How delightful and refreshing to see that blogger The Yummy Mom ("I'm a mom, not a saint, thank goodness") has teamed up with the owner of a new online sex shop for women called MySecretCase (those Italians sure do love using English for marketing purposes). I especially appreciated the post on the store's blog called Sex toys during pregnancy in which we are assured that there are options for us even if our doctor has advised us against having sex for some risk-related reason.

You can choose one of the extra soft clitoral massagers...that we offer on MySecretCase. Sexuality is not just about penetration!

While the woman who writes the Yummy Mom is not exactly a feminist, in the country where the madonna-whore complex was practically invented, it's so encouraging to see some mainstream promotion of sexuality and motherhood to wrench Italians out of their ridiculously outdated, if subconscious, views. While I grew up with stores like the classic Lovecraft in Toronto, I have never seen anything like that here in Italy. Indeed, as the Yummy Mom asks her readers:

Have you ever been surfing the web in search of particular piece of lingerie or a sex toy and you wind up in a squalid sex shop, with a black background and women displayed with revolting vulgarity? And maybe, horrified, not recognizing yourself in those oppressive images, you turned off the computer, thus abandoning any fanciful ambition? Norma decided to resolve this problem, and created a Love Store for women.

Our partnership was borne of a common idea: to promote a female sexual culture, which often seems unknown or neglected. After all, the most popular Google searches have to do with sex, and for many people the female orgasm is a medieval mystery.

That's why Norma and I have decided that every week, both on my blog and on MySecretCase, we will talk about sex, in the hopes of providing some useful information and some food for thought.

An untapped market, if there ever was one. Hear hear!