Good Clean Reads

Why would you want to smell like everyone else? That's one of the questions we asked ourselves when we started to learn about the dangers of synthetic perfumes and fragrances. By "synthetic perfumes and fragrances," we mean most of the perfumes you see (and smell) when you walk into a department store. In 2015, department stores stocked 1,165 fragrance brands (nearly twice as many as they carried in 2002). But the thing is, 95% of the chemicals in most of these fragrances are derived from petrochemicals.

“We erase female pleasure…it puts girls not only at a disadvantage in terms of having a satisfying sexual experience but also just having an equal relationship.” Peggy Orenstein

“He liked it. That’s enough for me.” Our mothers said it about sex, as did our grandmothers. And yet disturbingly, our thoroughly modern daughters whose evolution and potential has dramatically risen, with higher earning...

"What we learn with pleasure we never forget. " Alfred MercierLearning to feel pleasure begins with cultivating our capacity to experience the world through our senses. Sensuality is really nothing more than connecting to your senses deeply. And it is in the smallest of pleasurable sensations that this practice comes alive. But often in our day-to-day, we lose touch with the physical sensations of life especially, and most interestingly, when we are in the midst of intense emotions.

“The only thing about masturbation to be ashamed of is doing it badly.” –Sigmund Freud

Shared pleasure depends on one’s capacity to pleasure themselves, which is why most sex therapists refer to the practice of masturbation as the foundation of sexual health. And just for the record, masturbation is the most common sexual practice on the planet. It is not just for lonely people either: surveys...

“Pleasure is the object, duty and the goal of all rational creatures.”  Voltaire

1. Bathe in your senses

Pleasure is entirely dependent on our physical capacity to experience the world through our senses. We open to pleasure when we become deliberate about learning more about our capacity to see, hear, feel, smell, and taste. Doing this is easier than you might think: just by adopting the practice...

"Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty. "-Frank HerbertWe often confuse the idea of doing whatever we want with true freedom. Following our every whim without a sense of responsibility for the consequences is not really freedom, but rather a poor facsimile that ends up entrapping us in unintended patterns of damaged relationships and long-term emotional scarring. Perhaps there is nowhere that this kind of misunderstanding about freedom creates more havoc than with our sexual selves.

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror… Just keep going. No feeling is final.”-Rainier Maria Rilke

 

We can’t choose which feelings we want to experience. What most people don’t realize in their selective attention to their feelings is that as we block our ability to feel any particular emotion, it actually impacts all of our emotional capacity, not just the things we are trying to...

A few months ago I got an email from Jane Fonda through an introduction from one of our investors.  She closed her note: “Can you help? Love Jane. ” Of course, I can help.  So I sent products and catalogs, answered questions and researched yam lubes. For any fans of Grace and Frankie, the story of two older women whose husbands, long-time law partners, leave their wives for each other, you will know why I was trying to learn about Say Grace Yam Lube. Actually, we had gotten calls about organic yam lube, which it turns out is not really made of yams, but yam extract which is a natural estrogen replacement.

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

Of all the sexual acts on the planet, masturbation leads the way as not only the most commonly practiced and safest ways to have sex, but also as the one that most frequently and reliably ends in orgasm. Not terribly surprising when you consider who...