Sex Feels Like Nothing. Your Pelvic Floor Knows Why.

What if low desire, painful sex, and feeling nothing during intimacy have nothing to do with your hormones — and everything to do with your pelvic floor holding your nervous system's unfinished business? Dr. Juls draws the triangle no one has drawn for you: pelvic floor, nervous system, desire. And explains why releasing one unlocks all three.

A September 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis published in Sexual Medicine confirmed that pelvic floor training produces large, significant improvements in arousal, orgasm, and sexual satisfaction in postmenopausal women. But the reason it works is not muscle strength. Dr. Juls explains how a nervous system locked in survival mode creates chronic pelvic floor tension, how that tension silences sensation and shuts down desire, and why Rosemary Basson's research on responsive desire means "I never feel like it" is not a verdict — it is a physiology problem with a body-based solution.

You will leave this episode understanding what has actually been happening in your body. You will receive a somatic Sacral Floor Release practice you can begin tonight. And you will have three journaling questions that move the work from your ears into your nervous system. The complete framework lives in Are We Gonna Have Sex or What? — available now at juliemerrimanphd.com.

Listen now. Try the Sacral Floor Release practice tonight — eight minutes and an exhale is where it starts. Send this episode to a woman who has been told her desire is the problem. It isn't. And for the full nervous system roadmap, grab the book at juliemerrimanphd.com.

They told you the fire dies at 50. They lied.

Desire Reset Guide is your 72-hour erotic reboot—where you'll unlock the arousal pathway buried in your nervous system, reclaim the raw hunger you were taught to suppress, and rewire your body to crave pleasure again.

Not because you're broken. Because you're ready to burn.

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Dr. Juls | Sexy After 50 Podcast
New episodes Wednesdays and Fridays, 5am CST

This podcast is for women over 50 navigating low desire, sexual disconnection, and body changes who want nervous-system-informed insight into libido, aliveness, intimacy, and embodied pleasure so they can move from tamed and underground to rebooted, alive, and unapologetically hungry.

Transcript

Audio Only - All Participants 0:02

In this episode, you'll discover why your pelvic floor isn't a Kegel problem, it's a nervous system problem, and that one shift changes everything about desire Sexy After 50. Improve sex and intimacy by healing your nervous system so you finally feel turned on and confident. We're waking up what never left, desire and fire. I'm Dr. Jules. Let's get to it Okay, girl. I need you to hang around, 'cause you're gonna learn why chronic stress grips your pelvic floor and shuts down desire before intimacy even begins. Two, I'm gonna help you understand why the research on women's sexual response means, "I never feel like it," is physiologically not failure. And you'll leave with a somatic practice that starts the conversation, right? Everything starts with a conversation between your nervous system, your pelvic floor, and your desire. So those are the three things I want you to hang around for, uh, 'cause we're gonna talk about it in this ses- in this session. Ha. It's like a session in this podcast. So, okay. One point of that triangle I just mentioned, your pelvic floor. Another, your nervous system. And the third Your desire. So we've got a triangle here. Pelvic floor, nervous system, desire. These three are not separate systems operating in polite independence from one another. They are the same conversation happening in three different rooms of your gorgeous, amazing body. And when one room goes silent, the other two go dark as well. So let me start with the research, because I want to walk... I w- I want you to walk out of this episode armed, feeling like, "Oh, okay, that makes complete sense. Good to know." Okay. And plus, I love the research. That's one thing, I just, I, I'm enjoying these podcasts so much, 'cause I get in, and I feel like I'm prepping for a class, uh, c- 'cause I am a professor, and I do prep for those classes. But, um, it's just so fun to get in the research and then share this stuff with y'all. Okay, so a systematic review and meta-analysis published in September 2025 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, and this is out of the University of Vigo in Spain, looks specifically at the effects of pelvic floor muscle training on sexual function in post-menopausal women. What they found, girl, it was not subtle. Across randomized clinical trials, pelvic floor training produced significant positive effects in arousal, orgasm, and overall sexual satisfaction. Sounds good, right? The effect sizes were large, y'all. Arousal improved at a standard mean difference of 1.87, orgasm at 1.91, and satisfaction at 2.16. So in research te- terms, those numbers mean something real and measurable is happening in the body. But here's what that study doesn't tell you, and what I want to fill in today. Pelvic floor training is not just about strengthening a muscle group. It is about restoring communication between your body and your nervous system, and that distinction, girl, that is everything. So let's be curious and think about what our pelvic floor is actually all about. So most of us have been taught that the pelvic floor is the thing you squeeze when you sneeze That is the beginning and the end of the cultural conversation around it. What women are rarely told is that the pelvic floor is a complex hammock of muscle, fascia, and connective tissue spanning the base of your pelvis. It supports your bladder, it supports your bowels, it supports your uterus. It participates in every breath you take, rising gently on the exhale, descending on the inhale. It is in constant, quiet dialogue with your diaphragm, your deep core, and your nervous system, and it is one of the primary places in the human body where unprocessed stress takes up residence. Research published in PLOS One in 2024 documented the physical manifestations of sustained psychological stress in women and found measurable correlations between chronic stress and hypertonicity of the pelvic floor. Hypertonicity means the muscles are not weak. They are gripped, chronically contracted, unable to release. The same research noted that pelvic floor hypertonicity is directly associated with dyspareunia, and that's painful, penetrative intercourse, and with reduced blood flow and sensation in the pelvic region. We're squeezing it to death 'cause we're so contracted. The researchers also found, y'all, measurable connections between pelvic floor hypertonicity and tension in your jaw. Women who clench their jaw under stress are often also clenching their pelvic floor. The body has stress patterns, and those patterns run deep. So when a woman over 50 says sex hurts or she feels nothing or arousal simply will not come online, the question her doctor rarely asks is, what is her pelvic floor doing between sexual encounters? Is it gripped? Has it been braced for years? Is it carrying the weight of a nervous system that never fully gets to rest? Are you ever asked that at the doctor? No. No, we're asked if we're safe at home. You know, they ask, they're checking for abuse, but they don't check about our stress and how our body is carrying it, and how that bracing might get in the way of our sexual pleasure So yeah, the nervous system is running the show, and here's the architecture to, you need to understand. See, your nervous system operates in two primary states. The first is in an activation state, your body's response to demand, pressure, threat, and stress. In this state, muscles brace. You're ready for impact, right? Breathing becomes shallow. Blood flow redirects to your extremities. The entire system organizes itself around surviving, managing, doing. The second state is a restoration state, the physiological condition the body enters when it registers safety. In this state, muscles soften. We surrender. I mean, that's such a big part of desire and being with your partner. Breathing deepens, blood return- returns to the core, digestion resumes, and crucially, arousal becomes physiologically possible. Girl, these two states cannot run simultaneously. You cannot be in survival mode and pleasure mode at the same time. And it's not a mindset issue. It is not a willingness issue. It is a biological fact, and for women in midlife who have been running on activation for years, managing careers, marriages, hormonal transitions, aging parents, children, and the invisible accumulation of decades of putting everyone first, the nervous system does not simply switch modes because someone initiates sex. The body is still in the meeting, still managing the inbox, still braced, and nowhere in the body Is that bracing more consequential for desire than in your pelvic floor? So a 2024 treatment algorithm published in obstet- the OBGYN, um, magazine named what clinicians are increa- it's not a magazine, it's a journal, but named what clinicians are increasingly recognizing that psycho- psychosocial stress, anxiety, and central nervous system sensitization all play direct roles in high tone pelvic floor dysfunction. The Cleveland Clinic, writing in 2025, stated it plainly: stress hormones, inflammation, muscle tension, and a nervous system on high alert can intensify pelvic pain and compound distress in a cycle that conversation alone rarely resolves. The floor is gripped, the nervous system is alarmed, and desire has gone quiet. Not because it left, she is still there, but because the body has not been given the conditions for desire to thrive So, we're gonna talk about Rosemary Basson and the model that reframes everything, because I wanna give you one more piece of science that I consider essential for every woman in the audience. Rosemary Basson, a Canadian physician and researcher, published a model of female sexual response in 2000 that changed how the field understands desire. The traditional model, the one most of us absorbed in cultural osmosis, 'cause we rarely were talked to about it, positions desire as the starting point, right? Oh, you magically, spontaneously feel desire, arousal follows, then pa-ta, orgasm. Well, Basson's model says for many of us women, that linear sequence is not the reality. So just, let's take a big deep breath and rest into that. Like, ah, okay, we're not broken. No, we are not broken. Desire is often responsive. It emerges during or after arousal, not before it. Women frequently begin from a place of willingness or receptivity, not spontaneous craving. They engage, arousal builds, and then desire, she arrives. But what this means for the woman over 50 who says she never feels like it is this, she may not be experiencing low desire at all. She may be experiencing a normal desire pattern in a body whose nervous system is too gripped to allow the arousal that would light the match. You're not broken. You're braced. The pelvic floor is the somatic record of that bracing, and releasing it with intention, with breath, with nervous system awareness is why the research produces the results it does Okay, lot of research to take in there. Re-listen to that. This is current research. Here's the exciting thing for me, and I hope y'all are hearing this, they're finally adding women over 50 into the research base. And not just over 50, I think just women period, but certainly those of us that have been told culturally that we're old has-been and to disappear, you know? Not the case. We still got a lot of life to live, a lot of sex to have, a lot of orgasms waiting for us. Okay. So moving to our chakra and somatic psychology. In chakra tradition, we're gonna talk about the second chakra, and we've talked about our sacral chakra a lot. But as y'all know, it's right below our navel. And what does it govern? I know y'all could probably repeat this with me. Creativity, pleasure, flow, sensation, desire. It is the home of the self inside the body. When you map chakra psychology onto nervous system science, which is why I love this, the precision is striking. When the sacral center is contracted, which ancient wisdom says happens when fear, shame, or unprocessed emotion is held in your body, the creative and sensual life force goes still That is the pelvic floor hypertonicity described in the language of the body's energy system. A gripped floor, a silent center, a desire that went underground, not because it died, but because the body stopped feeling safe enough to hold it. Healing your sacral chakra means restoring safety, we've got to feel safe to do anything with our body, and release in the body's center. Okay, so we've gotta feel safe. I missed a whole thought there. We've got to restore that safety, we've got to restore that flow, and we've got to release this into our body center. And it means giving the nervous system enough evidence of safety that the floor can soften, blood can return, your genitals need that blood and sensation, girl, can be felt again So I've got a somatic practice for you. It's sacral floor release, and you can begin it today. No referral needed. You can... No equipment is needed, just your breath, your body, and eight beautiful minutes of you taking care of you. So all you have to do is lie on your back, place a folded blanket or bolster under your knees, or simply bend your knees with feet flat. Close your eyes and place one hand on your lower belly, just below that navel. Place the other hand on the center of your chest. I need you to take three deep breaths and simply notice what you feel under your hands. Isn't that so much of what we do, we're just noticing? We're so busy. This is your time to be a being and just notice I don't want you to think what you sh- what should be there. All you need to do is notice what's actually there. Tension, stillness, warmth, just notice. And bring your awareness to the base of your pelvis. Not to grip it, not to squeeze it, simply to acknowledge it. Many women have never consciously placed their attention there outside a clinical context. The first time you do, you may notice resistance, blankness, or even emotion rising All of this is information. And what I'd really invite you to do as you're laying there, I want you to drop those knees open and let that fascia, let those tissues stretch just a little bit. That just, that's some release. That's a butterfly pose. You're doing a butterfly pose, a yoga pose, but just stretch. Ah, it's not even a stretch, it's just a release. Just let that fall open. On your next inhale, imagine the breath traveling all the way down into your pelvis, filling the base of your body like water filling a bowl. And on the exhale, invite the floor to soften. Do not force it, invite it. The exhale is the nervous system's natural release signal. Let the breath lead Continue for four breath cycles. Inhale into the bowl, exhale and soften the floor Now add an orienting element. Without lifting your head, allow your eyes to slowly scan the edges of the room. Ceiling, walls, familiar objects. Let your senses gather evidence that the present moment is safe. This signals to your brain that defense is not required right now. The nervous system begins that downshift. The floor softens further. Girl, stay here as long as it feels nourishing. And when you're ready, gently roll to one side before sitting up, and simply notice with curiosity what changes. What changed? The goal of this practice is not an orgasm. It's not performance. It is the restoration of a conversation between your nervous system and your body's center, a conversation that years of stress has interrupted. You just didn't have time for it. You are not fixing anything. You are returning home to your own dwelling So one more thing This is the integration practice, and before you close this episode, three questions to sit with, not to answer quickly, to feel into. Where in my daily life am I most chronically braced, not just emotionally, but physically? Where does my body grip before I'm even conscious of it? When was the last time I allowed my pelvis to soften? Not during sex, but, you know, think about during sex too, 'cause you really arrive different if you're softened and surrendered. But how about simply during rest, during a bath, during stillness What would it mean to let pleasure be something my body was built for? Not something I have to earn Right from the body, not the brain. Let your hand move and see what surfaces. Okay, we're gonna land this plane. Here's what we talked about today. The pelvic floor is not a muscle problem. It is a nervous system conversation, and chronic stress grips it, silences sensation, and closes the door on desire. Rosemary Basson's research on responsive desire means, "I never feel like it," is a physiology operating correctly. Desire cannot ignite in a body that is too gripped to allow the arousal that precedes. Pelvic floor release done with somatic intention and breath is one of the most evidence-backed and accessible practices available to women over 50, and it begins not with a Kegel, with an exhale This is Sexy After 50. This is the show for women who refuse to disappear, and I celebrate that you've been here with me today. I will see you on Friday

22:35

They told you the fire dies at 50. They lied. Tap the show notes to download Reignite Your Fire and Desire, your free 72-hour erotic reboot. Unlock the arousal pathway buried in your nervous system. Reclaim the raw hunger you were taught to suppress, and rewire your body to crave pleasure again. Not because you're broken, but because you're ready to burn. Move from invisible to incredible. I'm Dr. Jules. Keep burning