Susan Bratton has spent over twenty years as what she calls a "trusted hot sex advisor" - a description that is deliberately unpretentious about what the work actually involves. She comes from Silicon Valley, where she ran a tech company before pivoting to sexual health and intimacy education. That background shows in how she thinks: systematically, with a focus on outcomes, and with a frustration about an industry that keeps selling products to people who need skills.
Her opening position is blunt: "You can't vibrator your way to sexual fulfilment." The industry's default response to dissatisfaction in the bedroom is a new product. Bratton's argument is that products are a small part of a much larger picture, and that the education piece - the skills, the communication frameworks, the body knowledge - is where the real transformation happens and where the industry consistently underinvests.
"Millions of people have what I call bedroom boredom," she says. "And they think there's something wrong with them when really they just need new techniques, more variety, and better communication skills." The reframe matters. Pathologising a common experience keeps people stuck. Normalising it - and pointing them toward learnable solutions - is what actually moves things forward.
The technique transfer nobody is talking about
One of the most interesting arguments Bratton makes is about where the most advanced sexual techniques come from. The answer is not where most people would guess: it's clinical work with people who have sexual dysfunctions. Techniques developed to address numbness, anorgasmia, erectile issues, and post-surgical desensitisation have produced some of the most sophisticated body-based practices available. And almost none of that knowledge is reaching the mainstream audience that could benefit from it.
"The techniques developed for people with the most challenging sexual health issues are the most advanced tools we have. And they work for everyone." This is the transfer argument: if a method can reliably produce sensation for someone with significant nerve damage, it will produce significantly more sensation for someone without it. The ceiling is higher than most people realise, because most people have never been taught by anyone who learned from that clinical baseline.
For brands in the sexual wellness space, this is an argument for investing in genuine education at the product level. Not "how to use this toy in three steps" but "here is what is actually happening in your body, here is why this technique works, here is how to build the skill." The brands that fund that kind of content - or partner with educators who can deliver it - are doing something meaningfully different from the ones selling novelty.
On bedroom boredom, and the audience nobody is serving properly
Bratton is specific about who she works with and why. Women over 40 are her primary audience, and her argument is that they represent both the most underserved demographic in sexual wellness and the highest-value one. They have disposable income, they're past the stage of worrying what people think, and they are actively looking for solutions to real problems - dryness, reduced sensation, changes in libido, partners who haven't kept up with their evolving needs.
"These women are not embarrassed anymore. They want answers. They want to actually fix the problem, not just feel temporarily better about it."
The industry's response to this audience has largely been lubricants and low-stimulation toys. Bratton's argument is that these women want education and transformation, not just products. The concept she returns to is what she calls becoming "sexual soulmates" - partners who have developed the knowledge, the communication skills, and the shared practice to have genuinely satisfying sex across decades of a relationship. That is a goal, not a product category. And it requires education, not just hardware.
The "benevolent bedroom bully" - and what it means for how brands talk about pleasure
Bratton uses a phrase that will make some people uncomfortable: the "benevolent bedroom bully." She means it precisely, not provocatively. It describes the partner who has learned enough - about technique, about their partner's body, about communication - to take confident initiative from a place of genuine care. Not dominance for its own sake. Competence expressed as leadership.
The reason the phrase is worth engaging with is that it points to something the industry's language often obscures: that good sex involves someone knowing what they're doing. The wellness-adjacent framing of sexual content - soft, affirming, always collaborative in a way that implies no one is ever more capable than anyone else - can inadvertently suggest that skill doesn't matter. Bratton's position is that skill matters enormously, that it is learnable, and that the person who invests in learning it changes the experience for both people in the room.
For brands, this is an argument about the level of education their content should be aiming for. "Here are some tips for a better night" is not the same as "here is a structured practice you can develop over time." The former generates a click. The latter generates a customer who comes back.
What she looks for in brand partnerships
Bratton is selective about what she works with, and the distinction she draws is between brands that are genuinely transformational and brands that are recreational. She is interested in the former. Recreational products are fine; they are not what she puts her name to.
"I want to work with brands that are actually changing people's intimate lives. Not just giving them a new thing to try." The bar is whether the product or the content makes a measurable difference to someone's experience of sex and intimacy over time. A toy that adds novelty for one evening does not clear it. A product paired with genuine education about technique and body knowledge might.
She is also specific about transparency. Brands that exaggerate what their products do - that promise transformation through a device alone - create a trust problem for the whole category. When the product doesn't deliver the promised experience, the customer doesn't blame the marketing. They blame themselves. That cycle of self-blame is exactly what Bratton's work is trying to break.
Find Susan Bratton at SusanBratton.com and at @susanbratton on social platforms.
