Welcome to the Vagina Blog Book Club! Have a book to add? Contact me, I\’d love to hear about it!!
I love a good book and I love reading! Check out my book list for my best reading recommendations to improve your period, your sex life and more. Just check out this review snippet from one of my favorite books, Come as You Are:
“Cutting-edge research across multiple disciplines tells us that the most important factor for women in creating and sustaining a fulfilling sex life, is not what you do in bed or how you do it, but how you feel about it. Which means that stress, mood, trust, and body image are not peripheral factors in a woman’s sexual wellbeing; they are central to it. Once you understand these factors, and how to influence them, you can create for yourself better sex and more profound pleasure than you ever thought possible.
And Emily Nagoski can prove it.”
Taking Charge of Your Fertility
by Toni Weschler
This book is an absolute must-read for everyone that owns a vagina. It reads like your best friends blog and includes important information like:
- The latest medical advances in assisted reproductive technologies (ART)
- In-depth coverage of women’s gynecological and sexual health
- Illustrations, photographs, an expanded color insert and sample charts
- Three Prevalent Conditions—Endometriosis, Ovarian Cysts and PCOS
- Natural Ways to Balance Your Hormones
- Preserving Your Future Fertility
- Miscarriages
- Idiopathic Infertility
- Causes of Unusual Bleeding
Clear and comprehensive, yet warm and approachable, Taking Charge of Your Fertility is one of the most universally lauded health books on the market today. It is an essential reference for every woman of reproductive age.
See More about Taking Charge of Your Fertility:
PEN + PAPER FERTILITY CHARTING
ENDOMETRIOSIS WITH FUNCTIONAL HEALTH + WELLNESS
PERIODS WITH ALEXSIA PRIOLO, A NATUROPATHIC DOCTOR
Sex That Works: An Intimate Guide to Awakening Your Erotic Life
by Wendy Strgar
Wendy Strgar is a sexologist and founder of one of my favorite lube companies, Good Clean Love. Her writing is honest, thought-provoking and immensely helpful in maintaining long term sexual relationships! “Making sex work—embracing your erotic soul and deepening the intimacy in your life—is both a consequence of deep presence and its gift. Healing our selves in our deepest erotic space can only be a deliberate act, and the doing of it miraculously seems to heal everything else. Tapping into the courage to know your own deepest sexual thoughts and feelings, and offering them with your whole being, is both a life work and lasting gift that will be long remembered.” —Wendy Strgar, Sex That Works
Sex That Works covers these 11 topics:
- Freedom
- Pleasure
- Finding your normal
- Courage
- Curiosity
- Sensation
- Fantasy
- Attention
- Gratitude
Strgar makes very good points about how we confuse sexual freedom with sexual license, resulting in a hookup culture that has us faking orgasms like porn stars. Authentic sexual freedom, she writes, means \’taking responsibility for our own sexual needs.\’ The book shows us how to do just that. She talks about how to achieve a state of mental abandonment, how to appreciate small sensual moments, how to love without always worrying every second about being loved back — and how asking for sexual satisfaction even requires a certain level of courage. Along the way, Strgar, now in her 50s, explains how she brought her own sex life with her husband of more than 30 years back from the brink of ruin. She argues persuasively that sexual pleasure, however you define it, is not a luxury but a necessity. I might add that the love oils she sells on her site smell really good. —The New York Times Book Review
Spiritual Midwifery
I love Spiritual Midwifery and I love Ina May Gaskin. Her book is an important read for any woman because it changes the way that we look at birth. It challenges the cultural norms that we\’ve learned as Americans and shines a light on how birth CAN be, if we just let it.
The original Spiritual Midwifery, published in 1976, introduced an entire generation of young women to the possibility of home birth and breast feeding. It also breathed new life into the all-but-vanished field of midwifery. Ina May Gaskin is one of the Founders and the current president of the Midwives\’ Alliance of North America. She is a powerful advocate for a woman\’s right to give birth without excessive and unnecessary medical intervention.
Her clinical midwifery skills have been developed entirely through independent study and apprenticeship with other midwives around the world. Ina May and fellow Farm midwives were instrumental in the development of the rigorous Certified Professional Midwife (CPM) certification process.
See more about Spiritual Midwifery here:
WHY SHOULD I HAVE A HOME BIRTH WITH A CERTIFIED NURSE MIDWIFE | WITH PICTURES!
BIRTHWITHOUTFEAR PHILADELPHIA WITH JANUARY HARSHE
INA MAY IS MY HOME GIRL RINGER T-SHIRT
Sweetening the Pill
Education and information are power and this book is powerful. There is a huge lack of information about the hormonal birth control that many women take and this book sets out to expose everything you really need to know. It\’s a must-read.
Millions of healthy women take a powerful medication every day from their mid-teens to menopause – the Pill – but few know how this drug works or the potential side effects. Contrary to cultural myth, the birth-control pill impacts on every organ and function of the body, and yet most women do not even think of it as a drug.
Depression, anxiety, paranoia, rage, panic attacks – just a few of the effects of the Pill on half of the over 80% of women who pop these tablets during their lifetimes.
Come As You Are
Researchers have spent the last decade trying to develop a “pink pill” for women to function like Viagra does for men. So where is it? Well, for reasons this book makes crystal clear, that pill will never be the answer—but as a result of the research that’s gone into it, scientists in the last few years have learned more about how women’s sexuality works than we ever thought possible, and Come as You Are explains it all.
The first lesson in this essential, transformative book by Dr. Emily Nagoski is that every woman has her own unique sexuality, like a fingerprint, and that women vary more than men in our anatomy, our sexual response mechanisms, and the way our bodies respond to the sexual world. So we never need to judge ourselves based on others’ experiences. Because women vary, and that’s normal.
Second lesson: sex happens in a context. And all the complications of everyday life influence the context surrounding a woman’s arousal, desire, and orgasm.
Cutting-edge research across multiple disciplines tells us that the most important factor for women in creating and sustaining a fulfilling sex life, is not what you do in bed or how you do it, but how you feel about it. Which means that stress, mood, trust, and body image are not peripheral factors in a woman’s sexual wellbeing; they are central to it. Once you understand these factors, and how to influence them, you can create for yourself better sex and more profound pleasure than you ever thought possible.
And Emily Nagoski can prove it.
See more about Come As You Are here:
SEX IN MARRIAGE | CELEBRATING 13 YEARS
The Guide to Getting it On: Unzipped
