About

Pamela Madsen is a fearless advocate for women’s health and integrated sexuality. During her 25-year career, Pamela has leveraged her raw honesty and well-informed wit to help strip the stigma from infertility, female desire and pleasure, body image and weight . The willingness to use her personal struggles to have children, discover her innate sexuality and find self-esteem has made Pamela one of the most accessible and relatable figures in the vanguard of women’s wellness.

Pamela’s trademark openness and humor blew the lid off one of the worst kept secrets in this country: the power of the erotic core buried inside every woman to transform her life. With Shameless: How I Ditched The Diet, Got Naked, Found True Pleasure and Still Got Home In Time To Cook Dinner (Rodale, January 2011), she wrote a frank, touching and bestselling memoir that has become a rallying cry for thousands of women who find that they’ve spent lifetimes sublimating their sexuality, often with dire consequences to their physical, emotional and relationship well-being.

Taking the hard-won lessons of her own self-discovery on the road, Pamela meets with women across the country — every day mothers, daughters, wives and girlfriends — inspiring them to find their own paths to becoming women in full. She talks from the heart about connecting to one’s true erotic identity and using that life force to relax in their own skin, strengthen their relationships, and seize opportunities they once thought out of reach. Pamela is their soul sister, the slightly chubby woman next door who’s found the secret sauce. And as Sassy and Jane magazines founder Jane Pratt recently said of Pamela, “I want what she’s having.”

A veteran speaker and educator, Pamela is a renowned blogger, who writes for Psychology Today, The Fertility Advocate and episodically, the The Huffington Post. She’s advising members of her gated online community, found at beingshameless.com, how to access the transformative power of pleasure. She brings it home on the speaker circuit, in face-to-face workshops, one-on-one coaching sessions, women’s circles and in book clubs.

During a recent six-week cross-country tour, Pamela spoke to thousands of people at venues as varied as big independent bookstores and specialized conferences such as The Curvy Revolution. She appeared alongside thought leaders, Marianne Williamson and Maya Angelou among them, at the virtual Women’s International Summit For Health.

After her years as the Founder and first Executive Director of The American Fertility Association, Pamela has become a trusted media resource. She’s recently appeared on CNN, AARP Primetime Radio, The Dr. Laura Berman Show, FLOURISH (Dr. Christiane Northrop’s radio show), The Jane Pratt Show and Playboy Radio to name a few. She’s been featured in Newsweek, Vogue, 60 Minutes and Oprah.

Pamela lives in Riverdale, NY with her extraordinarily patient and supportive husband of 30 years and two young adult sons, who learned well from their father.

SHAMELESS is her first book published by Rodale Books in January 2011.

Maybe it’s a congenital disorder. Maybe it’s something I learned as an itty-bitty baby. But when I find something wonderful or liberating or even mildly helpful, I can’t keep my mouth shut. Even my mother, the original unfiltered talker, marvels at my compulsion to spill the beans whenever I’m on a mission.

Over the past four years, I took a pretty zany voyage from an honest-to-goodness repressed, monogamous, middle-aged, hyper-achieving, chubby woman with two kids to an honest-to-goodness monogamous, middle-aged, accomplished chubby “sex goddess” with two kids.

Once I owned up to my deepest, untapped desires, I discovered a wellspring of happiness and self-confidence inside me that extended to every part of my life. Whoa! I thought. This is incredible! Everyone should know they have the power to experience life in all its richness right now, just as they are. No diets, no plastic surgery, no nothing. Just intact, healthy sexuality.

If I can stop warring with my weight and workaholism, I think most people can. I know that when I stopped denying my hearty and normal sexual appetites, I started losing my uncontrollable urges to overeat, overwork and over-compensate. For the first time, I could relax in my own skin.

Admitting your desires takes a tanker-load of courage, and a rip-stop web of support. That’s what I’m here to provide. That’s my mission. That’s why I wrote SHAMELESS.

Even if it’s a bit outside the box for a respected advocate in the infertility field, I believe it is essential to speak up about healthy sexuality.

With few nonprofessional people willing to speak openly about the power of sensuality, the average sexually curious person is stuck with dry textbooks or fictional characters that they can enjoy but can’t emulate. I ain’t no Cougar Town Courtney Cox. Most men I know aren’t starring in Hung. But it doesn’t mean we can’t feel as sexy. And when we feel that sexy, that good about ourselves, when we feel we deserve pleasure, and lots of it, that’s when so many things that seemed impossible can become our new reality. As Dr. Christiane Northrup so succinctly put it, “Pleasure is a life-changer.”

Who better to write a tell-all about allowing pleasure to change your life than a woman who lived it and can’t keep a secret? Yeah, I know. I’m shameless.