The V-Word

Breast cancer and all reproductive cancers impact all of us. Even with enhanced and more effective detection and treatment options, the numbers are mind-numbing - over one in eight women will be diagnosed this year.

One of the most common problems that bring long-term couples into therapy is that of initiating intimacy. According to Rachel Sussman, a marriage counselor in New York City, one of the most common reasons that couples come to couples therapy is differing sex drives and opinions on how to initiate sex.

Glance down the feminine hygiene aisle of any pharmacy or grocery store and you’ll find numerous products designed to freshen, clean and cover up the natural smell of the female body. Although it’s well known that the practice of douching – spraying liquid into the vaginal canal in an effort to make it cleaner or to feel fresher – is unhealthy, feminine product manufacturers keep coming...

I have always preferred the company of children in my life. They speak the truth. They are present and awake to life in a way that seems to slip away as we become adults. Somewhere around the time when we become conscious of being seen, we lose the freedom to see what is actually happening around us. 

I am often speechless these days. It is hard to trust the words I have known to convey what it is like to go on living my son Ian has left. My writer self, like the rest of me is cast out beyond the language that I once was able to use so effortlessly. Grief and love have swallowed not only my ability to express what is happening inside and around me, but often even the will to try. It is a desolate landscape this space, walking beside the valley of the shadow of death. Simultaneously magnetizing to those...

Is it Sex for Love, or Love for Sex?One of the most significant gaps between partners when it comes to love or sex is the truism that traditionally, male energy opens to love through sexual connection and female energy is more apt to need love to ignite its sexuality. I remember well a conversation I had with another mother at the playground years ago, when I was urging her to not withhold her sexual response until she was satisfied with the loving attention she received from her mate. She looked at me shocked and said “why are you taking...

I was out recently with a friend, and we started talking about sex. She told me about how, in her current relationship, she wants sex more often than her boyfriend does. We laughed about how this never would have happened when we were in our twenties. "We're in our sexual prime now," she said, and we laughed again. We hear this a lot: that a woman's sexual prime – or sometimes the term is sexual peak – happens during her thirties.

There are some who would say that the idea of equality is nothing more than an aspirational declaration. They argue that the truth of meritocracy it is at the root of human evolution. What drives progress more than the individual’s drive for more?

When we consider the efforts that women have made over generations for equality, it humbles you. Today while interviewing the president of Planned Parenthood of Southwestern Oregon, I learned that the early beginnings of the organization began with women sewing diaphragms that they procured in Italy and Japan into their petticoats. Many women were arrested when they were handing them out on the streets in New York.