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Today we meet psychoanalyst Dr. Michael Bader who shares why we may need to move beyond hormones, lube, and libido hacks and into the hidden forces of guilt, shame, fantasy, and long-term intimacy that shape desire, often without us realizing it.
We cover:
What are the most common, and least discussed, desire blockers in midlife
The surprising role "ruthlessness" plays in sexual pleasure and why intimacy can make desire harder
What sexual fantasies are really doing psychologically, and why they often intensify with age
How long-term relationships and caretaking instincts quietly suppress arousal
Practical ways midlife women can reconnect with desire without performance pressure
Dr. Michael Bader is a psychologist and psychoanalyst with over four decades of clinical experience, known for his pioneering work on the psychology of desire, intimacy, and sexual fulfillment. He is the author of the influential book Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies, where he unpacks the hidden emotional and psychological meanings behind sexual fantasy and why it plays such a powerful role in human arousal.
Dr. Bader blends clinical depth with a refreshingly accessible style, helping people understand how unconscious fears, early experiences, and emotional dynamics shape their erotic lives. His work challenges shame, reduces stigma, and offers a compassionate, science-informed framework for sexual well-being.
Beyond his clinical practice, Dr. Bader has served as a consultant, teacher, and writer on topics ranging from sexuality to social psychology, and he's widely respected for bridging the gap between psychological theory and everyday struggles around intimacy, pleasure, and connection.
Book: Arousal https://michaelbader.com/books/arousal-the-secret-logic-of-sexual-fantasies/
Contact Dr. Michael Bader:
Website: michaelbader.com
Webcast: Invisible Ink: The Unconscious in Modern Politics and Culture
Email: [email protected]
Tiktok: @michaelbaderdmh
Instagram @drummajorforfreedom
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Have you lost your libido and can't find it?
But you really want to?
And testosterone just isn't working for you anymore.
Or maybe you just don't want to take it.
Then this episode is for you.
Now I'm going to try to keep the intro really short now
because I just want to jump right into the interview.
This is just a second episode that I recorded with psychoanalyst Dr. Michael Bader.
And I have a link to the first episode in the show notes.
You can go check it out there.
I highly recommend you listed that one first because he gives the background as well.
And I found Dr. Bader so fascinating that I just had to have them on again.
And I usually don't interview men when it comes to sex.
But he came highly recommended.
And I just, I loved his book called A Rousal,
which explains like the thoughts in our heads and what's happening during sex.
And sometimes the thoughts in our head, these,
so he calls them fantasies, are a way to get more aroused.
And sometimes it's just totally out of control.
I'm kind of horrified by it.
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But it makes us enjoy sex better.
It's crazy.
He explains all of this.
So we took an even deeper dive into this episode.
So before we start, I must ask you to please subscribe to the show if you haven't already.
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Okay, well,
it's a real pleasure to have Dr. Michael Bader on this show again.
I'm so excited about this. Welcome.
Great to be here. Thanks for having me again.
Yeah, I just couldn't stop speaking with you.
It was so amazing that first episode that we did,
we covered a lot.
And so I will have that link in the show notes
so everyone can go and listen to it and catch up.
But this time I would really like to take a deeper dive
into some of the topics that that we went down.
We went, we covered and then if we can't give some really practical tips
that women can actually start using today.
And we talked about guilt and shame and these are the big roadblocks
to having a real real pleasure in midlife.
And so let's maybe put the woman
who is in Perry and post Metapods into contacts.
And we're thinking about someone in our 40s, 50s, up to 60s.
Can you explain what are the three most common reasons
that women in midlife feel that guilt and shame?
But I think we have to separate the response to that into two buckets.
One is the personal private legacy history
and sources of guilt and shame that she feels
from her own growing up in her family.
And I want to return to that in a minute.
And then the other is the sources of guilt and shame
that are in the social world
that have to do with how women are identified,
socialization, people's perceptions publicly
of a woman that age.
So there are different sources of guilt and shame
that come from each arena.
But let's just take the personal one first
because this is a little bit more difficult, I think,
to explain, but it's fundamental to understanding the ways
of which we inhibit sexual excitement.
Is that all of us have some residue of guilt and shame
from our growing up?
It's almost part of the human condition.
And it has to do with the fact that as children grow up,
they're attached in their families for security,
for actually for life and death,
dependent on the authority of their family
and in their ability to adapt to their family.
And that is to fit into the rules of the road
that your family lays down
and protecting those connections and attachments
is of utmost importance, developmentally.
So what does that mean?
So when you leave home, you leave home your 18,
you go to college, it means leaving the attachments
that have been so vital to your whole psyche.
And the idea that you might feel separation guilt
is just hardwired into the situation.
We all feel a little bit of that
or if we do better than a loved one,
we feel a little bit of survivor guilt
and that's almost part of the territory of being human.
And then if you think about shame,
we grow up in a herd that we depend on being able to fit in.
And if the herd judges us to be wrong, inadequate,
defective in any way,
it is a profoundly harmful feeling that we have.
That's shame is how we appear in the eyes of the other.
So we all have those feelings.
And then what I have discovered is that
and they are often not conscious,
but that what I found is a regularly interfere with
and inhibit sexual excitement.
And the one concept I want to make sure
that I add to the mix that's important
is I use a concept called ruthlessness.
And I say good sex, maximum sexual pleasure and excitement
requires some element of ruthlessness.
And people take umbrajada
because it sounds like I'm saying that aggression
or hostility is a necessary part of arousal.
And that's not what it means at all.
In my psychological tradition,
ruthlessness means to be without concern.
It's what babies experience
and toddlers vis-a-vis their mothers,
which is they take from the mother
and they don't take with a high regard or concern
for the effect of their taking on the mother.
That's what this guy in England,
Donald Winnecott called ruthlessness.
So I say in sexual excitement and desire,
there is an essential dimension of it
that has to do with using the other as an object.
Now, that's tricky territory, isn't it?
Because objectification is harmful.
We know that and it's been critiqued up and down
and should be.
But somebody described to me,
a woman said to me,
look, when I climax sexually,
I feel like it's a wave that builds and builds and builds
and then crashes on the shore.
And I don't want to have to worry
about whether the shore can take it.
So you want to be able to use,
but use and not harm the other person.
Now, good sex,
it also, we know,
depends on empathy and intuition,
reading the other person's cues,
being able to figure out what the other person needs,
all that good stuff that we know in our culture is important.
But this other element is also necessary for arousal.
And if one,
now here's the punchline,
if one feels undue concern
and care for the other,
the object of your desire,
then this ruthless part of your sexuality
can't be expressed and experienced
and excitement is diminished.
Same way,
if you feel too ashamed and defective in fear,
that state of being is incompatible
with maximum sexual arousal.
So we see these affective states
that undue worry and guilt about hurting you,
the shame-based sense of being inferior
and helpless and rejected.
Those states are both universal,
to some degree,
unconscious and always playing a little,
throwing a little bit of shade on sexual exuberance.
And we create sexual fantasies
in order to negate or counteract those affects.
And what happens when you counteract them,
you're able to express desire.
So those are complicated things.
Then you have to add one fourth thing
just to make this incredibly complicated.
Now you have the social judgments
about let's say women in their 50s and 60s,
postmenopausal women are not supposed to be sexual.
There is a phrase they call some women MILFs,
M-I-L-F,
which we don't have to say what that means.
Some women have turned that into a badge of honor,
but mostly it's disparaging.
It's saying you're an older woman and cheesy
or just you stand out because you're someone
I would like to have sex with
as if that's a rare thing and almost violates a code.
So a woman has to deal with that burden
also of socially being told in effect
that A, they're not the 25-year-old Cosmo model
in terms of beauty, desire and allure.
That's the shame part, right?
Is there in all of us,
but in women in this category.
And then you're not supposed to want sex.
You're not supposed to go out hunting for sex for God's sakes.
In fact, if you were telling your children
and grandchildren about your masturbating last night
and what you thought about,
everyone would become psychotic
and you'd be thrown into a mental hospital or something.
Why?
Not just because those levels of sexual detail
are usually forbidden from conversation,
but because you don't want to see your mother
or your grandmother or your grand aunt reveal
that she has those fantasies too.
Why are we like that?
Are there any cultures that don't?
That seem to break that?
I mean, I don't know in terms of erotic desire,
but certainly some of it has to do
with incest prohibitions.
I know it sounds a little psychoanalytic wacky,
but it's like you don't want to see your mother
as someone who's going around wanting to get laid all the time
or have sex or your grandmother for God's sakes.
So there's this sort of familial prohibitions
that have to do with that,
I think that have to play into it.
As well as the entire social industry
and capitalist machinery that has created
certain standards of beauty and behavior
that you see everywhere in every magazine,
every TV and show and movie.
And as a woman ages, she doesn't fit that bill.
She knows it.
Source of what?
Source of shame, little bit.
You can fight against it or whatever,
but it is still cooking around in the background somewhere.
Yeah, who wants to see their parents,
but we know that older adults do it plays an importance
on sex and arousal and desire,
but in our brains and especially our younger brains,
you just don't make that association or you say,
that's not supposed to happen.
You don't, yeah,
and I guess it's a sort of protective mechanism as well.
And okay, there's a reason for that.
But then the fallout is,
then we put a label on a woman of a certain age
or a man of certain age,
like you're not supposed to do that even older men.
Oh, you're a dirty old man.
You know, is it because if she wants to be sleeping with somebody,
we can't put these labels on these people
because then I could see where the guilt and the shame
and can come from.
And this is society placing this on us, right?
Absolutely, absolutely society.
And you think about the 1950s.
Now that's when I was born,
early 50s and post-war America men came back from the front.
Women had been working like my mother had been working
as a bank teller during the war.
The men came back and took those jobs.
And the women were basically let go
and were told, in effect,
the idea was that they would now raise families
in relatively alienated, isolated suburbs
apart from their kinship networks.
And there was a generation of millions of families
that were built on that foundation of a mother
who was supposed to derive all of her self-esteem
and worth from being a mother.
And as the 50s went on, of course,
you had people like Betty Friedan,
write books, The Feminine Mystique,
where she talked about the suffering of those women.
She called it the problem with no name
because they couldn't define what it was exactly
that they were suffering from.
But what they were suffering from was this
domesticated housewife mother fixation
that the culture had of her being a perfect mother.
So what was my point?
My point is there was a generation of women
who grew up in the 50s,
who were at a level of distress and unhappiness.
That was widespread.
Now, the question comes up in my own work
is that the children of these mothers
who had a lot of other traits,
this is generalizations 101.
I just, there's tons of individual variation.
But as a generalization, I think it's true.
And a generation of children grow up then
with the experience of very unhappy mothers.
Girls and boys have to see this in different ways.
So what do you do when you have an unhappy mother?
You worry about her?
You feel some guilt about doing
saying anything that might make things worse?
You feel sorry for her?
There's a part of you because you're a child
who feels even responsible like you're supposed
to help mommy feel better.
Now, you think about that psychic state
in induced, you might say,
in a whole generation of the children of these mothers.
They grow up with a lot of guilt.
It's not the traditional Jewish mother guilt,
but it's a kind of guilt that comes from the experience
of having unhappy parents towards whom you feel responsible
and for whom it's vital,
you're it's vitally important
that you figure out a way of getting along
in this relationship.
So you become a caretaker,
you become somebody who it's hard to leave home.
Sometimes when you leave home,
you sabotage yourself, have to come back.
It's hard to have more of the good things in life
than unhappy parents.
We call that survivor guilt.
So I'm just describing the vicissitudes of the ways
that we become guilty, worried caretakers.
And then, oh boy, that makes sex hard
because it's difficult, if not impossible,
to get excited if you have a relationship to the other.
That's a caretaking, empathic,
healing, even fixing, worried relationship.
And guess what happens in long-term relationships?
Exactly that.
I get to know you so well from the inside out.
I get to know almost when you're going to finish a sentence
where that intimate.
I can feel what's going on.
I can look at you and you look at me
in a certain way and I can read your moods.
All right, and that's not abnormal.
That's a good, intimate, long-term love relationship.
However, if ruthlessness is part of good sexual desire,
I can't be comfortably ruthless with you
because I'm worried about you.
And I care so much about the impact
of my words and actions on your interior life.
And an old psychoanalyst once said to me
after a conference, he said,
I've been doing couples therapy for 60 years.
He said, you know, it makes a good, successful marriage.
So what's that?
When they love the other person
for the way they're different
and that violates the normal wisdom is,
oh no, we fall in love because we share so much.
But he was pointing out this thing
about seeing the other person as an other
that he thinks is an important part of healthy love.
And I agree with him.
And it's also part of healthy sex
because if the other person is separate from you
is over there in a sense,
like a sturdy, independent, other agent,
then you don't worry as much about hurting them
with your desire,
with your wanting to use them,
with your selfish needs.
Is there not something you have to feel guilty about?
Yeah, it's crazy
because there's two different things
that are going on that we want in a relationship
and what we want in the bedroom.
And I guess maybe this is why people have affairs
and things happen and not.
But there was a question I sent to you earlier
and it was about Esther Perral
and she's a psychologist very well known
and she has a book called Meeting and Captivity.
And she calls this central tension of long-term relationships
since we're on this topic of long-term.
This was a great time to ask.
So she says that love seeks closeness and security.
While desire thrives on distance, mystery, and autonomy.
So couples want that safety, predictability,
emotional, attunement, and the erotic excitement.
So how in the world are we supposed to make this work?
Are we close or are we far?
Are we distant and mysterious
or we know each other's thoughts
and finish each other's sentences?
You see what I mean?
Yeah, I do.
With a natural course of sexual excitement, desire,
and a long-term intimate relationship
declines over time, period.
It does everywhere.
And it is exactly what Perral is talking about.
It's a function of intimacy.
But you see, if we say intimacy
somehow contributes to sexual boredom,
that doesn't make sense on the surface.
Until we look at what does intimacy
make difficult in sexual in the bedroom?
And what I'm saying is exactly this making this point
is that we want to abandon ourselves
and surrender someone to desire and pleasure
when we're in the bedroom.
And I'm going to be a little bit blunt here and,
but not too much.
But just to make sure that we understand
that in the intimate moments of sexual arousal,
the choreography and the fantasy life and the experience
contains at its best a certain letting go, doesn't it?
It's like let go and just let the cat out of the bag.
Okay, now if you let the cat out of the bag
but you worry unconsciously or not
about whether that cat is going to hurt the person
you love and you need and are attached to for your soul,
then guess what?
You're not going to let the damn cat out of the bag.
Is this also a little bit of ruthlessness
when you say cat out of the bag and letting go?
That's exactly what ruthlessness is.
It's like I was trying to find metaphors for it
but the woman that had the wave on the beach
or the letting go with abandon
or I think I might have mentioned last time
that I had a woman in treatment
who was a well-known feminist theorist
and she was very well-known, proud of it,
written a lot but she came and just seen me
because she had sexual fantasies that were bothering her
and making her feel ashamed.
The fantasy was making her shame
which was that she would be taken
and made to have sex with the janitor on her desk.
Somebody she didn't know, a big guy would throw her on the desk
and just ravish her.
And she reported to me and said,
that turns me on, I don't get it.
And it violates my whole sense of feminist principles
and the way I live my life.
But see, here was the thing.
It was actually a fantasy that dealt with her fear
of being too strong.
Her fear of being too strong.
Yes, her guilt about being too strong,
about her capacity, if she let it out of the bag.
Her belief was she hurt whoever she was with,
the man she was with, it went overwhelm him,
castrate him, make him feel burdened.
It would, but if she had a fantasy of this powerful man
being sexually ruthless with her,
then she could be ruthless,
experienced ruthlessness back at him.
She should not have to worry about hurting him.
He wouldn't worry about hurting her.
So when you get into the details of these fantasies,
you can see that they almost always involve some way.
The person is trying to disconfirm the gate overcome
some kind of belief or feeling in the guilt family
or the shame family.
That otherwise is getting in the way of their libido.
Yeah, we covered this so well in the first episode.
And your book as well,
the story of this woman exactly you're talking about
and so many stories.
I'm just amazed the things that happen
and go through life and interfere with their sexual life
from their pleasure and people come to seek you
because they're trying to find answers like,
why does my brain even go there?
I don't know why and feel guilty for having the thing
or perhaps, yeah, they're just people who can't have sex
with their own wife or because of so many norms
and social pressures or things that we grew up with.
And it reminds me a little bit about,
so I imagine different cultures have different problems
as well and what you're doing is looking
at mostly North Americans.
And I just, it reminds me,
there was this one sleep specialist
that I remember speaking to in Hong Kong,
but she was English.
And her client was from,
I don't remember which culture,
but where there was multiple marriages, okay?
And the woman was having sleep issues,
probably sex issues too, we don't know
because her husband said,
now she needs to take a second job
so he can have a second wife.
So you can imagine this psychology in there
and it's just an example of different cultures
must have a whole other can of worms
that could be really interesting to try to understand.
Really interesting because the social narrative
that we live in and in many ways are shaped
by these expectation monogamy.
And let's say you were visiting a community
where they practice polygamy.
So the social norms very different than ours
would be very threatening to most of us in various ways.
But none of that bears on the question
of how they get sexually excited or not.
So let's say you're one of four wives.
Now that can impact you in every way you can imagine
but how does it impact you in the bedroom?
In other words, does it contribute
to the conditions under which you can get sexually aroused
or not?
And I would say it would have to impact
but I don't know exactly how it would.
But of course, you know, these expectations
that are around us that we grow up in,
the rules of the road, so to speak, of a culture,
infect every part of life and have to intrude
in the bedroom, but still the issue of sexual desire
and letting the cat out of the bag question
is I think going to be there regardless of the culture.
How the culture navigates it
or it creates conditions under which it can get addressed.
I'm sure it's really highly varied.
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Now let's get back to the show.
Let's then give some practical tips
as I'm thinking about the woman who is struggling,
whether it's because, I guess it's very different
if you're in a long-term marriage.
Like you said, this dichotomy,
how do you even deal with this?
And it sounds like part of it is being able to get rid
of those feelings of guilt, shame, fear.
And then being able to let go or sense of ruthlessness
and then have that, I guess it's like an ebb and flow
because your partners could be going,
we don't know what's going through his or her head
or whatever that is,
but you wanna have this connection during the sexual act
and you wanna have the experience
and if you're togetherness,
but at the same time when you say letting go
and not sort of carrying so much worried
about the other person, it doesn't mean you don't care.
I can see where it doesn't become a problem.
Like how do you navigate this
and how would that be different for a woman who's?
How do you not care about the person you're with?
I mean, if you hear me say,
well, the problem is you cared too much
about the person you're with, you care about how they feel,
the solution must be to not care.
No, you can't not care.
That's why there's a tendency over a long period of time
and an intimate relationship for a sexual arousal
and desired and diminished, right?
So what can you do?
Well, one thing we haven't talked about is do you masturbate?
So when you think about sexual health,
your show has pioneered discussions
about hormone replacement therapy
and we know diet, exercise, sleep are all parts
of creating the physiologic conditions
under which you can experience desire.
But of course, now you're still up
against these inhibitory roadblocks.
So as a number of things,
depending on the person that I would suggest,
one is if we come to understand that they feel
they can't date, let's say, because they're ashamed.
They have an expectation they'll be rejected
for their age and their body, okay?
Then I've explored with them the history of that,
how they acquire that painful judgment
about themselves being defective.
That's what I call a pathogenic belief.
It's not based in objective scientific reality.
They're not actually defective.
So psychotherapy helps uncover some of these beliefs
and exposes them to the rational light of day
that someone can start to modify those beliefs.
Or they worry that they're in bed
and their partner is gonna be burdened
by having to take so long to help them orgasm.
It takes so long for me to orgasm
and I'm so worried that Bob is gonna,
it's just boring to him.
So that's guilt.
Or pressure that you have to go fast.
Well, it's pressure, but it's plays on your inclination
to feel guilty like you're supposed to be the girl
who's pleasing Bob all the time.
That's your job.
Bob's welfare matters more than yours.
You're supposed to take care of old Bob over there.
But maybe that's something that you can work to undo.
Like you don't have to take care of Bob.
Maybe Bob should just take care of himself in bed
a little bit more.
So that doesn't even care.
And we're making these stories in our head
that he really cares.
Like we're worried about him.
He's not exactly right.
It's exactly right, of course.
And you can even, if you have a certain kind of relationship,
you can even talk to Bob about this a little bit.
You could say, Bob, I just want to surrender
to the pleasure of this great moment
and not have to worry about you.
Is that okay, dude?
I mean, that's silly.
You would probably, most people wouldn't have that conversation,
which you could in some situation.
And then that would just make your irrational worry
more explicit and you could change it.
And, but the other thing is that it also has to be okay.
Now, this is more complicated to not feel
a lot of sexual desire.
You see, because we have a critic up here.
I think of it as standing on the balcony,
looking down at the dance floor.
The dance floor is the choreography of everyday life.
And we're up here on the balcony trying to look at it.
But up here on the balcony with us
are some pretty harsh critics.
And one of them is saying, you're too old to date,
your ugly, your body isn't what it was when you were 25.
Don't even try, just stay home and watch TV.
That's a critical shameer up here.
That makes sexual excitement pretty difficult, right?
Or don't go out here robbing the cradle.
You look ridiculous.
You're an older woman looking for a hot guy or something.
Come on, act your age, act your age.
The shaming voice from the balcony over and over again.
So, one of the things that a woman could do
either in conversation with privately listening
to your podcast, talking to other women being in a group,
going to a therapist is to try to redress
and lower the noise of this shamer
that's always looking at her and finding her wanting.
And then the other thing is that she's supposed
to be a caretaker, isn't she?
As women are bred and evolutionarily inclined
to be caretakers.
And there are so many forces that socialize women
to do it and that make that appealing to women
to do just that.
But you know what, being a caretaker is great for love.
It's not always so great for sex.
And that's what we were talking about before.
If you are committed in veteran caretaker
and that's what you do,
it's hard to get really turned on
and really just let the cat out of the bag.
And then people develop, why I asked about masturbation
is that I would ask a woman that says,
I have no sexual desire to say,
well, do you ever masturbate?
Now, of course, there's a lot of prohibitions
against masturbation as well.
That's not an easy road.
If she says she does, then I would ask her
if we had enough trust to tell me about
what she thinks about when she masturbates
because that's a sexual fantasy.
And once we learn what it is,
it opens the door to understanding
so much about her
and about the dilemmas that brought her in to see me
to begin with.
It's one of the tactics,
a lot of the sex parts I've interviewed
is before you even go into the bedroom with someone else,
figure out what you like.
And that includes, that requires masturbation
or what feeling yourself, what turns you on,
and that whole exploration.
So it kind of, I guess one of your patients was saying no,
I don't know if that would be one of the solutions
is because how can you tell your partner what you want
because part of the solution is saying,
have that communication that I like it this way
and out that way, but if you don't know what you want,
then how is he gonna, or is she gonna ex-guess?
That's really interesting.
So you can find that out a little bit
through masturbation or watching certain, I guess,
porn websites that have a menu of things
that appeal to you.
Nowadays, of course, there is not a single sexual fetish
or interest that isn't findable on the web.
It's extraordinary as anyone who does it knows.
And so that's a very interesting invitation
for someone to say like, what turns you on?
How do you know?
What did turn you on?
And here's that trick to the question though,
is that some, we'll say, some women will say to me,
I don't think of anything when I touch myself.
I just think of my own body
and I feel the pleasure of my own body.
All right, so there's no mentation,
there's no storyline up here, right?
But then it's like, oh, wait,
but what kind of men are you attracted to?
Who's your poster boy?
Who's the, who's even the Hollywood guy
that you think is just so hot?
Once you start talking about sexual preferences,
you're in the world of sexual fantasies.
It's the same thing, exactly the same thing.
Yeah, a guy I saw was drawn to,
there is a type of modeling and imagery
in women's magazines.
It's called heroin chic.
That's an odd name, heroin chic.
And it's a young woman who looks kind of,
who's advertising something, clothing, cosmetic something,
but she looks very worn out and desiccated,
like she's really just recovering from a bad night.
And you think, well, what's appealing about that?
Huh? What?
And in this guy's mind is that she's already damaged.
I don't have to worry about damaging her.
Well, crazy.
And so it's like all of a sudden,
oh, I don't have to worry about damn sure.
Oh, I guess Fred, because you do worry about damaging a woman.
Oh, yeah.
And then once you get that question on the table,
you've opened up a door to the whole psychotherapy, actually.
So do you see any themes in this women in midlife
are going through in terms of the source of their issues
or is it just too varied like everybody's so different?
Well, it's universal in the sense that they're afflicted
with something in the family of affects and beliefs
that I'm calling guilt, worry, responsibility, omnipotence.
And they have residues of feelings and beliefs
in the family of shame, rejection, inferiority, and helplessness.
Now, those I'm going to look for those themes
and then added on to that are all the social judgments
about women of that age are not supposed
to want to have any kind of sex, much less dirty sex
or much less ruthless sex, mon.
So I think you have impinging from the outside every magazine
and then you have an internal life that's highly varied
but has to do with those two families of inhibitions.
It's also really complex in a sense
that only psychoanalyst can actually pick these apart
and go help you dig out the reasons why
because I think as I was listening to your book,
I was like, God, I guess that makes perfect sense.
I would have never thought that could be the reason.
Yeah.
So for women who's listening now and she's thinking,
oh yeah, this kind of resonates with me
and I think it has to do with my mom or my religion
or my whatever, where do you think she should start
in terms of to unpack this?
Yeah, that's a good question.
That's very difficult to answer
because it would be something like this.
It would be like, okay, if you had in your mind
that Bader was onto something when he said guilt and shame
were the two families of things that hold me back
and that my preferences and fantasy life are attempts
to overcome those two things somehow.
That's a big first step.
It's like if you were to just think about it
almost pragmatically.
Okay, so you start with I like tough looking women.
You'd have to actually do a little self interrogation.
That's not easy.
What do I like?
What do I like in the world?
Who am I attracted to?
What stories turned me on have appealed to me?
But let's say you do that and you come upon this conclusion
that let's say you're a woman and say,
I really like tough looking men,
men who seem rugged, independent and strong.
They look that way, they feel that way.
I may even sense they are that way in their life.
You say, oh, that kind of appeals to me.
So then the thing is you don't have to get rid of that.
Like that's fine.
That's like a source of attraction.
That's just normal fine.
Enjoy yourself.
But if your question is what does that mean,
then you take the next step and you say,
well, how does a rugged, tough, independent man
make me feel safe from the threats posed by guilt and shame
or shame, one or the other.
That's the next question.
You say, oh, well, maybe a tough rugged man
is somebody I don't have to worry about.
Oh, so I worry about my male other, huh?
What do you worry about?
I worry they're welfare.
I worry if they're happy.
I worry if they like me.
I worry if they don't seem calm and comfortable
with their skin.
I worry about these guys normally.
Oh, okay, well, I can see how the fantasy
and the preference of a tough rugged man
then makes a lot of sense for you, doesn't it?
Yes.
Now, that's not an easy process to go through.
And at the end of it, what does it get you?
It's like, okay, that's why I like tough rugged independent man.
Yeah.
But it might also tip you off to,
oh, I worry about men too, damn much, don't I?
I worry about burning them, being stronger than them.
I'm supposed to be one down and make their egos feel good.
Oh, I'm supposed to flatter and make them feel like big shots.
That's my job.
Now you're into a world where you could make some choices
and not feel that way.
Not easy, boy, no, it is not easy to not feel that way,
because the world expects you to feel that way,
but it's possible.
How long does it take for you to help someone decipher
and pull some of these things out?
Some people I've been seeing for eons
and we never talk about anything involving
their sexual fantasy life.
And then I have some people that have come in
and in one session, I can propose at least a hypothesis
about what's going on in the damn bedroom.
And that's because I get a little background
and if the person tells me some details
about their sexual fantasy life or behavior,
then I can very often decode it and link it
to something that might even be a topic for,
wait for it, therapy down the road.
And I can do that quickly if I get details,
but it's very hard to get details
because most of us, we are not used to talking
about the details of our sexual fantasy life with anybody.
Yeah, you heard stories.
Even our partners, right?
Yeah.
People that go, I really like it when you hold me down
or see, I think some version of dominance, submission,
Saddle, masochistic, fantasies are very common
and they're forbidden.
They're forbidden in any age group,
but in older or middle age or older women,
I think it's something that if they were to be put
in a truth serum chamber and they had to be,
and they masturbated and then they had to describe
what it was that they thought about during the time
they were masturbating, often it would involve themes
of power, dominance and submission of some kind
because those fantasies are antidotes to feeling guilt.
And it's like your brain is trying
to have a workaround for you.
It is because the theory here is not that radical
is that we can only feel these sexual desire
if it is safe to do so.
Just like in therapy, you're not going to bring up
painful, intimate details of your past
until it's safe to do so.
In sex life, in sexual life, you can only experience
around so if it's safe to experience it
and then the obvious question is,
oh well, what makes it unsafe, guilt and shame?
So our minds are very creative.
They just say, oh, I still want to feel pleasure
because we are wired to want to feel pleasure.
We don't have to take some super drug to feel,
to want to feel pleasure.
We don't have to have a part of our brain
electromagnetically stimulated to want to feel pleasure.
It is hardwired.
We want pleasure.
But a lot of people may find pleasure in risky behaviors,
let's say, overeating, over drinking,
that I guess get that dopamine head.
And so I think we are hardwired.
Why do some people go to those ways to find pleasure
rather than, okay, I'm going to work on myself,
my sexual pleasure, because I guess it's easier
to eat something, I don't know.
No, it's true.
I'll tell you one thing I have told patients.
And also, when I teach, it's one of the things
that I teach.
I say, look, they're working through the human mind.
We can make it seem all complicated
and abstract, into Freudian, Metatherian.
But there's a simple way of describing
what gets people who see me into trouble.
One thing, they come in, they have a complaint.
Some symptom, they're feeling unhappy at work.
They're obsessional and make lists and they're ADHD.
The human mind is motivated to avoid suffering and distress.
Okay, it doesn't seem like a news flash, right?
Our minds are always predicting threat and danger
because it's evolution.
It helped us survive our brain
and our brains are always predicting the next thing.
And I know it's silly, but if I turn around like,
I know I'm gonna see that door, right?
My mind predicts what I'm going to see when I turn.
My mind's are always doing that.
So our minds are always predicting
not just that there's a door, but predicting like,
if I go into this door, I might be embarrassed.
Or if I ask her out on a date, she might reject me.
Or if I really do this to her and badge,
she'll feel like I'm dominating.
There's a prediction of danger.
And then the mind says, oh no,
we're not gonna feel that danger is thing.
We're gonna do something else to not feel it.
But the thing we do to not feel it
is often the thing that causes us pain.
I use this silly example of someone who is radically
agoraphobic, can't leave the house.
His wife drives and forces him to come see me.
He experiences danger out in the world, doesn't he?
That's the danger.
So what does he do?
His solution is to stay indoors, make sense?
But staying indoors is ruining his life.
And that simple model is what happens
with almost everybody that I see in therapy.
So with sex in the bedroom,
we are always anticipating,
because we know ourselves danger of some kind,
the danger that I'm gonna hurt you,
the danger I'm gonna burden you.
My needs are gonna make you feel bad.
I'm gonna be too selfish.
I'm gonna expose myself to your judgment,
that you're gonna hate me, reject me.
I'm just like, I'm panimining it,
because obviously we're not always thinking
those big traumas, but those are always there.
So those voices make it impossible for me to get aroused.
And I gotta figure out a way to work around it.
And I encourage my patients to figure out ways
to work around it.
So you like the idea of dominating your husband,
being the top, and he doesn't like it.
The reason you like to be the top
is because you have this thing that has to do,
again, guilt and work, guilt,
that if you're strong, you're gonna hurt the other person.
So when you have a domination fantasy,
you are strong, but the other person gets aroused.
You know what I mean?
This is the key to bondage and discipline
and Saddlemaskistic sexual is that on both parts,
they get to experience the,
let the cat out of the bag, ruthless,
aggressive, selfish force of desire,
but they don't have to worry about injuring the object.
I wonder if the generation now, a younger generation,
because in your, and I thought about this,
because in your book, you had a young 27 year old man
have an issue, we've just got married,
he can't have sex with his wife, he's blocked.
And it seemed to be, and I have a son, who's 27,
and so I'm always thinking, oh, this generation,
it seems like this younger generation
is having less sex than maybe my generation
or even older, I don't know.
But I'm wondering if there's any kind of,
it seems to the world, especially in the US,
it's very PC and very feminist and very,
to be, and this was part of his trauma,
it was difficult to overcome,
because he learned you shouldn't be treating a woman like this,
and you shouldn't be taking advantage of her,
and his wife was, I want to have sex with you,
but she also had some sexual abuse or something,
and you don't want to be careful,
like, is there anything that you think
is going to happen to this generation?
Why you describe it's very important that we can say
that the woke sensibility that has to do with everything
from respecting boundaries to sensitize in yourself
to power, objectification, gender asymmetries,
and all that, you could say,
you have as a principled, value driven moral universe.
You could say, that's the one I want to live in,
and you can see that there are elements in that
can actually affect you in the bedroom,
and the one you mentioned is the main one,
actually, is the idea that,
I just said, well, we could oppose objectification,
but see, there's an element of objectification
that I think is a necessary part of ruthlessness.
Now, that's weird, but it's true.
I think that there's something,
because it's the let the cat out of the bag thing,
man, I don't want to have to worry about you,
like, I want to have you be a thing
that I can for just that five seconds or that minute,
that I could use for my own pleasure selfishly
and not have to feel like I'm ruining your life
like I'm a domineering abusive, aggressive, sadist monster.
And so these things do actually sometimes conflict,
and then you have to have some negotiation, don't you?
Because there's really a sexual fantasy you might have
if you masturbate, okay?
But then in the real world,
you have to negotiate that fantasy
with another person, don't you?
So I had a woman in treatment whose fantasy was two guys,
a three-way, two guys and her,
is say, well, how does that solve the problem of guilt
and shame?
Well, two ways at the same time.
One is, she's getting double the attention.
So attention is an antidote to shame and inferiority,
all that.
She's getting double the attention.
And she doesn't have to worry about wearing one guy out
or hurting one guy, because he's got a wingman.
He's got a, he's part of a troop, you know what I mean?
Now, that isn't an argument in favor of gang sex
or anything like that.
This is a fantasy we're talking about.
And I think it's so important to distinguish the two things.
I was on a TV show years ago with about porn
and with a woman who had written a book
about how destructive porn was to relationships.
And I guess they had me on thinking I would defend porn,
which I wasn't.
But what I did say was,
what if a guy gets excited by a porn
that in which there's multiple men on one woman?
It doesn't mean he wants to go home and gang bang his wife.
Yeah, I know.
So it seems clear with all the fantasies
that you've had in this story.
Like, yeah, that's what's so troubling.
Why people feel shame for having something
that they would never do in real life.
Oh, never in a million years.
I mean, after the show that producer came up to me
and said, oh, you know, there was a lot of,
people were disturbed by your interview.
And I said, why?
So because you used the word gang bang.
I said, this is a show about porn.
You have a section on porn.
He said, well, it's a morning show.
It's a women and children watching.
But my whole point was that if you,
that what you get turned on by in porn
isn't what you want to take away as a script
and rewrite it at home with your partner.
Although there's overlap, it's not the same thing
because sex in the real world has to be negotiated.
Obviously with someone else.
So it's not coercive.
The person's not really a thing.
Ready?
You can have a kind of wishful.
I use you as a thing, kind of element of sensibility.
But in reality, the person's not really a thing.
I remember the last question I had in my head.
You mentioned something about women don't need to feel full pleasure.
If she, I guess if she doesn't want to or it's not.
I'm guessing it's because you said that it's,
we feel so much pressure that we should feel arousal and pleasure.
I mean, it would be great.
I think a lot of women want that who is listening.
If you're listening now, then you probably do.
But maybe you said it's okay to not want to.
And that's so important because you might take away
from the show that they think we should go home and masturbate.
No, that might be interesting experiment.
But the other thing to know is just this.
That if you have the freedom to be fully self accepting
and not shamed in any way confident about the fact that,
yeah, I'm still a good person who loves my partner
and I don't have sexual desires.
First of all, you don't say that in public.
It's embarrassing, blah, blah, blah.
But if you can make that be okay,
then you have the freedom to actually explore
moments of sexual desire and attraction.
If you get off your back, the idea that you're supposed to
because I can tell you that in groups that I'm in,
when couples who've been together a long time,
if the subject of sex comes up,
everybody makes some embarrassed indication that,
well, that's an old memory or that's not high on the menu
or some throwaway line that suggests,
yeah, we don't have sex, but we're not gonna talk about it
because it's something mildly embarrassing about it.
Like we're supposed to be in heat all the time.
And we're not and we are not.
Then we might have the freedom to explore
what we might like to do on occasion
to give ourselves and our body's pleasure,
which is one of the things our minds and bodies desire.
Yeah, it's a tactic that's been recommended
by other people I've interviewed where you in the bedroom,
you just explore no intent to orgasm or have penetrations
more about exploring what they do.
And it's okay if you don't.
That's a good point.
That brings this right into the sex therapy world
where that is a common recommendation.
It's just lie with your partner.
Touch each other in a way that is pleasurable,
but there's no expectation what,
in fact, it's formally declared.
This is not about anybody coming to orgasm.
And if you're a rouse, great,
and if you're not a rouse, great, that's fine.
And it's to inoculate yourself
and expose you to the possibility
that your body can experience some pleasure.
Yeah, it's a good,
it's I think it's a good recommendation.
It's a good place to start if you want to,
it takes that pressure off that a lot of women may feel
like have to keep up or,
but I want to work on this and not.
And I always think there's a fomo going on.
Me, I'm like, there must,
there's a whole world out there.
Maybe I don't even know about.
And I'm curious,
and the kind of curious person says,
yeah, that's why even though I kind of would say,
well, it's for me personally,
it's not just, okay,
let's just keep it.
I'm a biohacker who wants to optimize health.
Why?
What if you were referred to as a milk?
Do you find that flattering or degrading?
It's a bit new in the big,
it's kind of like, oh, you find me attractive.
I'm like, oh, it's a compliment,
but at the same time you go,
well, wait a second, and you calling me old.
It's, yes, and no.
That's very interesting, isn't it?
Both parts of it, yeah.
Yeah.
It can be both.
It can both.
For me, it's not very clear.
The initial is, okay, I'm attractive,
but then you're like, yeah.
Well, I'll just give you one quicky vignette
that one of my first patients
when I was in psychoanalytic training.
His sexual fantasy,
when he was a teenager,
was having sex with a friend of his mothers
in a secluded place on the beach near where they lived.
The analyst I was presenting this to,
of course, thought this was the edipus complex,
and really it was the boy's sexual desires for his mother.
And he was completely wrong.
It what it really was, he had a mom
that was like one of these moms I described in the 50s,
was quite unhappy.
Okay, unhappy mom.
Now, in the sexual fantasy,
he's with a younger, slightly younger friend
with his mothers, who's sexual
and wants to have sex with him.
So now we have an older woman
who is sexually alive and not depressed.
So if somebody's sexually excited
by definition that communicates, I'm not hurt.
I'm not suffering, isn't that me?
So in a lot of pornographic fantasy,
everybody in the scene has to be turned on
because the excitement communicates.
No one's being hurt here.
No one to worry about here.
Everyone's having fun.
Everyone's having fun.
No one's suffering here.
No one has to be taken care of.
It's incredible.
I love the analysis, I guess, of things
that we never even thought of.
And I think it could be very helpful
for the women who are struggling right now
in this time of life.
And who want to have their sex life
or want to find pleasure,
just maybe not knowing how.
They've already tried the creams and the gels and HRT
and all the lubricants and the toys.
And that's why you're here
because you can give some insight.
So before we wrap up,
is there any advice that you would give a woman
in midlife where she could start right now?
I think one of the things is
if she can find some place, a friend, probably,
they're probably not her partner,
where the subject of sex could be brought up in some detail.
And what I mean by in some detail
is not just throw away lines like,
yeah, I'm not having any sex
or I haven't wanted to have sex in a year or something like that.
But we're actually, she could learn what it is
that interests her.
Now, that could be through conversation.
It could be as we said earlier
through masturbation and pornography.
It could be just with self-reflection
is that there are things that can give you pleasure.
It doesn't matter whether they're weird,
off the block, unconventional,
unseemly for a woman, it doesn't matter.
There are things that can give you pleasure.
They have a right to have
and that you have a right to not seek out at the same time.
And if there are things that are interesting to you
and pleasurable,
then you should sort of take a little bit of a dive into
what those things are, what they feel like.
And if that eventually ends up in a situation
where you can act them out with a person in the world,
great, if not and they remain private, that's fine too.
So that's what I would say.
Wonderful.
I will thank you so much.
Dr. Michael Bader, I have your links to your website
and your book.
I think it's fascinating.
And if anybody needs to reach out to you,
how are your contacts in the show notes?
And so I really look forward to talking to you again.
And thank you so much for everyone
who's listened to the very end.
And I hope this has been helpful.
And thank you, Dr. Bader, for-
Thank you, Zora, for having me on.
I love your show.
It's really important.
Thank you.
Wonderful.
See you next time.
Bye, yes, bye.
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is not a substitute for personal medical advice
and not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship
with a qualified healthcare professional.
It is intended as a sharing of knowledge
and information from the personal research
and experience of me and my guests.
Hack My Age
Hack My Age
Hack My Age