Jessica Badonsky Flips Your Sexual Script (From the Archive)
She's a Board certified FNP, podcaster and menopause healthcare provider who believes in your erotic power above all things.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Jessica identifies as an “intimacy and erotic power coach,” but she’s also a Family Nurse Practitioner with a thriving practice in The Bronx. Of all the sexual health professionals I’ve interviewed, she is the one whose message resonates most deeply for me. Her message of radical love for ourselves and each other could not be more relevant, and the deep care she gives to her clients and community is an inspiration. I hope you enjoy this interview from 2023, and please feel free with comments below. PS: You can work with her online! Links below.
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Hi, Jessica, Welcome to the Womancake interview! How is your workday going?
I just spent the whole entire day learning about STIs, sexually transmitted infections. One of the things that I've learned at this job, and that's because I've taken care of people as a nurse practitioner, [is] the importance of checking all of the areas of the body, when we're checking for sexually transmitted infections, and how much in particular, certain infections are missed. Because women, or people with vaginas, are just peeing in a little bottle to test their STIs, and we're really missing a lot.
Good to know! You are a Board certified Family Nurse Practitioner, and you’re also certified by the North American Menopause Society as a menopause provider. You're a sexual Wellness Coach with an almost 20-year background in women's health and wellness. When you look at the landscape of women's health and wellness in America right now, what are you most inspired by, and what is most concerning to you?
I'm absolutely inspired by the conversation that's happening around perimenopause and menopause. I also am very inspired [by] the conversation that's starting to happen around pleasure and sexual pleasure, because I think that's huge. There's a large gap that's missing when we think about how we teach young people about sex and sexuality. In my own thinking about Miss Humphrey, I think that was our [high school sex-ed] teacher, [the conversation] was always, and I think that it still is very much the case, around disease prevention and pregnancy prevention. There was no conversation [about] pleasure. When [America] did have the Surgeon General, Elders, who actually talked about self pleasure and masturbation as being brought in as part of sexual education, they just got rid of her lickety-split. So the current [focus on pleasure] is really exciting.
What is really concerning [goes] back to my day today. When we talk about sex and sexuality, and we talk about bodies, and we talk about pleasure, and we talk about STIs, I think that people don't put together the connection of health equity and STIs. Which communities get them more often, right? There's a definite inequality right there. Then we can think about black women and maternal death, and the fact that congenital syphilis has just been skyrocketing. So it's the inequality and the lack of conversation around how, if we can only know as a society, that there really is enough to go around. Your safety is important to me, as I hope that my safety is to you, my mother's safety, my cousins, my uncle, my aunt. Everyone's safety is important.
What you're talking about there, if I understand you correctly, is the lack of equity when it comes to information about health care, and the way that systemic racism and sexism affect various populations in different ways.
It's not only just health care, it [also] becomes access to health literacy, access to literacy. When it comes down to economics, then it comes down to [for example], a Plan B pill. We've lived our whole lives with the ability to have some autonomy, some kind of agency in our bodies, and that has been taken away. Whoever thought that was going to happen? It just becomes very, very fundamental. [The] economy, food deserts, it's all interconnected. We are all here for from sex, right? If sex didn't exist, neither would any of us. So it's just very complicated and deep.
I want to speak now to the part of you that is a menopause coach, and ask if you had any kind of advice you might offer to perimenopausal and menopausal women who are interested in increasing pleasure in their sex lives?
The first thing that comes to my mind is, how do you define pleasure, and how has pleasure possibly changed or not changed? We all have something called “the sexual script”. When we're talking about pleasure, the sexual script [can be something] like, “We only do it on Tuesdays, and the light is on. My partner comes to me and grabs the back of my neck in this one particular way. Then I smile, and then one of us takes a shower.” That's the sexual script. It's [about] redefining an understanding, [for example], “I actually really like to have my arm stroked gently,” and that becomes this erotic connection. I think that it's taking time to go within, and figuring out what is pleasurable, and what turns you on and what turns you off.
That would be the first thing, then we can get more into the physical. When we think about vaginal dryness, if it doesn't feel good to have your genitals touched in a particular way, say something. Maybe it's even just to yourself, “This has never felt good!”. And then absolutely going to talk to a provider, especially when we're in our 40s and into our 50s, and saying, “There's been a shift, there's been a change.” [You’re] trusting that you do actually know your body. You have lived in that body for decades.
Thank you, that's such an important message! The theme of our new issue is “guilty pleasure”. Do you have any kind of philosophy about it, or any guilty pleasures that you truly love?
Why do we have to associate guilt? That's the first thing, let's not make it guilty. But there are new things that I find that I take time for, because it brings me so much pleasure. I've always loved movement. I found this thing called Naughty Girl Fitness online. I love that it's a younger woman [who] talks about grabbing your hips and like, twerking. You're working out, but it's fun to move your body in a kind of essential way. I actually have to do it in the way that I find pleasure. And I love ice cream, I'm a mint chip fan. I can be really bougie and get that Van Leeuwen. And sometimes that will be my lunch.
I hear that! How does wisdom manifest in your life at this time?
It sometimes manifests when my teenage children listen to me. When I'm saying something, and they're looking at me, [but] they might be [acting] like, “This is so stupid!”. But you can catch them, you can see in their eyes that something has shifted, and they're actually taking some of it in. That's when I know that maybe I do know a thing or two.
Will you share an aspect of your character that you've grown to love and one that you still struggle with?
This is not a character thing, but I am neurodivergent. I have certifiable ADHD, and my editing skills of my mouth are not great. But I think that it's okay. Sometimes my inability to self-edit is just what's needed. I think I love my neuro divergence. I love the fact that I constantly have ideas coming into my head. I love the fact that I can't stay stuck in one thing. I'm not meant to do that. That's not who I am. I'm all over the place, and that's really okay, because I can create a lot of stuff and I can hold a lot of ideas.
Is there any kind of personal struggle that still manifests in your life right now?
There's a book coming out that I'm part of. I wrote a chapter in it about race. The book is for Black sexologists. I'm being very out about who I am, and that I am extremely light skinned, but my mother is a Black woman and therefore I am Black. Constantly saying it out loud and out front is hard for people, sometimes. My constant reminder to myself is that no matter how you look at me, or how my presentation brings up whatever feelings it brings up, I still want to hold in my heart that you, whoever you are, are my cousin. My very distant cousin, but you are my cousin. If I look at you that way, then it goes right back to safety. Knowing that I want [even] the most deplorable people I can think of to be safe.
My constant reminder to myself is that no matter how you look at me, or how my presentation brings up whatever feelings it brings up, I still want to hold in my heart that you, whoever you are, are my cousin. My very distant cousin, but you are my cousin. If I look at you that way, then it goes right back to safety. Knowing that I want [even] the most deplorable people I can think of to be safe.
Will you share an event from your life that created a distinct “before” and “after”, and what kind of wisdom you gleaned from the after?
Something very painful just happened, and although I'm still processing it, I know that there will be an “after”. This just happened on Sunday at [the] Juneteenth [celebration]. My family and I went to walk the 5k here in New York City. I wore a t- shirt that said, “Lightly melanated, hella Black.” We were walking on 92nd Street, right by Central Park, very fancy [area]. My husband and my youngest child were way ahead of us, already at the car. I was walking with my teenagers, and a family came walking past us. A tall white man. I assume he was white, and I'll tell you why, [he was] wearing a camouflage weighted vest. He had two kids, much taller than me. I heard a whisper in my ear as we walked past each other, and the whisper was, “I hope you die!”
I realized that my shirt was so offensive to him that he wished that I was dead. I'm still processing that. But it has fundamentally changed me, because what I realized is [that] there's the Loving Generation gap. There's a group of us born out of mixed race families. We're older now, we're all Gen X people who are moving into these wiser years. What I realized, and [this is] the first time I'm saying this publicly about this story, [is] that there are so many of us in this generation who look like me, that can remove the t-shirt. But our ancestors, the people that we are born from, had no t-shirt to remove. It's not that I didn't know that before, It was just very, very different [this time]. But I have to hold on to [the idea] that [that man] is my very, very, very distant cousin, and he is obviously scared. He wants safety for himself and his family, just as much as I want it for mine.
I think you have a lot of grace, Jessica, and it's very moving. Will you share a woman in your life who currently inspires you and why?
It's always my mother [Pat Bowie]. She’s 83, she's an actor. She's still working in the New York theater. She's [also] in, “And Just Like That”. My mother is strong. She's funny, like if you want to laugh at something inappropriate and almost pee on yourself, my mother's hilarious, and she is smart. She's really talented. My father and my mother had a swami, Swami Satchidananda. And so my father used to say, “Swami Satchidananda said, ‘If you dig lots of holes, you'll never hit water. But if you keep digging, keep digging, keep digging, you’ll hit water.’ That's what your mother did. She kept digging.” She's always been a force, she's just amazing to me!
WOW, I love her on that show, she commands the screen! Aside from her performance on AJLT, will you share a show or book or movie that you are currently enjoying?
I'm reading two books at once. One is called, “Klara And the Sun” [by Kazuo Ishiguro]. It's taken me a really long time to read it, but I really enjoyed it because I like science fiction. I'm [also] reading one [called, “After The Lights Go Out”] that's about an MMA fighter who's got mental health stuff.
Great! Will you talk more about the book you mentioned for black sexologists?
It's called, “The People's Book of Human Sexuality”, and the editor and author is Bianca Laureano. It’s set up into three different sections. I'm in the second section. My chapter is [about] the erotic power of the professional nurse, and the body they move in. The idea of that is when I talked about the erotic power, it's based off of Audrey Lorde’s, “Uses of The Erotic: The Erotic As Power”, which is extremely meaningful to me [and] is kind of the basis of when I've done coaching around that concept, where the erotic is really what some people call the feminine energy. Audrey Lorde talked about once you once you tap into that internal knowing you cannot turn away, you can no longer deny it. In nursing there's this whole theory of, “novice to expert”. When you are an expert, your intuition is one of the primary things that lead you into being a good nurse. [For example], “I know that patient is about to go off, I just know it. And yes, the vitals look good but I'm telling you right now they're gonna crash in five minutes!”. That, to me, is that erotic power that comes into nursing, from your deep intuition, [and] using the body as well.
This post has been edited for length and clarity.
Jessica can be found via her website, where she has all kinds of offerings for midlife and menopausal women.