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oin GatherGreen subscribers and a team of sustainable loving experts. A host of speakers will educate and enlighten you. Stefanie Iris Weiss, author of “Eco-Sex” comes from New York to speak to us about the many facets of going green between the sheets. You will be delighted, inspired and educated about how to make your love life more sustainable.

Receive a copy of Stefanie’s book “Eco Sex”. Receive a month supply bottle of Hot Rawks, an organic herbal superfood injected Aphrodisiac supplement designed to enhance your sex life. Learn partner massage techniques , and about aphrodisiac herbs from TheShaman Shack. Even get your own custom blend. Hear from“Vanishing of the Bees” director Maryam Henein about the birds and the bees of eco sex. How to create your own Pusanga or “Love Potion” from the Amazon. Vegan aphrodisiac recipe demo by Just ‘N the Raw. Raw Vegan Aphrodisiac Chocolates by Gaia Alchemy available for purchase. Food also available for purchase. Peruse GatherGreen approved merchants like Izabella Miko, offering sustainable loving oriented products. Read More…

]]> http://ecosex.net/time-for-some-sustainable-love-in-la/feed/ 0 http://ecosex.net/josh-fox-director-of-gasland-on-the-tar-sands-and-how-to-stop-them/ http://ecosex.net/josh-fox-director-of-gasland-on-the-tar-sands-and-how-to-stop-them/#comments Sun, 21 Aug 2011 21:15:25 +0000 Stefanie http://ecosex.net/?p=963

Tar Sands Action/ Josh Fox from JFOX on Vimeo.

Read the interview here.

We all sext. Susan Lipkin’s research shows that people from their teens to their seventies are sending provocative photos and other titillating texts to consenting partners old and new. Single people do it, married people do it (with their actual spouses), and yes, adulterers do it. It’s just 21st century flirting, and for all its drawbacks, it brings the rush of endorphins that we crave before or after a tryst. (For teens, it’s another story.) Our online intimacies certainly have major implications for the way we relate one-to-one with other human beings. But for adults, it’s not scandalous, it just is.

Yes, Weiner is incredibly stupid for risking his career on this. Men in powerful positions tend to think they can get away with anything (see Vitter, Ensign, Edwards, Spitzer, Larry “Wide-stance” Craig, Foley, etc.) But let’s peek between the sheets and see if something else is at play here. Our culture is at once the most sexually repressed and hyper-sexualized nation on Earth. This entrenched Puritan ethos is so prevalent that most of us are running 18th century software in our brains when it comes to sexual mores. We may be revealing more in public, showing more T & A on the teevee, but it seems that the guilt gene is still in charge of our reactions to naked body parts and perceived perversions. It’s still not okay to be gay. People regularly refer to sex workers as “hookers” (even some feminists I know do this.) It’s 2011, and our collective sexual maturity is at the level of a twelve-year-old boy. And it seems to be getting worse, not better.

This incident and the many that have come before speak to our obsession with the power of the penis. Maybe now that we’ve seen Weiner’s weiner up close and personal, we can grow up and get over it. Penises are nice, necessary, and serve a variety of functions. But they shouldn’t run men’s lives, nor should they by extension run our media. Imagine if women’s orgasms were paid this kind of attention? (My theory: we wouldn’t have waged wars of choice twice in one decade if the clitoris got half as much attention as the penis does.)

Hypocrisy and sexual repression are, apparently, a heady, irresistible mix to the media. The afternoon that Weiner’s surreal press conference hit the airwaves (shown on every local channel in NYC, not just the 24 hour cable networks), we should have been talking about the five soldiers who died that morning in Iraq or the state of the economy.

Weiner has been a real hero on the left. Despite his recent, extremely moronic behavior, he’s proven to be incredibly smart and indispensable when it comes to standing up for the little guy. (I agree with him on just about everything but Israel.) Without him, Bernie Sanders, Patrick Leahy and Dennis Kucinich, we’d have no voice in Congress. And his voice has been the loudest, the most insistent. We can’t let this profoundly stupid slip-up ruin a champion of our cause. I trust his district will reelect him, because New Yorker’s are not so easily scandalized. He may even be Mayor someday. But this frenzy is precisely why Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are salivating right now: they think that one of their enemies has been taken down of his own volition. Do we want them to get a win here?

Secrets and lies exist because people are afraid that their fantasies and desires are dirty. So what if we tilted the paradigm and communicated our real needs to our partners? What if we didn’t get married for the wrong reasons? What if we taught children that their body parts aren’t naughty? What if we opened our minds and created more space for ALL kinds of sexuality? What if we got behind Marriage Equality? What if we stopped being so fake and so righteously religious? The first thing that would happen is that our sex lives would improve. There wouldn’t need to be any “good wives”. We’d never be rocked by a sex scandal again, wasting precious air time and resources on a non-story.

It just takes a little consciousness-raising, and it starts with your relationship to your own body. I hate to break out the old “fear versus love” canard, but it’s appropriate here. This is our chance to make the personal truly political, starting in our bedrooms. We’ll get more pleasure, and change the world in the process.

1. Surprise your partner with an environmentally-friendly intimate gift. Look for rechargeable sexual well-being products that are made of body-safe and eco-friendly materials, and comply with the world’s most stringent standards, including RoHS, WEEE and REACH.

The we-vibe is a new one that has been getting all the ladies talking. It’s encased in lead-free, phthalate-free, 100% medical-grade platinum silicone and uses a long-lasting rechargeable battery—plus the manufacturing and distribution operations are carbon-neutral. That’s an orgasm we could get behind!

2. Rub down with homemade eco-massage oil. Your s.o. so deserves it! Check out Stefanie Iris Weiss’ critically acclaimed enviro-sexual bible, Eco Sex, to find recipes to brew up homemade oils from natural materials.

Read more: http://www.sheckys.com/2011/05/14/5-ways-to-have-greener-sex/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_term=no-boys-allowed

Three years ago, when I first started the research for my recently published book Eco-Sex: Go Green Between the Sheets and Make Your Love Life Sustainable (Crown Publishing/Ten Speed Press, 2010) I was still planning to have 2.0 kids, au natural. As a woman who often cries at the sight of infants and coos at her friend’s little ones, having biological babies always seemed like an inevitable step. But once I fully wrapped my brain around the relationship of overpopulation to climate change, especially in the West, I made a big decision: I won’t bring more kids into the world.

I learned that even if I spent the rest of my life recycling, having even one child would increase my carbon legacy by 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide. I still crawl around on the floor with toddlers when given the chance, and go ga-ga for goo-goos, but my uterus is officially closed for business. I’ll be adopting kids when the time is right.

I’m a freelance writer who makes her living in New York City, and my life doesn’t exactly suck. I’ve got family, friends, and endless culture at my fingertips (and until recently, a long-term boyfriend, so dating is now in the mix again). I’m in my confident thirties, not my “OMG WTF am I doing?” twenties. I can travel, go to dinner parties and parties that end long after dinner is finished. I can take a yoga class when I want to, dance ’til the wee hours, or just cuddle up in front of the TV. I have the time to be passionate about my various causes (sexual health, sustainability, social and economic justice). I make my own hours and live a life built on my own needs and inspirations. Ain’t bad at all.

But if you hold my life up to the lens of our baby-bump-obsessed culture, there’ s a planet-sized chasm in my world: the lack of a child. Some parents seem to hold me simultaneously in contempt and awe: something few are willing to verbalize. One friend with two kids once let it slip that he believes choosing not to have children is “selfish”. Children are of course precious, however, in our society, they are deeply fetishized. Even though I’m not a traditional “childless by choice” woman (because I plan to adopt someday) I still get constant questions from people of every age: “But when?” and “Why wouldn’t you want your own kids?” as if adopted children are somehow less lovable than one’s “own” kids. “You’ll change your mind,” is a classic comment, usually from older people with teenagers or grown children.

And what about women who’ve decided that child-rearing, both biological and otherwise, is not on their agenda at all? Imagine how they they feel every time someone says, “But don’t you want kids?” or “Don’t worry, you’ll change your mind.” People react to the idea of women not having children with total incredulity, shock, and worst of all, pity. They assume it’s a case of infertility in disguise, a lack of a relationship, or that women without kids “hate children”. In the majority of cases, it’s none of the above. I’m in a weird category because I do plan to bring kids into my life one day. Still, I feel like it’s incredibly important to defend my sisters who are “childfree” or “childless by choice”, depending on your preferred parlance.

Lisa Hymas, Grist writer and coiner of the acronym GINK (green inclinations, no kids) has written an enlightening post: Say it Loud: I’m Childfree and I’m Proud, one in a series all about living childfree. Laura S. Scott, the author of Two Is Enough: A Couple’s Guide to Living Childless By Choice (Seal Press, 2009) does a wonderful job of profiling this burgeoning movement of women (and men) who are loud and proud about their childfree status. Especially in a political climate like the current one, where a woman’s right to choose is under the most serious threat in history, women who have chosen not to have children need to come out of the child-free closet. World-wide population will hit the nine-billion mark by the middle of the century, and the GOP wants to cut funding for Planned Parenthood, the organization that does the most to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Hello, outrageous hypocrisy.

It should be acknowledged that there are plenty of people who desperately want kids but can’t have them easily — infertile couples, gay couples, singles who don’t want to do it alone, etc. This isn’t to diminish their very real emotions about having children. At the same time, we shouldn’t be afraid to look at how unhealthy our obsession with children has become. Isn’t it possible that the massive sadness and mourning that infertile women experience is built, in part, on society’s view of them as “barren” women? Why do they think their lives will be empty without kids? It’s not all nature, that’s for sure.

Take a group of girls between three and five, playing house. Inevitably, one girl will always want to be the mother. Another will dig the “older sister” role. Another will prefer to be the baby. Some even want to be the dad. None of these choices are wrong – they just are. But as young girls grow into tweens and teens and then young women, our roles are constantly defined in smaller and smaller terms by a society that insists we’re probably not of much value unless we have children. And this socialization is so deeply built into our understanding of our self-worth that it’s almost impossible for women to know where they end and being a mother begins.

Plenty of us are probably meant not to have children – maybe our art is our baby, something to be nurtured and then sent off into the world. Maybe we have a house of rescued pets. Maybe we’re off in a developing nation helping people to lead healthy, sustainable lives.

Think about all the abused children whose parents’ baggage has become their baggage — simply because there was no consciousness around having kids. They just did what they thought they were put here to do. Babies and young children are wildly intuitive in ways that we can’t even imagine. If they’re not exactly treasured, or worse, seen as a burden — it’s a good bet that they can feel that in their tiny bodies. And even though they can’t process it intellectually, just wait until they’re grown up.

Imagine, for a moment, if the option of NOT having kids was talked about in home economics or health classes in high school, just like everything else. If all of our children were truly conscious decisions, perhaps we’d have a much happier, psychologically healthier world. And that’s not even counting what reducing the population will do for Planet Earth — making all of our lives, the ones we’re living right now, safer from the ravages of climate change.