Good Clean Reads

Everyone always talks about becoming environmentally aware in their home or business, but what about becoming aware while on a date? Here are 4 ways to make that transition now! 

May is “International Masturbation Month,” and here at Good Clean Love, we don’t shy away from talking about masturbation and self-pleasure. We agree with physicians and sex therapists the world over that it is a natural part of a sexually healthy life. 

To celebrate, we’re sharing four things you might not know about masturbation and the practice of self-pleasure.

“Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.”  E.E. Cummings

Days are becoming balmy, daylight lasting into evening, and the flowering trees are now awash in color. If ever there was a moment that the kiss was invented somehow I am sure it was when the world awoke to springtime.  It’s hard to imagine a world in which we didn’t kiss- no wonder that the earliest recorded kisses date back to the very beginning of recorded time. The ancient Indian Vedic scriptures describe lovers “setting mouth to mouth”. Even earlier, historians have understood the kiss as the foundation of our biological drive to reproduce. The earliest recorded kissing began with the practice of brushing noses which allowed potential partners to immediately identify whether the match was compatible.

It was almost a year ago that I got word that my book, Sex that Works, was accepted for publication by Sounds True. Initially, I had offered that the subtitle of the book should be Learning to Feel, which instead became the introduction. It could have been the entire book, because no matter what aspect of our life we ponder- whether we are thinking about work, family, or our social or intimate life- what we refuse to feel keeps us separate from what we know to be true and affects how we can connect...

“Imagine living a life when the only sex you can get is to force yourself on someone who doesn’t want you. That kind of sex is an act of violence, and not only towards the victim…”

Almost all of the interviews that I do these days are about consent, or more aptly the lack of it on college campuses. Reporters often begin these interviews believing that this issue is isolated to our youth, that...

“Sex is always about emotions.  Good sex is about free emotions; bad sex is about blocked emotions.”  Deepak Chopra

Here is the sad truth about the sex lives in many long-term partnerships: often it is either the glue that keeps the relationship strong or the thorn in its side, a source of persistent pain and discord. Endless books and articles substantiate both the frequency and damage of the...

"We must give more in order to get more. It is the generous giving of ourselves that produces the generous harvest. " Orison MardenOne of the saddest of all statistics on our collective sexual health is about how little time we spend on it, with the average sexual act lasting only 7-12 minutes. Sexual foreplay is the moments when the arousal mechanism in the limbic brain gets to align with the blood flow to the genitals, enriching sensory experiences.

“The real vulnerability is not from taking off our clothes together, but in baring our hearts to one another…”  Wendy Strgar, Sex that Works

“Masturbation: the primary sexual activity of mankind. In the nineteenth century it was a disease; in the twentieth, it’s a cure.” — Thomas Szasz

Although there is no chapter dedicated specifically to effects of masturbation on health in my new book Sex that Works, I refer often to why self-pleasure is so essential to moving towards a healthy relationship with pleasure itself. In fact, sex...