and attack other men's sperm. Dang. Wow. Yeah. I know. Come on now.
[00:39:07] Fun Facts about Infidelity and Fertility
Leah: Whose sperm is the mightiest?
Sheri: Well, you know, there's survival of the fittest at a lot of different levels here. Yeah, So that's another level. That's, you know, So women are maximizing their chances of not only making a baby, but making the best baby. Absolutely. Maybe you have a couple of different sperm donors.
Sheri: It's so interesting. Isn't it? Yeah.
Leah: So would that also mean that if a woman has, you know, a number of different lovers, and either wants to get pregnant, or doesn't know about wanting or not wanting... yeah. And, uh, well, what was my question?
Sheri: Is she more likely to get pregnant by a lover?
Leah: Yeah. Is she more likely to get pregnant than another woman who has had one lover?
Sheri: Well, first of all, um, a woman is more likely to have better sex with a lover than with her long-term partner, because it's new and exciting, right? Yeah. Um, probably having better orgasms. That's going to increase the chance of fertility.
So if a woman has got a husband, who will, we'll call him a husband. A husband who She's been with him for a long time and isn't having great sex with him, and she's got a lover on the side, uh, that her husband doesn't know about.
Um, she's more likely to be fertile and get pregnant if impregnated by the lover. Is she having sex with her lover again? Maybe mm-hmm that could be part of it, but there are also really interesting things. Now, the husband is going to make a higher percentage of fighter and blocker sperm if he suspects she's having an affair.
Okay. Wow. Also, there's something about proximity. So if, if, if I'm with my guy all the time, he's going to make hardly any fighter sperm. The more I'm away and out of his site, the higher the percentage of fighter sperm he's going to make.
Now the study I'd like to see, which nobody has done, is, well, what if you've got a couple of lovers and you're polyamorous and everybody's cool with it?
Right, right. So he is not jealous. He's fine with it. Right. So, but nobody's done those kinds of studies.
Leah: Well, what about dreams? Because I had a dream last night of having sex with Brad Pit and Robert De Niro.
Willow: Oh my God. What a good dream!
Leah: It was such a good night's sleep, let me tell ya...! Wow. It was heightened. I was going to be murdered too. It was completely out of the ordinary. Yeah. It was life threatening and I was just coming over and over and over again. I'd like to know the test. Is my husband going to create some more fighter sperm, fighter sperm, because of his hot dreams I'm having?
Sheri: I don't think so. No. Because consider fairness. He's not going to feel jealous. He's not going to feel jealous. I mean, if you tell him about him, he might be, yeah.
Leah: He should. I did. And he really wasn't jealous. He was more celebratory.
Sheri: Exactly. So that's why I think if you're poly, that thing with the fighter sperm increasing wouldn't happen. So I think it's a function of jealousy .
Sheri: Interesting. Interesting, but who knows, that's just a theory.
Willow: It's amazing.
Sheri: So fun. Right. So much fun. Yeah.
Willow: So God, Sheri, you are just a wealth of information, and we could talk to you and rap out for hours and hours and hours, because there's just so much good stuff to go into here.
[00:42:50] Erectile Tissue | Who Has the Bigger Bone?
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Willow: I just wanted to get one more tidbit from you because your knowledge is so vast. What is it like, what is one of the most important things you would want to share with women about their anatomy so that they can understand how to create more pleasure?
Leah: Yeah. If I can just rephrase it slightly, yeah. If you could only teach one thing that could make an impact in a woman's life, like everything else, we're like you're censored. What's the one thing that would be so important that your message could share it?
Sheri: So women have what I call the female erectile network, which is a network of structures that are all made out of erectile tissue.
Sheri: Erectile tissue is what penises are made out of. So we already know what erectile tissue can do. It can go from small and soft to big and hard when it fills up with blood that gets trapped. That's called engorgement. Women have just as much erectile tissue as men do, pound for pound, inch for inch, but it's arranged differently.
Sheri: So it behaves similarly in some ways. And in other ways, it does not. So we've got a network of structures.
Sheri: So one way that it's different is that we can get aroused in orgasm with just one little part of the network activated. Right? So if all we know is the head of the clitoris as the good spot, and we play with the head of the clitoris and we get turned on, we have an orgasm.
Sheri: Yay! That's great. That's a fine, fine thing. I'm not knocking it.
Sheri: But it's like trying to play the piano. when you think you've only got 12 keys. No, you've got 88 keys and foot pedals. So when you learn about all of the erectile structures and you stimulate all of the structures that enhance your arousal and orgasmic capacity in a quantum way, you get these circuits of interconnected, overlapping, um, erogenous activity.
Sheri: Because it's not just the erectile tissue, it's the nerve pathways, which you have multiple pathways for as well. So if you really want to learn how to have the most absolutely mind-blowing, um, arousal and orgasms, then learn your learn what you've got, learn how to make it happy and get everybody in the band to play along. Because it's, uh, it's a pretty dramatic difference.
Sheri: And you know, when I was young, back in the, you know, BC, before computers, back in the old days, um, you know, we didn't know anything. We didn't have any information. Basically. I still remember getting ahold of "the Joy of Sex". The first copy of Joy sex does not mention the word "clitoris" at all.
Sheri: Crazy. I immediately grabbed *Our Bodies, Ourselves*. I was about 12 or 13. And that's where I was found. I was like, "Oh, that, yeah, that's what it's called." because I had discovered it. I didn't know its name. It's like, okay, that's what it's called. But none of the rest of the erectile network is in those, uh, books. Still not.
Sheri: Yeah, but I was able to have some really good orgasms mostly by myself.
Sheri: And then eventually, I learned how to have orgasms with partners and how to communicate and, uh, then it got easier to have them and I learned how to have more of them. And I didn't have orgasms with intercourse when I started, like most women don't. And I learned how to do that. And so I learned all this stuff, but once I got that map of all the parts,
Sheri: It was like the difference between singing a song and playing the guitar. And, um, having a full orchestra, yeah. Right. I mean, you just can't compare them. They're both wonderful. But if you want to have the orchestral orgasms, you've got to play the whole instrument. And I don't even just mean the genital part. I mean the whole instrument, this part, and this part from head to toe, this part.
Sheri: Yeah, Everything. So that's, that's the, that's the most important thing, I think. I
Willow, I love that. That's amazing. And that's why your book is so valuable. And again, like if you have not gotten an, uh, women's anatomy of arousal, you must, it's a must. Yeah.
Leah: You know, I have to just say I have a very distinct before and after experience of myself and my own body. Mm-hmm. From "before" I did Sheri's work well into a, uh, sex expert career, to " after " Sheri's teachings.
Leah: And this body really upleveled the refinement, the distinctions, the subtlety. I had a big growth spurt in my own experience, of my own pleasure, of my own communication ability, and my understanding of how my sexual body can expand due to this understanding. This is how my sexual self can fully come online, like Uplevel on turn on big time.
Leah: So I encourage everyone to seek out Sheri. And, um, she's just, as you can see,
Willow: I understand. We got so much out of her in one hour.
Willow: Get
Leah: yourself, lots of hours with Sheri, lots of hours.
Sheri: Well, as I said, I do have some recorded online courses and classes. Yeah. Just as a way to really get the information, because it's not just me talking, but I'm also an artist. I've done my own anatomy illustrations.
Sheri: I use lots of visuals. So there are lots of, um, different ways to learn. because some people learn better through sight than through hearing
[00:48:47] Free Gift from Sheri
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Leah: Yeah. You've actually generously given us a free gift for our viewers. Could you tell me a little bit about the online class __Her-Gasmic Abundance__?
Sheri: Yeah, So it's an online class.
Sheri: That's focused on female orgasm. Although I must say, pretty much most of the stuff that's in it would apply to most people, with whatever kind of body you have, whatever sort of plumbing you have. But it is focused on female orgasm because we have a huge orgasm gap. And that's just unacceptable.
Sheri: It's worse than the wage gap.
Sheri: You need to bridge that gap. That's right.
Sheri: Yeah, Yeah. We have a lot of women who are not having orgasms who have not yet learned how to have an orgasm at all, or have them sometimes, but they're not assured. And, and I do always want to say to women, you're, there's nothing wrong with you.
Sheri: You are not broken. It's just stuff you haven't learned yet. It's like playing the piano. If you haven't learned how to play the piano, You don't feel ashamed, but you can learn if you want. Yeah. So this is about how to learn to play your own instrument and become a virtuoso of your own erotic abilities, capacities, equipment, the whole nine years.
Willow: "I love that." It's going to be such an incredible gift. Thank you so much for offering that. Thank you so much for that. Make sure that you grab that gift and tune in more to Sheri and her work, because it is vast and profound and really changing the face of what we know sexuality to be.
Leah: Thank you, Sheri.
Willow: Yeah. Sheri.
Sheri: It's my pleasure.
Sheri: Yeah, ours as well. Exactly. It's all our pleasure. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you for the work you're doing and getting the information for me and all these other wonderful speakers out there, because you are both so, uh, wise and have so much to share yourselves.
Sheri: So I'm just grateful that you're doing this and helping get the culture shifted into a more sex-positive living life.
Sheri: “Ecstatic, positive world."
Sheri: Yes,
Willow: absolutely. A living, awake world. That's what we're going for here.
Willow:. And, we'll see all of you for the next interview.