ColumnHere are 9 sex tips for giving you and your partner an organic sex-lift.

Sex is natural, sex is good, but not everybody is doing nearly enough of what they should. We’re busy, we’re stressed out, and we’re tired, but that’s precisely why we should be having more sex. Being intimate cuts heart attack risk, burns calories, increases endorphins and boosts immunity. But in a technology-addled world where we’re often more intimate with our iPhones than our active or would-be lovers, sometimes you need a few tips. It’s time to slow down and put some eco into your sex. Here’s a guide to getting it on au naturel.

1. Fall in Love With Your Own Body

Eco-Sex starts with your own body. Practice being Cleopatra from the moment you wake in the morning until your lover arrives to pick you up (or just comes home from work). If you haven’t already begun excising toxic chemicals from your beauty routine, let better sex be your clarion call. Cleansing and moisturizing with EWG-approved products or DIY organic essential oil blends will make you look and feel beautiful. Falling in love with your own body is step number one for a healthy sex life: give your temple the respect it deserves.

2. Entertain Aphrodisiacs

Nibble on vegan and organic aphrodisiacs. Skip the heavy, artery-clogging, erection-killing steak and champagne dinner. Try a vegan and/or raw meal laced with aphrodisiacs like asparagus, ginger, avocado, and artichoke (to turn on women) and cinnamon, mango, squash, pumpkin and cayenne (to turn on the guys). Ginger and basil do double-duty, seducing both sexes.

3. Light it Up

Let there be candlelight. Particularly if you’re in a long-term relationship where it seems as if you and your partner are having a threesome with the television. It’s nice to ditch the grid, at least for an evening. Turn off all the electric lights and create a sensual, subtle, skin-flattering glow. Conventional candles are often made from toxic paraffin, so go for ethically sourced, eco-friendly, fair-trade varieties when possible. Cheekily-named (“Morning Wood” and “One Night Stand”) candles from A Scent of Scandal are vegan with cotton wicks. Essoya Candles use non-GMO soy and stimulating essential oil blends. Or try doing a craft night with your lover: make candles together before you make love.

4. Slip Into Something Natural

Wear sustainable skivvies. When sex gets too routine, the old cliché about lingerie really does work – especially when your panties are made from the good stuff. Forget the mass-produced Victoria’s Secret or even the Agent Provocateur – slip on underwear made from natural textiles like organic cotton and bamboo, and let the fireworks begin. Enamore, Araks, and Urban Fox make gorgeous, simple and sexy bras, panties, and teddies that both you and your lover will fancy.

5. Stay Ethical Right Down to…

Make your safe sex sustainable sex. The amazing folks behind Sir Richard’s Condom Company have created the first ethical condom. Vegan (certified by PETA), and sourced from sustainable latex, Sir Richard’s donates a condom to a developing country for every one you buy. Consider them the Tom’s Shoes of the sex industry. Luckily your pleasure is just as important to them as ethics are: the ultra-thin variety are seriously thin condoms that feel barely there. They’re also stylishly packaged and available at Whole Foods.

6. Oil Up Your Libido

Rub on some DIY massage oil. Coconut oil, the magical elixir that can be used in your hair, as a makeup remover, as a vegetable sauté, or in your smoothie is also a wonderful massage oil. Include a few drops of lavender and ylang-ylang essential oil (for stress-reduction) or neroli oil to stimulate libido.

7. Make Things Slippery

Make your lube organic. The conventional lube you find in the corner drugstore likely includes endocrine-disrupting parabens. Even some of the “natural” brands still have glycerin, which isn’t necessarily a toxic ingredient in other products, but not something you want near your nether regions. Glycerin strips the vagina of moisture, making it raw and more susceptible to yeast infections and even STI’s. Experiment with organic brands like Sliquid Organics or the UK-based Yes. Note: only use water-based lube with latex condoms – oil will degrade latex, rendering it useless. Keep your coconut oil away from your condoms.

8. Create An Adult Toy Box

Try sustainable sex toys. Yes, they require power. But that doesn’t mean they’re less than natural. The pleasure-pioneers at JimmyJane have created a line of sustainable, medical-grade, rechargeable silicone sex toys that last practically forever, unlike the throwaway, pthlalate-laced, plastic dildos of yore. These toys are gorgeous pieces of high-end design that belong on top of your night table instead of hidden in the drawer.

9. Take It Out of the Bedroom

Do it in the woods. You can, and you should change sexual venues. Find a safe, secluded spot in the wilderness and surrender to the wind and the leaves and the trees.

Stefanie Iris Weiss is the author of Eco-Sex: Go Green Between the Sheets and Make Your Love Life Sustainable (Ten Speed Press/Crown Publishing, 2010) and eight other books. Stefanie keeps her carbon footprint small in New York City, where she writes about sustainability, sexuality, reproductive rights, dating and relationships, politics, fashion, beauty, and more for many publications. Learn more about her at ecosex.net, follow her eco-sex exploits on Twitter or join her on Facebook.

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ColumnA petulant husband recently emailed his wife a sex spreadsheet, detailing all the moments she’d rejected his sexual advances during the previous month. She posted it on Reddit, where her sexcuses quickly went viral. The Internet had a solid laugh.

Aside from the much-needed LOL we got from the sex spreadsheet story during a week of grueling, awful news, it brings up an important question – is it possible to owe your partner sexual satisfaction in the same way you owe payments on your student loan? In short, no. But it’s not always that simple.

When, if, how and why we have sex within our committed relationships is generally fraught with complexity and confusion. We’re understandably made more vulnerable when our advances are rebuffed – this is true for men and women, gay and straight people and everyone in-between. Every relationship and its attendant sexual rhythm is unique — yet some gender stereotypes still prevail.

In the old story, when heterosexual men signed up for marriage, they bought a virgin with an engagement ring. Put a ring on it and your wifey will put a ring on… well, you get my point.

Three months salary is probably worth it to the men who continue to think these antiquated thoughts. After choosing a mate the “man of the house” expects that his partner’s “wifely duty” will be done as compensation for his hard work – this absurd bit of misogyny seemed to hit its apotheosis in the middle of the 20th century. Oh, 1950s – you were just the best.

This model of sexual relations is grounded in the idea that women have no sexual desire, let alone sexual agency. Forget about love, romance, or sex – this worldview says all women are seeking is a good provider. That this outmoded concept (how it was ever “moded” I have no idea) still propels so many men – and women – into marriage is unthinkable, especially to those of us who have heard of feminism.

The first husband’s sex spreadsheet begat another wife’s sex spreadsheet. Equality! (These two are not married to each other, just to be clear.)

What this sex spreadsheet-making is really doing is telling us that a lot of people have crappy sex lives and that they resent it enough to make it public. I don’t know how their sex lives got to be that way, but I can take a stab at why the womenfolk are unsatisfied.

Women aren’t taught to value sex – we hear so often that we’re biologically primed to value romance and companionship over carnal desire that we eventually believe this defines who we are. Evolutionary psychology continues to attempt to use “science” to prove that men want the sex and women want the money. Except they’re taking somewhat recently established cultural norms, ones that have clear historical trajectories, and trying to prove that our paleo ancestors must’ve felt the same way. Instead of parsing the history, they’re looking at the “Real Housewives” and reducing it to, “Me cave man, you woman.” And it ever was thus. Except it wasn’t.

More and more science is showing that, in fact, women’s sexual desire has deeper wells than men’s does. The old trope about men wanting/needing sex more than women is proving to be patently false. (I’ve often recommended Daniel Bergner’s “What Do Women Want” as a primer in this arena — if you’ve ever wondered about your own libido, or are just curious about the myths and realities of women’s desires — the history of our sexual longing — give it a read.)

So if there is indeed a an epidemic of women having classic headaches, feeling exhausted, or “sweaty and gross” to quote the original sex spreadsheet lady, and so on, what’s the deal?

Perhaps they never really wanted their husbands in the first place, but married them anyway. I think this is a lot more widespread than we ever considered. Because women are constantly told not just that their desire doesn’t matter, but that their libidos are weaker than men’s, why would they put sexual satisfaction high on their must-have list for marriage?

Also, WOMEN TRULY ARE EXHAUSTED. That’s not an excuse. We’re working full-time, raising children, cleaning houses and trying to “have it all” even though I don’t believe that’s really a thing because the wrong people are defining what “all” is. But that’s for another column.

Some women learn that it’s ok to have lots of sex in college, before marriage, but you “put those things away” once you settle down, thus settling for the good, unsexy guy. This, I guess, is supposed to be one step up from not being allowed to have sex at all, except for procreation. (There is a shockingly huge number of people that believe pleasure is a sin.)

I have nothing against good guys — long may they reign — but I do wonder if women are shutting down their natural libidos and “settling” in order to what — not be spinsters? Get the babies done? It all boils down to one thing — sexual needs are being met last. This doesn’t mean that you should spend your life chasing after bad boys — it just means you might want to consider seeking partners that meet ALL your needs. Why continue dating someone that doesn’t turn you on, with whom you have no chemistry — simply because he’s kind and seems to love you? Or that you get along really well? These are nice, important things — but check in with yourself to see if you’re devaluing your sexual needs because you think you need something else more.

Maybe you didn’t settle (or don’t plan to) but your partner isn’t trying as hard as he once did to please you. Maybe it was really hot at the beginning simply because the chemistry was off the hook — but now you need more and he’s not asking you what you need. Maybe you have secret fantasies that you’ve been too shy to share. Communication is the key to all of the above.

One final note on monogamy. I believe it’s not really possible long-term, despite every rom-com you’ve ever seen. If you’re two, three, five or seven years into a relationship and you’re feeling the itch — YOU ARE NORMAL. One way to deal with this is to tell your partner you have a headache, and live a life of quiet resignation, devoid of pleasure.

Another way is to be honest at the outset — with yourself and with your partner. Even the hottest, craziest sexual attraction can eventually wane — you have to be prepared to feel differently a few years down the road, without serving your partner a spreadsheet.

Join Stefanie on a journey to the authentic heart of your sexual self with Project 40: Sadism, Masochism, Sexuality & Shadow, an online 40-day tour through the heart of your psyche via intensive journaling, ritual, and guided daily emails. 

Got a question for Stefanie? Email stefanie at ecosalon dot com, and she’ll answer it in the next Sexual Healing column.

Keep in touch with Stefanie on Twitter: @ecosexuality

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A recent New York Times article by Lori Gottlieb, the woman who wrote “Marry Him: The Case For Settling for Mr. Good Enough” (I know – we probably shouldn’t be listening to her) got my knickers in a twist. In a piece called, “Does a More Equal Marriage Equal Less Sex?” she trots out statistics that conflate domestic duties and the health of couples’ sex lives. Once again, female sexuality is confused with the deeply misogynistic history of marriage. 

The premise is that partnerships in which men and women do equal amounts of housework are bad for the bedroom. The sheets may be clean and the rug vacuumed, but no one is throwing down on them and making them dirty again, because men doing chores is apparently not sexy. She’s essentially saying that heterosexuals are wired to do things the way we have since time immemorial. (Yet failing to mention that marriage, that vaunted institution, was originally an arrangement in which women were purchased by men as property.)

She calls it “gender differentiation.” I grant that in heterosexual partnerships, the things that make us different can be the sexiest things of all. But the studies she cites, and the conclusions she comes to, are straight out of some kind of 1950’s guide to getting it on.

Women in the kitchen, men at work. Those “Mad Men” standards are what make for the sexiest sexy times, according to Gottlieb. Yes, because Joan, Peggy, and Betty just had it so good back then. Women just want men to be men! Because being men means being a dick about sharing the workload, sitting on the couch with a cigar, and probably also cheating. Since he’s coming home and taking care of us and the kids, financially — it’s cool, right?

In that vein, I’m calling BULLSHIT IN ALL CAPS.

Our marriages are more equal now, thank god. That’s progress. Women have flooded into the workplace since the seventies, but it’s only in the last ten years or so that men have begun bucking up and picking up after themselves. Instead of women doing 100 percent of the work (in the workplace and at home) men are now participating, and we like it like that. Except, Gottlieb suggests, this is why the marrieds aren’t having enough sex. Essentially, like everything else, it’s the ladies’ fault.

It’s not that equality kills libido, it’s that boredom does – for women. If Ms. Gottlieb had bothered to look at the reams of research about women’s sexuality from the last few years, perhaps she would have been introduced to a few theories that could have expanded her worldview. Daniel Bergner’s exploration of women’s sexuality in “What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire” – a rather slim volume – is rife with information about women’s libido. I think it would have taught her a lot. Namely, that women are likelier to get bored with their partners than men, that we need novelty, that after a few years, it’s hard for us to get it up with the same guy over and over again. That monogamy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and forcing ourselves into its strictures can thwart our desires.

The research in Bergner’s book and others like “Sex at Dawn” have shown us that tired tropes of evolutionary psychology are projections of a culture of inequality – not facts. There is a growing body of literature built around breaking down the misogynist assumptions about sex and relationships – but we clearly have more work to do when the Times regularly prints articles like Gottlieb’s.

If your guy does his share of the work at home, yet you’re no longer feeling like a nightly boink is necessary — don’t assume it’s because he’s been emasculated by the vacuum he’s holding. It may be because you’ve been together more than three years — the magic number for when sexual desire begins to wane for women. It may be parenthood — the number one boner-killer (utter exhaustion is a pretty good excuse for rolling over instead of rolling on top of your lover). If you believe in staying in your relationship for the long haul, there are many ways to improve your sex life. Role playing, toys, mutual masturbation, Orgasmic Meditation, watching porn together, sharing fantasies, having date nights — the possibilities are endless.

Got a question for Stefanie? Email stefanie at ecosalon dot com and she’ll answer it in the next Sexual Healing column.

Keep in touch with Stefanie on Twitter: @ecosexuality

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The post The Times Dusts Off Tired Tropes About Female Sexuality (Again): Sexual Healing appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnWe’ve talked a lot about the orgasm in this space before (and we surely will again), but it’s just one of many ingredients in the proverbial sexual feast. Find out how the food on your real dinner plate can affect your sexual appetites.

The four-stage model of sexual response goes like this: excitement/desire phase, plateau phase, orgasmic phase, and finally – resolution phase. But the most important spice isn’t even included in the list – libido.

Libido is complex animal, and its mysteries are not easily solved, particularly for women. Daniel Bergner posited some promising theories in his recent book What Do Women Want: Adventures In The Science of Female Desire, but the questions remain open. We can only answer them for ourselves (and have fun doing it). It’s not just about what we want, it’s about how often we want it, and why.

For the sake of this column, let’s put aside the myriad cultural and psychological complexities of women and desire. No matter who you are or what you want, there’s one fundamental we cannot ignore when it comes to libido: our physical health. We’ve all had a headache (the real kind) and thus decided to forgo a romp in the hay. But if the baseline health isn’t there, your libido can get stuck in a major funk.

We tend to think of blood flow issues as part of the male domain. We’ve all seen the cheesy couple in a Cialis commercial, dancing in their kitchen while the voice over says ,“It may only be an issue of blood flow, so see your doctor…” But guess what, ladies? Your sexual response also requires blood flow and engorgement. That’s where Nitric Oxide, a magical ingredient, comes in.

Nitric oxide is produced by the body, and it plays a huge role in both penile and clitoral response. Better known to chem nerds as NO, it also controls blood pressure, helps with heart and nerve function, fights infection, and more. In other words, it’s no slouch. (It won “molecule of the year” in 1992. Bet you didn’t know that molecules won awards, eh?)

How to Eat Your Way to a Better Orgasm

So how do you say yes to more NO? Well, it’s produced when you exercise; getting sweaty helps your body make more. So your next bikram yoga class can also be used to enhance your sex life.

But if you’re already pretty active, you can also eat your way to a better orgasm. L-arginine is an amino acid that converts to NO in your body – or, in science-speak, it’s an “oxidative precursor” to NO.

Want some L-arginine? You can find it in: almonds, chickpeas, coconut, flaxseeds, garlic, ginseng, greens, oatmeal, peanuts, root veggies, salmon, soy, sunflower seeds, tuna, walnuts, and chocolate. Some of the crossover items on this list–ginseng, soy, and chocolate– are also known to function as aphrodisiacs, so you’ll get double bang for your buck, so to speak. L-arginine is also available in supplement form – if you or your partner has a diagnosed sexual dysfunction, it might be worth looking into.

However, it’s important to note that there haven’t been any truly useful studies about arginine and sexual response in women. For men with ED, there is some evidence that it arginine works like Viagra – and it’s safer. Arginine has a lot of other benefits, too. But there are side effects, even though this is a “natural” supplement. Be particularly wary of arginine if you have herpes – it can aggravate your symptoms.

I believe that pleasure can and should be found along the way, and that it’s not always about the Big O. That said, there’s nothing wrong with priming your body for a better orgasm by eating better as well.

Got a question for Stefanie? Email stefanie@ecosalon.com and she’ll answer it in the next Sexual Healing column.

Keep in touch with Stefanie on Twitter: @ecosexuality

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ColumnDo you know what women want?

I’m just one woman, so I can truly only speak for myself. But the ancient question of what women want has obsessed us ever since Eve was cast out of the garden for being too libidinous, and too curious. Since that moment women’s sexuality has been feared, reviled, and made into the subject of epic poems. We have been called sirens, burned at the stake for our supposed witchery, and eventually trained to be  virginal, marriageable maidens. Apparently, we can’t win — we either want it too much or not enough.

Our sexuality was so repressed, so underground, that the very idea of women’s pleasure wasn’t even a thing for American and European men until the 20th century. Women were thought to be receptacles for sperm, baby-makers, and raisers of progeny only.

In the 19th century, tightly corseted and managed by our husband-owners, huge numbers of women were diagnosed with “hysteria” (which was also explored in a 2011 Maggie Gyllenhaal movie). This was what happened when a housebound woman, often a mother, exhibited what amounted to symptoms of chronic depression, brought on by the complete repression of her sexual urges.

Her doctor’s prescription was the release of a good orgasm — however it wasn’t called an orgasm, because remember, women didn’t experience pleasure — they called it a “paroxysm.” But still, it was progress: tacit acknowledgment, at least in doctor’s offices, that clitoral stimulation was healthy and necessary.

Doctors did this by hand for years, but then the vibrator was invented in 1880 (thank you, electricity!). Vibrators were advertised as “personal massagers” and women began buying them in droves, but once the word got out about what they were really used for, they went underground again, at least until the seventies (thank you feminism!). Such is the way with women’s pleasure — once our culture realizes that it’s unceasing and liberating, it’s quickly silenced by the Shame Industrial Complex.

In the past few years a number of books exploring what women want and specifically, women’s sexuality, have emerged. There was Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, which set the whole concept of monogamy on its head in 2010, and then Naomi Wolf’s Vagina last year. I was already heady with excitement about a new sexual paradigm. A Sexual Revolution 2.0, so to speak. And then I got my review copy of Daniel Bergner’s What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire in early June. I inhaled it in a matter of hours, while sitting by the pool. It’s one of the most important books I’ve read in years. I found myself nodding as I read, and even said “YES!” out loud, alarming the man on the lounge chair next to me.

Finally, scientific proof of what I’ve known in my body since I’ve known anything — that women are deep, endless wells of sexual desire. That it is not by any means what society tells us it is. That it is animalistic, and at times base. That it is not polite. That it is not always about receptivity. That relationships and intimacy are great, but they don’t always trump casual sex. That being with the same partner for years can get boring. That it’s okay to desire others. That it’s, in fact, biologically likely that one will want to stray.

All of these things, and more, are explained in this seminal text. From rat studies to masturbation studies, Bergner presents evidence that what many women want is essentially exactly the OPPOSITE of what we’ve been told it is. Female sexuality researchers are in these pages, and the great myths of evolutionary psychology are exploded, once and finally, for the utter bunk they’ve always been.

Women have been sold a bill of goods about what we want. It’s bad enough that our body image issues are so entrenched, and that little girls begin to develop them at earlier and earlier ages. (Seven-year-olds with anorexia exist.) It’s bad enough that our relationship to the clothes we wear, the makeup we use, the way we present ourselves in public is so fraught. Male gaze continues to suck. It has us so twisted and distorted that we have to spend our lifetimes righting it. But now that we have this other layer of evidence about what’s been taken from us, we can begin to put ourselves back together again.

Our culture still tells us that sexual women are sluts, witches and bitches. Our carnal nature isn’t getting us burned at the stake anymore, but it is getting us so thoroughly slut-shamed that we bury it. Women I know, even the smartest of the lot, are so confused about what they want that they don’t even give themselves a chance to figure it out. They marry (and stay married to) men they never desired in the first place. They think that the man they’re attracted to now is the man they’ll still be attracted to in ten, twenty years. They fully buy into the the idea that men cheat because they’re horny animals, and that long-suffering women always lose, because menopause will eventually kill our sex drives. That we’re on a slow sexual decline, while our male partners are always the ones with the wandering eyes — just because they’re built that way. Others buy into the directives of Mating In Captivity — that making “dates” with your long-term partner is the way to keep the spark alive. The science in “What Do Women Want?” suggests that the spark may remain elusive, no matter how hard we work at it.

Just a week ago, the New York Times ran a piece about the poor little coeds at the University of Pennsylvania, and how “hookup” culture was ruining their chances for marriage. There is still a stigma, even for millenials out there doing their thing, experimenting, and getting off.

I hope that the publication of this book will spur a conversation about what women REALLY want. This  may completely upend everything we know — our relationships, our expectations, our long-term plans.You need to start talking with your girlfriends, your lovers, your boyfriend, your husband. I’ve talked to some guys who are a bit threatened by the concept of women wanting sex as much as, or even more, than men. But hey, they’ll get over it.

Next on my reading list is UNMASTERED: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult To Tell by Katherine Angel. Won’t you join my book club, and together we can change the world?

Image: Dbrekke

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