Sitting in the Urban Grind Coffeehouse in Portland, OR, talking about natural building with Lydia Doleman, owner of the Portland-based natural building company Flyer Hammer Productions, I could feel my jealousy of her job coalescing. I had just completed her class An Introduction to Carpentry for Women, and was ready to trade in my computer – my current primary tool – for a table saw. Inspired and empowered by the possibilities that my new skill presented, I was compelled to find out what it’s like to be a woman in a (stereo)typically male profession and to understand the spin that natural building puts on the construction trade.

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Love doesn’t always last forever, and neither do sex toys. Whether your relationship with your sex toy has just gotten old, the toy has lost its steam, or you’ve found someone else, at some point you and your sex toy will have to part ways. So where do sex toys go when they die? More...

Let’s talk about sex…”green” sex. More specifically, let’s talk about the birds of an artificial feather and the bees with a battery-operated buzz. That’s right – sex toys, lubes, goos and whatever else we use to enhance our adventures in the bedroom, with or without a playmate. These toys, however, don’t come with the warning labels and regulations that children’s toys normally come with. So, unless you’ve done you research, we don’t really know what we’re putting in our…well, you know.

In uncovering what’s used to make those toys made for playing with under the covers, we find the usual suspects – PVC, phthalates, and parabens – giving “getting dirty” a new meaning. Not surprisingly and rather unfortunately, the cheapest and most ubiquitous toys and products are the most harmful. The squishy, jelly-like (and frankly frighteningly life-like) kinds, i.e. jelly rubbers and “cyberskin” toys, are made with PVC and phthalates. Aside from the toxins they put into the waste stream, they leach toxins into your blood stream, which scientists suspect are a cause of cancer and reproductive system damage (I smell irony). Additionally, many lubricants contain petroleum derivatives (read: flammable fossil fuel) and parabens – those hormone-mimicking chemicals that have been found in breast cancer tumors and may be a contributor thereof. There’s nothing like a global warming-inducing or carcinogenic sex toy to kill the mood. More...