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How we all perpetuate Rape Culture & what we can do to stop
In true late adopter fashion, I’ve finally jumped into watching “Game of Thrones” after, well, years of seeing headline after headline about the epic novel-turned-TV series. I got completely sucked in from the first episode. However, a curious thing happened while I watched some of the sex scenes — I noticed that I had completely turned off my ability to feel, because it was honestly too painful...
Making Sense of the Friend Zone
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...
A Thousand Years
“While we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.” –Audre Lorde
Yesterday, a judge gave Ariel Castro, the Ohio man guilty of abducting, raping and abusing 3 young women for more than ten years, life in prison plus a thousand years. Given that he only has one life to pay for his heinous crimes I was thinking maybe that the justice system...
The Tip of the Iceberg: Hating Harvey
“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...
Overcoming Sexual Terror
“He brought up the fact he likes to rape little boys…He’s telling me how he likes to use a knife on them.” -Cpl Travis Schouten
What happens when the core sexual attraction of men to women is so tainted with terror that it disappears? It’s practically science fiction to imagine living in a culture that has so effectively terrorized the natural desire for sexual union between men and women, one...
Playing With Fire: Avoiding the Risks of Hookups
Hooking up is not a new practice. It is, however, beginning to be socially acceptable. These days it seems like everyone’s doing it, and well, if you haven’t experimented with hooking up, you probably will, too. While it is exciting to list off Saturday night conquests to a lunch table of your closest girlfriends, hooking up can go horribly wrong. Thus, in order to have the most enjoyable...
Healing Sex Part 1: How Sex Can Heal Us
“If we could heal only one thing in the human experience and it was our relationship to our sexual selves, everything else would heal as a consequence.” -Wendy Strgar
Sex is at the beginning and end of who we are. Indeed, we are each the most profound products of the sexual act, and the more we learn about our fragile, erotic selves, the more obvious it is that this is the center around which...
40 Years Later is Still Yesterday
“Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes.” Maggie Kuhn
What remains unsaid in us remains alive. It is the trauma that we cannot acknowledge that burrows deeper inward, sapping our ability to trust ourselves as well as our capacity to connect to others. And among the traumas we experience, sexual abuses are one of the most potent in the ways that it imprints on our memory. This is why Beverly...
Rethinking Our Fear
“There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” -Franklin Roosevelt
Insecurity is a natural consequence of our mortal human experience. The most primal hardwired function of our brain is driven by a survival instinct, which is governed, to a large extent, by a negativity bias that operates without our conscious awareness. Negativity bias creates thinking mechanisms steeped in our worst fears and...
Ask the Loveologist: Healing Sex Addictions
Stanley Siegel, author of Your Brain on Sex and editor of psychologytomorrowmagazine.comis the definitive expert on how our sexual fantasies are either the doorway to our deepest healing or the prison of a life out of control. Recently, he shared a story about one of his therapy clients. Stanley writes: “If we can achieve authenticity by aligning our sexual behavior with our fantasies and desires,...
Healthy Sexual Fantasies
Recently I have been having crazy sexual fantasies while making love with my partner. I don’t know if I should feel guilty or excited because when I just let them go, I get way more aroused and I can tell my partner is feeling it too. I can’t get myself to tell my partner and I wonder if this is some form of cheating on him. I am not always thinking of someone else, just other crazy scenarios....
An Arousing Fantasy Life
The sexiest part of the human body lies in the brain, specifically our limbic brain, where our libido resides alongside our processing of emotions, memory and scent. One of the quickest and most assured routes to sexual arousal is through fantasy.
Learning to Feel: The Stanford Sexual Assault
“I was not only told that I was assaulted, I was told that because I couldn’t remember, I technically could not prove it was unwanted. And that distorted me, damaged me, and almost broke me.” –Stanford Rape Survivor
Sexual assault is so common that it occurs every two minutes in this country to one in six women (and one in 33 men). Until this week, it’s rampant existence has remained largely out...
Uniting Sexual Consciousness
“Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.” -Carl Jung
It was a curious time a few weeks ago as I moved between the Good Vibrations Sex Summit in the heart of downtown San Francisco to the Science and Non-Duality conferencein Marin County. Crossing back and forth over the Golden Gate Bridge, and many...
Fifty Shades of Grey: Recreating Erotic Consciousness
“His expression pulls at that dark part of me, buried in the depths of my belly- my libido, woken and tamed by him, but even now, insatiable.” -E.L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey
The story that has shifted the mainstream consciousness of sexuality is about a young beautiful virgin, who doesn’t recognize her own beauty and a deeply troubled young man, that channels his childhood pain and extreme...
Creating a Culture of Consent
“A consent culture is a society that values and promotes consensual sex, condemns rape and supports survivors of sexual violence…” – Siobhan Donovan, Building a Consent Culture
Almost every interview request I get these days begins with questions about consent; both what it means to say yes to sexual contact and what happens when initial consent goes away. The first thing that I say in these...
Can Sperm Cause Abdominal Pain?
If you find that your abdomen hurts after sex, you’re not alone. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), around 75% of women experience painful intercourse at one point or another. This can happen for a variety of reasons and the pain you’re feeling even has a name. In medical circles, it’s called dyspareunia which comes from early Greek meaning “difficulty mating.”
Interview with Emily Lindin of the UnSlut Project
Making Love Sustainable was fortunate to have been able to sit down and chat recently with Emily Lindin, founder of the UnSlut Project, author of UnSlut: A Diary and a Memoir, and director of a recently released documentary, UnSlut. We’d been eager to talk with Emily because of the important work she has been doing to help women and girls speak up about sexual bullying and shaming. We believe this...