"Desire Is Where Everything Begins." Wendy Strgar on the Life-Enhancing Benefits of Prioritizing Our Sexual Wellness
Our sexual energy and desires do not get the recognition they deserve. At least, not for women. Connecting deeply and safely with our sexuality, whether we’re partnered or single, can impact how we show up in the world. Doing so can prove to be powerful and transformative, says Wendy Strgar. “And it connects to what we actually long for.”
Wendy has been digging into the world of sexual health and pleasure for more than 20 years. She’s a human rallying cry for encouraging women—and people of all genders—to explore what feels good. In the late 1990s, after having her fourth child, she couldn’t find any clean intimacy products to help ease her discomfort during sex. Nearly everything on the market was toxic, she says and left her burning and in more pain. Wendy realized the only way to remedy her issue was to create her own products. Her company, Good Clean Love, was born out of her desire.
But there’s so much more to the story. Wendy wanted to go deep, really deep, and offer women not only clean products that honor the vaginal microbiome (she did this by collaborating with biophysicists, scientists, and gynecologists), but also education and messages around sexual empowerment, connectedness, and true intimacy.
Because sex and our sexual energy is connected to all areas of our lives, believes Wendy, who is now in her early sixties. And the benefits of looking into our sexual selves are more comprehensive and wide-reaching than we may ever realize. “I think about how many women I know— personally and who I’ve worked with—who, if you ask them, ‘What do you really want?’ they don’t have a response,” she says. “Desire is where everything begins. It’s where the wheel turns.”
Chatting with Wendy Strgar
You started Good Clean Love 20 years ago. How did this all evolve?
I had just had my fourth child. I was 37; it was very hard to come back into my body and to my sex life. I was blessed, honestly, both to be geared towards sexuality throughout my life and also to have that be such a functional part of my marriage over many years. So, I would go to my doctor and say, 'I'm having all this pain with sex,' and they would continuously give me these products that were based in propylene glycol and polyethylene glycol, and I had a terrible reaction to them. This was in the nineties, too. Only now are we starting to tell women just how hard it is on a body to have children. But then, they were like, 'Oh yeah, nothing's wrong.'
So, I had a real problem I was trying to solve. I wanted to remain sexual, and the products that were available on the market— I can give you a long scientific explanation about why—were toxic. I thought I've got to come up with a better solution. And that's how I started Good Clean Love.
From the start, your mission seemed more than just about products. It was about education and awareness, too. How so?
Interestingly, I had these four children who were in preschool to soccer, dance, and music, and I would talk to the moms on the sidelines or in the audience. All these women had these issues. It wasn't just me. It was so clear I was not alone in this problem.
I wanted to learn what makes a good product. I'm a committed problem solver. I was persistent. So, what distinguished Good Clean Love early on was that we weren't just trying to sell our product to just anybody having transactional sex. It was sort of like this change in how we were approaching sex. We were making a love company. I did so much education about what makes sex real and good, and it has everything to do with how you communicate and show up for each other. I was teaching myself how to stay loving and in love, and I was teaching it broadly because I was trying to learn it. Those are entrepreneurial ventures, where the entrepreneur tries to learn the lesson they're teaching.
“If people could have a satisfying, real, authentic sexual expression [...] it would change everything. ”
It seems that women's sexual wellness is starting to get a bit more light, but it still feels like a slow process. Where are we when it comes to talking about our sexual wellness?
Weirdly, we believe culturally that there's been this vast transformation. Yet when you speak to women individually, and many books point this out, we see that the change is not so significant. Women still go five or more years in pain, with vaginal pain specifically, and they don't talk to their doctor. We think this conversation is happening because maybe we see a Super Bowl commercial that is super sexy, and we think everyone's liberated. No—women are not talking to their partners about what pleasure means. There's still this shame around lubrication. And in the 20 years I've been in this business, pornography has exponentially increased. So many people are being educated—and I use the word educated very loosely—about sexual health from pornography, which is fiction. You can read about how that impacts women's feelings of safety, of this idea that we should always be self-lubricating, and other things. That's ridiculous. I'm not opposed to pornography. I think that eroticism and erotic images can be very helpful in good balanced measure, but the degree to which it has grown speaks to me about the number of people who are dissatisfied, alone, and unable to connect with themselves and to other human beings in the most intimate ways. So, sex education today is as lacking as it's ever been.
This also speaks to the rise of violence. The energy of our sexuality, when it's not released, can be violent. So, for such a long time, I have been a proponent and an educator about sexual health because I feel like it's this balance point that is off in us, culturally, and has been for centuries. I have often said that if people could have a satisfying, real, authentic sexual expression with somebody who loves them, it would change everything.
I'm 42 and only recently started wholly leaning into my sexuality and desires. I get the sense that when we unlock this in ourselves, it can shift how we work, partner, parent, and engage with the world.
Exactly! Yes. And it connects to what we long for. I think about how many people, personally and those I've worked with, who you can ask, 'What do you really want?' and they don't even have a response. Our desire is where everything begins. It is where the wheel turns. It is connected to that second chakra, that sexual energy. And too often, it is constantly contained.
So, what if we want to explore and contemplate our sexual wellness, expression, and desires? Where do we start?
This is such a big question. Let's start with the single woman. Maybe she doesn't have a close relationship with her body, a positive relationship with her body, which I think encapsulates most women. How can she start to see herself as beautiful? How can she begin to relate to her own body and her pleasure response? Masturbation. It is the foundation of sexual health. But it's still a more common practice for men than women, as seen in a recent study. Having access to your orgasm is powerful. One big confusion that happens for a lot of women, especially young women, is that they're with somebody and they have an orgasmic experience, and then they're convinced that it's him who gave them that experience. They don't know that it's their experience they gave to him. So again, having access to your orgasm is so powerful in a million ways. It's empowering to have a really healthy relationship so you can provide feedback on what feels good and not wait for something to happen.
So I would say to start, for any woman, regardless of what her relationship status is, hone your relationship to your sexual response. Know yourself. There's a great vibrator that I only recently discovered. It's different from every vibrator I've ever used—and I used to review them and study them. Dame came out with it, it’s called the Aer, and it's for clitoral stimulation. Any woman who uses that thing will figure out how it all works for her!
Also, in terms of sexual response, you want to start with what's subtle. Our love oils work because they go from your nose. Your olfactory bulb is your limbic brain; your limbic brain is where your memory, sexuality, and emotions wake up. So that's why when you smell summer for the first time every year, you remember when you were four. So you can create those pathways for yourself with a scent you love. When I made the love oils, I used these ancient aphrodisiac books where I learned to incorporate spices, like cinnamon, rose and vetiver, black pepper, and sandalwood. I packaged these scents that have been used for centuries. This goes back to education. In finding your arousal mechanism, for women, it happens in your brain. Your limbic brain must come on. And even if you can't find that place of desire, scent can help you awaken the place of arousal.
Wendy Strgar is an award-winning entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Good Clean Love, and the author of the books Sex that Works and Love that Works. Learn more at wendystrgar.com.
Interview and words by Stacey Lindsay.