Catherine Gigante-Brown

Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions wasn't your typical cutesie baby fare. It was raw, real—and unabashedly funny.

Candida Royalle pretty much invented couples erotica. She made it socially-acceptable. Respectable. The women in her films looked like real women and had real, comfortable female bodies. And her movies actually had stories. Good stories. She hired her friends—adult legends like Annie Sprinkle, Veronicas Hart and Vera, and Gloria Leonard — to create Femme films too.

Makeup and I have always had a love/hate relationship: I love it; it hates me.

I fumbled with my lace bra, hoping my silicone form wouldn't fall out from the left cup. I wasn't exactly ready . . . yet I was.

herbalist. shiatsu practitioner. healer.

Re-imagining the cervix, preserving the earth, facing breast cancer a whole new way…Annie Sprinkle’s wisdom abounds. “Life is a performance art piece,” she said...

After I got over the initial devastation, I pulled myself up by my big-girl panties and got on with it. Chemo was no picnic—but it was do-able.

What Stephen didn’t know –– what no one knew –– was how weak my knees grew when I pushed through the swinging doors of the ICU.

I asked a handful of women: why are people so scared of ladyparts?

I saw my present mother-in-law in a whole new light the first time she held my newborn son.