Good Clean Reads

If the first doubt that most people have about their sexual lives is whether they are “normal,” then the new 2. 0 dating and sex app version of connecting has only accelerated this doubt. Arguably, the driver to the ever-expanding array of choices in meeting a mate online is desire. Desire for sex certainly, but also, and maybe more importantly, desire for all the parts of a relationship that make sex good. Rarely does the twenty-minute hookup satisfy us. Instead we are often left wondering what happened and who it was for. Likewise, although we are easily addicted to...

“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...

The night of my fiftieth birthday party in late October was unseasonably warm. I wanted to be sure and remember the night, so the festivities included magic and fire dancers. My four kids had been planning something special, and I hoped that it wouldn’t be a crazy rap verse about my quirks. Instead they started by silencing the room. Then, when it was quiet, each of them shared their most personal...

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” MLK, Jr.

All of the things in life that we have no language for recede from view. And yet our inability to express the feelings and experiences that happen to us don’t make those feelings disappear entirely. Instead they take up residence in our body, manifesting in everything from anxiety attacks to unexplained physical...

“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...

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”  Albert Einstein

I was watching the Warriors get killed in game 4 when suddenly I felt a lump develop in my left ear. It was the middle of the 2nd half of the game. I was fine in the first half of the game and then suddenly I wasn’t. Throughout the evening, my ear...

June is Pride month, a nationwide celebration of the contributions gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people have made to our lives and culture. We wanted to learn more about gay pride history, so did a little Google self-educating. Here are some interesting bits of information on the history of pride month:Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month (LGBT Pride Month) is currently celebrated each year in the month of June to honor the 1969 Stonewall riots in Manhattan.