Good Clean Reads

"…the nearly $2 billion spent on abstinence only education over the past quarter-century may as well have been set on fire…”  Peggy Orenstein

Sexual health is a conversation that has been subverted for far too long. The conversations that we avoid and push underground become tainted with our own darkness and the longer that they remain out of reach, the more distorted they become. Sexual hygiene...

Maybe you think you need a vacation. Maybe you think you need certain kinds of food, or a certain amount of sleep, or certain clothes, or certain makeup, or certain books or friends or likes. Maybe you think you need a better cell phone or job or spouse in order to be happy.

Actually, there are just two things, beyond the necessities, that you need in order to be happy: you need patience, and you...

"Sex is a part of nature. I go along with nature. "-Marilyn MonroeOral sex is, at once, one of the most desirable sexual experiences and the one that still carries enough discomfort to still call it taboo in some circles. There was a time when you could get arrested for it. Still, in the vast sea of sexuality, developing a healthy connection and building skill to oral ways of loving have a power and passion unique in the world.

Love is scary.

There, I said what we’ve all been thinking. Sometimes, love is so scary that it’s easier to choose not to have it. Padded behind layers and layers of emotional armor, we defend our choice of not investing in love with myriad excuses — I’m too busy for a partner, I like being single, I’ve looked, I swear, but I can’t find anyone I’d want to be with…

Recently, I was at a documentary...

It was a normal weekend for us here at Good Clean Love when we posted a link to some light weekend reading for our Facebook fans — "The Friend Zone Has Deep-Seated Roots in Rape Culture," courtesy of The Plaid Zebra. Our post reached more than 1500 people, and we definitely heard about it: many people were angered by the content of the article and asked that we take our link to it down. In response, I figured we should probably have of a conversation about the whole thing.

At first it may not be obvious how sex and chronic illness are related: what context could they possibly share? Yet spend any time at all not feeling well, or worse, and you’ll know intimately how sex and illness both depend completely on the body. And how, paradoxically, when the body is ailing, a desire for pleasure, any desire at all, can feel impossible.

As Wendy has written, “Our body...

“There is no perfection,  only life.”  Milan Kundera

A dear friend of mine who will be signing divorce papers next week was lamenting to me about how he wishes he had paid better attention to the moments earlier in his relationship where things began to come apart. “I don’t know why I didn’t understand how serious the problems were then…” Most of us don’t see the gravity of the moment when things...

I'll admit that I'm a marriage newbie. After all, my husband and I got married just last fall after being together for a couple of years. Thus far, I've been hesitant to dole out marriage advice for fear that 1) I'll look like a fraud and 2) that it'll somehow backfire on my marriage, which, so far, is going pretty well. But, it's time to pull the sheets back, so to speak. Almost immediately after our wedding, people began asking me if it felt different to be be married.

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” –Steven Covey

Usually, when people leave each other they cite irreconcilable differences. What they don’t realize is that the things that end up feeling so big and unworkable all start out being little things. Annoying habits that don’t change, emotional insecurities that play into blame and shame,...