Bonus Episode: The Nine Lives Of Woman: Sensual, Sexual and Reproductive Stages From Birth To 100

Podcast
Written By Geneva Tolentino

What if every stage of a woman’s life—from early girlhood all the way to elderhood—was met with celebration, clarity, and empowerment?

SHOW NOTES | TRANSCRIPT

In this special bonus episode, Christine Marie Mason will share a preview of "The Nine Lives of Woman: Sensual, Sexual, and Reproductive Stages from Birth to 100”, a groundbreaking exploration of female sensuality, sexuality, and personal development. Drawing from her years of research and personal experience, Christine challenges traditional narratives about women's life stages, offering a revolutionary perspective that celebrates embodiment, empowerment, and the unchanging essence of the feminine spirit. This book shares intimate insights and a vision for a world where every woman's journey is honored, understood, and embraced.

.In this episode, we cover:

  • Launch of "Nine Lives of Woman"

  • Modern Reproduction Choices and Technologies

  • Introduction - Vision of New Awareness

  • Inspiration and motivation in writing this book

  • The Continuum of Becoming and Cultural Programming

  • The Androgynous Soul and Genderless Essence

  • Stages of Women's Lives and Developmental Markers

  • Support and Acknowledgments


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TRANSCRIPT

Christine Mason  0:00  

Christine. Hi everybody. It's Christine remason, and today is kind of a special episode and a special day for me, because I am officially launching my new book, The Nine Lives of woman, sensuality, sexuality and reproductive stages from birth to 100 so I'm going to read a little bit from that today, but first I wanted to tell you a little bit about the background of the book and what I hope it will accomplish. So I've been working in women's health for about eight years, and in tantric sexuality for about 15 years, as well as of having lived through many stages of direct experience as a mother, home, births, hospital, births, many children, nursing, living in communities, of raising daughters, all kinds of things, as well as having interviewed hundreds of people for the podcast and hundreds of people individually for personal narratives about their own experience of being in a female body. So over the years, I sort of came across this idea of the archetypes of a woman's life as Maiden, matron and Crone, and those archetypes are literally defined by your relationship to the ability to bear a child. So maiden has come of age and fertility but has not yet borne a child. Matron has borne a child and can still bear children, and crone is past the age of bearing children, and so you have this objectified definition of archetypes and stages that are related to bearing a child, and that seemed to me to be such an outdated way of understanding our life stages. So I began to look for archetypes that would be more inclusive. And knowing what I know about child development, about developmental stages, about spiritual development, knowing what I know about science and technology, about longevity, that we're now living 30 years or 40 years past our reproductive prime, and that that's fundamentally changed the game, I started to really think through an architect, a new way of seeing these life cycles. And it might sound strange to begin with birth to 12 or birth to first period, but what I became aware of is that how we show up sensually and sexually in our older life is deeply tied to how we're raised from zero to 12, that you don't have girls just showing up Venus on a half shell at 14, being able to say, this is what I desire, and being able to say a strong No, if they haven't been raised with that already. So the book is divided into nine stages. When I first started researching and writing, I was stunned that after menopause, which is about 52 or 53 for most women that it was just called post menopause, that was it as if you were a static thing from that point on. And that seemed to me utterly unlikely. So I started looking at the stages of gerontological development. And it turns out that there are very distinct stages after menopause that I'm calling the free period, the glide and the resolution. So post menopause, one, two and three, and that each of these have different social cultural needs, spiritual needs, emotional needs and sexual needs. Women are very sexual, much longer than the dominant culture would have you believe. So as I was writing, you know, it was very challenging to decide, like, what to include and what not to include, because, you know, it's such a complexity. Even in writing about the stage between getting your period and having your first intercourse experience, which in the United States, on average, is 17. So between 12 and 17, you know, what is your developmental task, learning how to ride your body, belonging, becoming fully yourself, working with your period, becoming body literate, and then from intercourse to the stage of maternal intent, like you might want to be a mother. Then, you know, people are having a lot of sex, but they don't want to get pregnant. So in this stage, you're also talking about all of the issues of birth control, you're talking about sexual violence, you're learning about how your sensuality and your sexual identity and your maturity into in sort of understanding what you like and and what you want and and how to speak that in a relational field. You know all of that is coming online. And then when you do finally make a decision to mother or not to mother, the girls, the women, the young women of our time, are having a completely unique experience from anything that has ever happened in human history before. You know, it wasn't even that long ago that deciding whether or not to have a child wasn't even an option. You know, although one in five women throughout history have ended their reproductive years without having born a child. That was usually because, you know, they they hadn't married. Circumstance didn't work out that way. They might have been barren. They might have been lesbian. There's a lot of reasons, cultural choice, but now a young woman can say, Should I have a child? Now it's one in four. Women will end their reproductive years in the West without having any children, and one in three in some parts of Asia, I think Tokyo. So increasingly, should I have a child? Is a question that they're able to ask. And then who should I have it with? You were previously constrained to having it with someone who was your husband for life, but now it's donors and it's all kinds of artificial reproductive technology enhancements that are available. It's friend babies and people who have seen that the fabric of the marital contract is shallower, is weaker than the length of parenting. So why not separate the questions of marriage and parenting? Very interesting idea, right? And then, when should I have the child? So now you have all of these technologies around in vitro fertilization that was just starting to happen. I can remember the first what they called it test tube baby, way back in 1978 but that technology is ubiquitous now, girls in their 20s are freezing their eggs just in case, but there's a lot of complications with that. So then you have questions around like, should I have a child because of the population? Should I have a child because of climate? Can I even have a child because of endocrine disruption? So a lot of that stuff's in the book. And then if you do decide to have a baby, there's a lot of things that I cover in the book at this stage, around the postpartum period, and honoring these cycles of your birth and and doing it in a way that combines the best of Western medical knowledge and the best of indigenous and traditional knowledge about how to make a birth go super easy and maybe even be orgasmic. French obstetrician Michel o'donne talks about that. So that's also in the book. Now we get into perimenopause. We get into menopause, active menopause, those few years of like, ugh. So much is going on, so much ups and downs, often that's considered almost like adolescents in reverse, because the same level of hormonal fluctuation is happening, and then the delicious time known as the free period. So I'm going to leave the rest of the conversation about you know, what is contained in the book for you to read in the book, and I'm going to make a specific ask. And I rarely do this because it's considered selling, but I've put so much energy and effort into bringing this to fruition, and I feel it has such a beautiful message about living every day of your life in awareness of the Divine perfect essence that is unchanging, but also in complete joy and embodiment of all the stages of your life. And I really would like us as people, men and women, to release the judgment and the shame and the confusion that comes with being in a body and to release from this moment forward, any kind of self abandonment or self Abnegation that comes around being an argument with your body. So whether you're coming of age and you're just not sure you like your legs, or you're going into perimenopause and you're not sure you've got it anymore, or you're an elder who's got some failure in the systems of the body, know that it's all beautiful and perfect and that your golden essence does not change. So I'd love for people to read it, get informed, and I end every chapter with a section on empathizing with people in each stage like what they're going through. So I'm also hoping that the book will increase cross generational conversations, conversations between the genders, will increase empathy and all of our understanding of what it means to be alive on the earth plane, in this body. So I'd like to take some time now to read a little bit from the beginning of the book. And then if you could go to my website, Christine mariemason.com, and the book, as I said, launches on April 1. If you pre purchase it on Kindle, it's going to be up on Kindle for a small fee for the first three days of its launch to encourage people to buy it and to leave reviews, and then it'll go back to a normal pricing so Christine mariemason.com from the Books page has the links, or you can look up Christine Marie Mason on Amazon and find it there.


Introduction, a vision to live into all stages of a woman's life are celebrated and understood. Women and girls know their worthiness and their capacity, we revel in the wonder of our bodies and enjoy bearing and raising children in choice. These choices are respected and celebrated by the organizations we run and those in which we work. We play sensually and sexually in deeply satisfying ways until the desire to do so departs very late in our lives. Ideally, we are embodied, happy and sovereign. We are free of shame and positively connected to our desires. There is acceptance of sexual identity and sexual preference. Everyone expresses her or his individual gifts in an environment where all people get to be strong and self possessed, and all people get to be receptive for. Regardless of their gender, each person views the other as a mirror, a spark of the same consciousness. The many feel themselves as one. Okay, so that's a vision that I had, and that's included in the introduction. But to make this vision real, we need to develop a new awareness in ourselves and lean into each other to unwind some of the cultural programming that still lingers in our systems. When I was growing up in the 1970s the women's movement had ignited, but it had yet to touch life, and my small Midwestern suburb coming of age as a young woman was patterned by a sort of Hush, hush repression. And as my mother died when I was 11, my father and eventually my wonderful stepmother and both sets of my grandmothers in the US and in Germany raised me. They were both Catholic, still in the throes of the Madonna whore framing of the feminine, not yet touched by Mary Magdalene as the first apostle. More on that later. So when I got my first period, my grandmother said nothing, and just handed me a welcome kit from Kotex. My father took me shopping for my first bra, but dropped me off in the department store and waited for me outside. Sex Education in my school was only about basic biological information. We learned about our period, breast development, armpit hair, and later in high school, we were taught about contraception. They split the boys and girls into two separate groups, but they didn't teach about relationships or offer any cultural context for sex, there was no conversation around what to do with the energy and the power of sexuality coming from and through your body. As a young girl, the message was, look really cute and sexy, but do not under any circumstances, act on it. And this was reinforced in many ways at home and school. For example, when my father remarried, his new wife called me a slut if I stayed out past nine o'clock, I was utterly confused by these messages and the right way to be. I wanted to better understand the boundary between being attractive and having a good time and being with my friends and being a slut when I fell in love at 16, I was a freshman in college, and I became pregnant with this man at 18, and we married by 22 I had three children and a degree from Northwestern University. I lacked consciousness around my choices, but it all turned out all right. I completed an MBA and moved into the work world, mostly in the field of technology, and I saw how hard it was to have children and be the most efficient worker I could be. In their eyes, how there was little space to offer my genius and be a great parent. When my fourth child was on the way, I made a decision to start my own company so I could own my time and craft a culture that worked for my life as a mother who wanted to work on her own terms, and that went very well around the same time, I also started to come to terms with my experiences with suppressed emotions and body shame and sexual shame. I began to intellectually dive into thinking around sexuality, liberation, theology and consciousness, I felt like culture was not giving enough attention to women's psycho biology and psycho emotional lives, and that we were still living into and reinforcing many of the paradigms that came from the era in which I grew up, if not before. So I started to reclaim a feminine aspect of myself. That journey launched me deeply into decades of Yoga Tantra, trauma, healing, PhD studies in consciousness, ecology and the divine feminine, I shifted from technological futurism to qualitative futurism, with ideas around how we can create a future that works better for all people, especially for women. And I believe that if you heal and balance the woman, it will also heal and balance men. So in 2017 I started Rosebud woman, a company which began by offering organic products to support women's intimate health and promote self love at every stage of a woman's life, from girlhood through menopause and into elderhood. I wrote several books on intimate self care and reverent living. Now I'm a grandmother about two thirds of the way through this life in this body, Goddess willing looking back and looking ahead at the same time, and I feel like a human bridge between the generations. I have strived for a long time to move in the world in the energy of truth and unconditional love. I have attempted, through my writing and the rose woman podcast, to expose the blind spots, the places where there is secrecy and the cultural biases that we don't even see, because secrecy and liberation don't mix well. So I say this. What if you grew up knowing that you were perfectly beautiful, that your sexuality was natural and joyful, and that every sensual, sexual and reproductive interaction in your life would be guided by reverence and freedom of choice. And moreover, what if there was no question that living as you do in a female body meant total inclusion and equal opportunity everywhere. And can you imagine if your mother and grandmother had felt that way too. I'm basically a human who spent years helping people love their bodies more, get super curious about their lives and live with greater peace, purpose and power. I've been exploring healing methods for transgenerational and cultural trauma, and I've seen firsthand that we can lift the inherited karmas and patterning around life in a female body. Although decades have passed since the so called Sexual Revolution, data and surveys consistently show pervasive gaps in women's knowledge around their bodies, coupled with trauma and shame around sexuality. And these gaps lead to needless health issues, emotional and psychological distress, unsatisfying sexual experiences and vulnerability. To violence and predation. So as long as sexual taboos remain unchallenged in our institutions, education, media, economics, culture, politics, medicine, and as long as unhelpful beliefs about women's bodies remain internalized by women themselves, the suffering will continue. So it's crucial to note that it's not only men perpetuating shame on women, other women, mothers, grandmothers, elders, peers can unknowingly transmit the same limiting stories they themselves inherited. So when daughters try to break free of these narratives, conflict might arise. Healing the maternal line through forgiveness and conscious rewriting of these stories becomes an essential step in freeing ourselves and the next generation. Alright? So I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit further into the introduction, and this is a little section called the continuum of becoming. We are always moving in gradations from one stage to the next in our lives, never truly standing still. As older women, we still have the girl child within us. As adults, our very first sexual experiences still live in us as girls, the imprint of our mothers and grandmothers experiences in the milk we drink and the air we breathe when we're not sharing across the life stages or acknowledging the continuum of becoming there can also be a sense of isolation. So as we open our hearts to each other, we might extend a hand across the age spectrum, so a 50 year old woman will know what 13 year olds today are dealing with as they come of age at this time in history, and 15 year old girls understand what a 90 year old woman experiences in her body as part of the natural progression of life in a body and when it comes to sexuality and life stages, the secrecy, the confusion, the lack of information and anxiety can cause some women to put on a mask and hold their feelings alone, especially what are sometimes called negative feelings such as sadness, rejection and shame, by encouraging and participating in a richer dialog across life stages, we can all contribute to this new vision for what it might be like to live happily in your body your whole life long, and to create a world that incorporates biological differences instead of repressing them. So I'd like to speak now to differences between gendered bodies. More specifically, while women have been progressively gaining control over our reproductive choices, greater civil liberties and more socioeconomic power in the last 100 years, the price we paid for economic and civil parity was often to assimilate into male structures. So we attempted to neutralize or mask our biology and be more like men, aspirationally replicating existing power models, and we did this to fit in and get as far as we have. But maybe that's not needed as much as it once was. Women are still intertwined with our biology. Our hormones change in every stage, from early teen menstruation to our fertility prime to menopause and beyond, and we can't be complicit in the attempt to scrub women's biological realities from the pathways to power and recognition The world needs to shift to accommodate a broader range of Embodied Reality. Culture has also imposed a narrative that we have bought into and carry around with us, that female biology is something unpredictable and wild, something to be overcome or neutralized, when in fact, it's a potent well of strength, intuition, attunement, insight and intelligence. So rather than repress our biological realities, we are invited to work with them as we see and understand the science and the narratives of these stages and the way we're living through them, we can choose how we want to evolve. It does a disservice to deny the beauty in the differences between masculine or feminine or in the non binary or blended genders, and to deny the genius in all of the stages of our lives, we don't gain anything by overriding our biology, but everything by working with it.


All right, here's another little section also from the introduction. It's called the androgynous soul. Our biological gender and its embodiments seem to matter to the culture we live in, but the soul itself and the fabric of life is genderless. We live in a reductionist model of gender as a valuable marker of a creature's relative importance, collectively forgetting that life itself, based on the DNA code shared by every living thing on earth, has no gender. DNA has no gender. It merely encodes it. There is no preference expressed in nature. It is 5050, all the way around. If we lived in a culture that remembered that its own natural state is a balance of male and female, all needed, all worthy, rather than a hierarchy wherein one is better than the other, we wouldn't need a correction. So all people, men and women, might remember that they are genderless before they are gendered and we might start then to connect with a concept called the divine androgyn or the natural state of our soul, half the masculine principle and half the feminine principle, half female and half male, half our mother and half our father. At this soul level, the principles of masculine and feminine are distilled as strength and receptivity, and they live in equal balance in women and in men, we aspire to this balance. Women without strength and agency are wishy washy and ineffective, and men without receptivity are rigid and violent. All beings need both. So in the coming chapters, I propose a new framework for the stages of women's lives, from the child becoming a young woman to a deepened understanding of the phases of elderhood. Each chapter can. Contains scientific and cultural resources, as well as interviews with researchers and thinkers about each stage. By sharing positive stories of women in each stage, I'm also aiming to create more joy in this cross generational conversation. It is my hope that a better understanding of what women go through over their whole life cycle will help us to redesign or reconsider institutions and cultural systems so that they better work for all of us, and thus invite more reverence and respect to all of the humans on Earth. So again, I said there were nine stages, and each of those has different brain, body and social markers. And I will say again that all of the Ages and Stages are fluid, as each woman is different. They're guidelines, not rules. For example, I use averages for the chapter headers, but men arch the first period that I pin at 12 because it's the average age can happen between nine and 15. Menopause, the average age being 51 can happen between 45 and 62 and perimenopause has been known to begin at 35 but for the most part, it comes on in the mid 40s. And also, I want to say that developmental stages I reference in this book are necessarily linear. If you didn't learn who you were and how to belong when you were young, you might have to double back at 50 to find that out. It's still possible, especially for experiences in communication, styles and things you never learned when you were younger, like your sexual preferences, your identity, your way to speak your desire into the world. And maybe most importantly, throughout the work, I aim to hold a steady thread that while our biology and roles seem to change drastically from birth to elderhood, there is an unchanging essence, our unique soul, light that remains a steady backdrop throughout and of course, because I am a unity, consciousness person, I come from a perspective that everything belongs, that diversity is a gift, and that everything in nature, even technology, which comes from our organic brains and organic materials, therefore also from nature, is included. So I inquire into technology with neutral curiosity, not judgment. Finally, I will say the book's focus is on cisgender women, regardless of sexual preference, but I do talk briefly about intersex and transgender science in chapter one of this book, anyone who has female parts and cycles will find personally useful information, as Will anybody who cares for people who has female parts and cycles. Let me just give you because I really want you to get the book. Let me just give you some of the headers from some of the upcoming chapters. So here are a few of the chapter sub headers. In stage one, trusting a child's inner knowing all the eggs she will ever have, teaching body sense touch mothers carry the culture of woman hitting them. And in stage two, here's some examples. Body changes, first blood, becoming and belonging, first love and deep friendship, non judgment, introducing a girl to the divine feminine, to her body as sacred Earth, early bloomers with larger breasts in stage three. Here's just a few again, of the sub headers, the young adult brain coming into yourself, cultivating body piece, body image and sexuality, the erotic blueprint, the magical, immense clitoris, orgasm parody, the field beyond shame. I mean, there's a lot in there. That's just a small sub segment. Let's talk birth control, miscarriage and abortion, safety and womanhood in the tressons. Here's a few of the sub headers, technological advancements in reproduction, childbearing, choice later babies, child free by choice or involuntarily, child free. Cultivating the erotic mind and deliberate Eros in the stage of being a mother on perimenopause. There's also reclaiming your hormones, the explant movement, the menopausal hormone window, if you're going to take HRT talking to your kids about it, sexuality and increasing discernment in this stage, the female brain at midlife comes in stage six. Are you ageist against yourself? 1000 follicles, the onset of natural menopause, sleep, body scaffolding, becoming a grandmother, and the evolutionary role of menopause, the grandmother hypothesis and its role in evolution, reframing midlife relationships, singleness and sex in midlife, the croning, etc. I hope that that preview sparked some interest in getting this book, and it's releasing April 1 2025 on Amazon Kindle, as well as on my site in print christinemariemason.com, if you appreciate the show and you appreciate the work, I would love your support. Thank you to everyone from Rosebud woman to my family and friends who've been available for these kinds of conversations for a very long time, to everyone who's been a guest on the podcast, who's covered these topics with me, to everyone who's been interviewed and willingly answered questions, to the women at Rosebud who took the surveys on sexuality in later life that led to many of the motivations and insights for writing the book. But. By the way, including a fun fact that when you ask women who is the easiest and hardest person to talk to about sexuality and sensuality, they all 201, in every generation say the hardest person to talk to is their own mother. So that was one good reason. We have to stop that people, we gotta start talking to one another across the life stages. So thank you again for your support as always, you guys are an amazing community and audience. Thank you so much for the way that you support the show, and I hope you enjoy this as a love offering from me. So as we conclude today's shorty episode on the nine lives of women, Please once again, thank rosebud. Rosewoman.com and radiant farms. Radiant farms.us psychoactive gummies for wellness throughout all the weird things that happen in our culture, kava for social anxiety, Kana for heart opening, etc, etc, etc. Radiant farms.us know that if you support them, you are supporting the production of the show and the production of the book. All right, all love, all the time. Remember your own divine essence, your beautiful soul, light, that part of you that is never dimmed from birth until your last breath. Namaste. You.




Geneva Tolentino
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