My Erotic Summer
Resource List

Foundational. Ogden centers women's erotic experience not as a problem to solve but as a wholeness to inhabit. Required reading for anyone building a relationship with their own desire.

Mindfulness and sexuality woven together in a way that actually makes sense. Graham makes the case that presence is the most erotic thing you can bring to any encounter.

Ancient Taoist wisdom meets modern anatomy. A serious, body-forward exploration of female sexual energy and what becomes possible when you actually understand your own body.

On loving without fear and relating without losing yourself. The erotic life is impossible without this kind of clarity about how we love and why.

The body is the first erotic site. Pilates as a practice of returning to and inhabiting yourself, precision, breath, and the profound aliveness of a body that is known and tended to.

Slowness as erotic practice. Tai chi as a way of cultivating presence, flow, and an intimate relationship with your own energy, which is exactly what fostering eroticism asks of us.

The senses are the doorway. The relationship between scent, memory, and desire is one of the most underexplored erotic territories there is.

Drawing on decades of clinical practice and a landmark national sex survey, Ogden offers a revolutionary exploration of women's sexual experience. The best sex, she argues, doesn't just happen in the body, it is multidimensional, connecting body, mind, heart, and soul. What she calls the ISIS Connection. Endorsed by Esther Perel herself. Essential reading.

The peer-reviewed monograph behind the ISIS Connection. Drawing on 3,810 respondents and 1,465 handwritten letters, Ogden's foundational survey shows that sexual response is more than physical, it involves meaningful interaction with self, partner, and the intangible presence of Spirit. A woman-positive challenge to the over-medicalization of sexual experience.

A room-wide meditation on modern intimacy, recorded live at Godmothers celebrating 20 years of Mating in Captivity. Esther moves from long-term partnership to Gen Z dating culture, from eroticism and imagination to trauma, caretaking, and the body's relationship to aliveness. "Passion is commensurate with the amount of uncertainty you can tolerate."

Esther Perel's Substack is an extension of her life's work, exploring desire, intimacy, and the erotic as a quality of aliveness rather than a category of behavior. Her writing on eroticism outside the bedroom is foundational to the Majora Minora philosophy. Subscribe and read everything.

A guided exploration of eroticism across the human lifespan, from the embodied curiosity of childhood through the deepening wisdom of elderhood. How desire evolves, what each stage asks of us, and why understanding our developmental history is one of the most erotic things we can do. My milestone project for Lifespan Human Development.