Oh, baby, this is the trauma of bringing a new life into this world during a pandemic:

• People are having babies virtually alone, with hospitals severely restricting support to one person or none.
• Babies needing testing or treatment are being whisked away to Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICU), with contact to the mother limited (some to just 15 minutes a day, making it nearly impossible to breastfeed and bond).
• People are being sent home as little as two hours after the birth, putting enormous stress on parents.
• One hospital tried to mandate epidurals until people protested the ethics of forcing narcotics on all birthers.
• People are being stripped of the right to a home birth in jurisdictions that regulate them, citing a lack of PPE for midwives.
• Birthing policies are changing by the week and differ between regions in a country and even between hospitals in the same city.

During such a scary and chaotic time, birthers need doulas (personal birth support workers) more than ever to provide psychological, emotional support, education on the changing process, evidence-based information on COVID-19 impacts, and advocacy and understanding of their rights to informed consent—and their right to say no.

“No is a complete sentence,” says Natasha Marchand.

So is, “Fuck, no,” if you need it, offers Bianca Sprague.

The two co-founded Bebo Mia Inc. 13 years ago with a mission to connect women* with their “intrinsic value and power” and change the way we give birth. They do so by providing international online training and certification for personal birth and fertility support workers. Their reach and global impact is impressive, having trained 2,700 people in 31 countries, with 500 taking courses with them each year.

It’s not the least bit surprising to them that doulas—at this moment of critical need—are being excluded from hospitals “pretty universally” around the world, with the medical establishment using the pandemic to double down on their control over the birthing space. North America has largely dismissed the World Health Organization’s call for doulas to be considered essential workers.

“Let’s not kid ourselves,” says Sprague. “This was happening before [COVID-19] . . . telling people not to hire doulas. The reason? We give people back their voice in the birth space.”

Go Online or Stay Home

Luckily, the company had the foresight to move online in 2014, which has enabled them to empower their international graduates in moving their practices online. Doulas are now texting and video conferencing through every stage, from prenatal education to appointments through birth and post-natal support. “So things have changed,” says Marchand, “but we are still here to support people and it’s always important, but so much more important at this time.”

Ironically, the company faced incredible flack for being the first doula education company to move online seven years ago. Nearly everyone told them they couldn’t teach the emotional skills or build community or provide proper support. Says Marchand: “We became really creative in how we would move online and still give people the personal touch that’s so important.” The entire team is available to take calls nearly 24/7 and checks in constantly through texts and video, which helps replace one-on-one talks over coffee. “Our community is huge and beautiful and everyone loves each other, and everyone told us we couldn’t do it, well, until now, when everyone’s trying to move online.”

Sprague contends that “people underestimate how powerful community can be in the virtual space.” In fact, the founders were “overjoyed” to find they could build a stronger community online than a bricks-and-mortar office, which confined their training to their physical location in Toronto. Doulas now “have easier access to each other” around the world, and Bebo Mia has clients taking their courses not just in North America but in Japan, New Zealand, and unlikely places such as Jamaica, Egypt, and Bahrain. Their reach on social and email reaches beyond 35,000 around the world.

Now the company is being recognized as thought leaders during this massive shift online. Next month, the founders will share their insights as Feminists in Residence in LiisBeth’s Feminist Enterprise Commons (FEC).

They offer this advice: Look at your business and think about how it goes online. You can’t just translate the whole thing into the digital space. Pivot one part online and do it really well, with a very clear niche and a very clear problem you are trying to solve. Make sure you’re very clearly calling out to the people who you want to be clicking on your business.

“Pick one thing and then slay at it,” says Sprague.

Speak Feminist, Loud and Clear

Moving online has also enabled Bebo Mia to amplify what they proudly describe as their inherently and radically feminist voices and business practices.

When they started out, the co-founders (Sprague is 39, Marchand is 41) said that business coaches’ advice on how to be successful never felt right. “There was always a ‘yuck’ factor,” says Marchand, “until we started listening to ourselves and started noticing forums like the FEC, and we realized there are new ways [of doing business].”

By implementing conscious feminist practices, they removed the hierarchical structure of their company. Their six full-time staff and four contract workers have an equal vote on policy and direction. They believe “money is energy” and keep it in flow by paying fair salaries, generous bonuses, professional development, and ensuring that everything they touch and spend money on is with vendors who share their feminist values.

They introduced “radical” HR policies, with support for individuals, their mental health, and their families equally weighted with keeping the corporation alive. Diversity is top of mind when hiring as is drawing from their pool of graduates. They have granted $50,000 in scholarships over the past three years for students who identify with marginalized communities, and a corporate sponsor, Olivia Scobie, has given seven scholarship positions. They also exclusively hire women*—with the asterisk intentional.

The company’s webpage loudly and proudly embraces a broad definition of women* to include women-identified, femme-presenting, two-spirited, gender queer, trans-inclusive, gender nonconforming, androgynous, agender, intersex, bigender, gender questioning, gender fluid, butch, non-binary, queer positive or any person that would like to be included in this definition. They got flack for that exhaustive list too, most especially from those who wanted to protect the word “women” in reproductive health, fearing that it meant letting go “of this power goddess, women-bring-forth-life thing,” says Sprague. They’re also getting pushback from those who feel that a broad term of women* is not actually inclusive of trans and gender-nonconforming folk.

The company is not only at ease with these challenges, but they also invite it. They check in constantly with the community, says Alana Nugent, the company’s marketing director and Sprague’s spouse. “It’s interesting as we get more language and access to it, there are more folks who say how it doesn’t work for them. It’s a moving target and it comes down to consistently checking in and understanding where people are at and how we can collectively come together under a term that people feel good about,” says Nugent.

Rather than squabbling over language that keeps us divided, they work to reduce exclusionary gendered language and introduce new inclusive terms to the reproductive health space. “Mother” doesn’t quite cut it for gay parents or someone giving up a baby at birth. So, they use an array of terms: birther, pregnant person, gestational parent, surrogate, mapa, papa. “If we are speaking to a mother who wants to be called a mother, we will do so,” says Marchand. “But all genders are represented in this space and many wouldn’t think of themselves as a ‘mother.’”

Change a Business Plan, Change a Life

In addition to offering certification courses for birth, fertility, and postpartum support workers, they also teach skills to run a successful business—and that too is with a feminist lens. They say that everything they do at Bebo Mia is with the intention to smash the kyriarchy and level power structures. All bodies are kept safe. All bodies are represented. Communities speak for themselves—so they ensure speakers on their teaching roster come from diverse communities.

“It all sounds so big,” says Marchand, “which I love. When we started this, it was so individual. It was Bianca and I struggling in this system.” They clawed their way through extreme poverty at startup (zero funding or loans), suffered through nightmare relationships (Marchand with an ex-husband, and Sprague and Nugent with the sperm donor for their daughter), and battled oppression from the medical system, all while raising children. “We did what we needed to do to get out of it. Then we wanted to do that for each individual person,” says Marchand.

Building their company “to do seven figures this year” is clearly satisfying, but they delight in seeing their clients around the world rising and thriving, from putting their passions last to setting up businesses and achieving financial independence. “There’s a ripple effect,” Sprague says about their business this flourishing. “It’s really magical to see the healing and what’s possible.” People help others. They flee abusive relationships. They secure homes and support for their family. Their children see them happy.

Says Marchand: “We know that we are birthing in a broken system that is broken on purpose, to keep us broken. So, we are actively hoping that by letting our voices be loud, people will know they have choices, they can make their own decisions, and they can say ‘no’ within the birth space and have the birth that they want. That will have a better outcome health-wise. They will basically have a better start to their life and start as a whole person with autonomy and personal choice and feeling strong. If this parent is strong, then this baby is strong. We’re trying to fix things from the very beginning of life.”

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There’s a reason people kindle romance in bars: they hope alcohol will soothe their first-date jitters. For Haritha Gnanaratna and Audra Williams, booze wasn’t an option. Gnanaratna was a professional bartender, but Williams, a writer and media personality, had never had a drink in her life.

“People get really defensive when I say I don’t drink,” says Williams. “They think it’s about them, like I’m judging them just by being sober.” But Gnanaratna saw her choice not as a hurdle to overcome but a new bar to reach. Says Williams: “He made me the most delicious non-alcoholic cocktail on our first date.”

That zesty drink—smoked black tea swirled with celery cordial, cardamom, agave, and lemon—was the beginning of their romance, and a new business venture, Temperance Cocktails, launched in September 2018. They split tasks, with Gnanaratna focusing on product design and testing, and Williams on communications and marketing. They both liked coming up with drink names, playing off tarot cards (The Fool, The Hierophant).

Williams, a former speech writer for NDP leader Jack Layton and self-described “left-wing fixer,” now works as a content and engagement specialist at the Centre for Social Innovation (CSI) in Toronto. The CSI industrial kitchen provided them with an early production facility to make and bottle a line of original drinks, which are available for sale online. They also mix drinks fresh at special events, offering an alternative to people who choose not to drink, prefer to drink less, or simply want the sublime taste of a good cocktail without the booze.

The Sober Nightlife

Their market may be a drop in the bucket of the alcohol-dominated beverage industry, but it’s an expanding niche. Gen Z may be the first generation in centuries to drink less than their forebears. In Canada, interest in non-alcoholic and low-alcoholic drinks has increased, with sales rising by 10 percent in 2018. Interestingly, less alcohol doesn’t necessarily mean less partying; according to one study, young Americans were drinking 15 percent less on a weekly basis, yet continued to frequent establishments where alcohol is served, a trend the research group called “sober nightlife.” This trend might be attributed to an increased interest in health and wellness, financial concerns, or even the legalization of marijuana in Canada and many states in the US.

The Temperance co-founders note that even industry insiders are cutting back. “People are realizing that the lifestyle is untenable,” says Gnanaratna. “And, I hate the word, but they’re going on ‘detox weeks’ or whatever. It’s kind of a cool litmus test for how things are going to be translated. If people in the industry are moving towards that direction, I can only guess at how much larger the demand is on the public side.”

As a bartender, Gnanaratna has seen the worst of how alcohol can influence behaviour—from bar fights to sexual aggression to outright exploitation. On more than one occasion, he has been fired for cutting off regular patrons he thought had too much to drink. Williams chose sobriety for personal reasons. “My mom drank a lot,” she says, “and it just seems to make every situation worse.”

The First Feminist Movement?

Their business name is a nod to the temperance movement that some historians, such as Ruth Bordin, consider the first major women’s rights movement—and a radical one at that. In the 18th and 19th century, public drinking was rampant but a woman married to an alcoholic had very little recourse but to suffer his unemployment, poverty, and the domestic abuse that often came with it. In the US, female temperance leaders advocated not only for reduced alcohol consumption and outright prohibition but also women’s right to vote. The movement gained traction when religious leaders took up the cause (backed by industrialists wanting a sober workforce). Notably, the 18th and 19th amendments to the US constitution—prohibiting alcohol and enfranchising women—were passed in the same year, 1920.

Williams and Gnanaratna self-identify as feminists and are trying to instil their business with feminist values. But he’s the sole proprietor. A feminist thing to do? She says she didn’t want her middle-class, white privilege to be the face of the company when applying for funding, and she still works a full-time career at CSI. In marketing, they avoid gendering drinks (no “girl drinks” here), refuse to shame or stigmatize drinkers, and avoid the language of alcohol recovery because as Williams says, “That’s important, but it’s not my community, so I can’t speak for it.”

Rather than demonizing alcohol, they want to provide people with choice and shift how we perceive alcohol as “the default” drink in social spaces such as bars, nightclubs, networking wine and cheeses, wedding receptions, sporting events, and so on. Gnanaratna admits that, while he designed non-alcoholic drinks in his previous bartending career, he sold very few. “What I realized,” he says, “is that those people were kind of self-selecting out of those spaces.” Says Williams, “For us, it’s really about accessibility. Anytime a person is making a choice that’s not the status quo, you’re pushing back against something.” Their goal is to make it easier to make that choice.

Temperance Cocktails also enables non-drinkers to feel more comfortable in those social spaces by offering fun and celebratory options with all the trappings of alcoholic cocktails (fancy glasses, exotic garnishes, bright colours) that also don’t signal you’re abstaining. As Williams knows well, being an obvious non-drinker in a room full of tipsy people can invite all kinds of defensive reactions and intrusive questions. With a Temperance cocktail in hand, folks can relax into regular social conversation rather than fielding uncomfortable queries about addictions or whether they’re pregnant.

The Secret Ingredient: Choice

As for running a business together—which can strain any romantic partnership—the co-founders enjoy working together. Williams loves being the go-to product tester and watching Gnanaratna employ “mad scientist” things in the kitchen, such as an antique meat slicer for making extra-thin fruit garnishes. Gnanaratna is thrilled to have found a career that draws on his experience as a high-end bartender, without having to count out tip coins into the wee hours each night.

But it has been hard work scaling up the business. Last year, the two launched a Kickstarter campaign to create 22 original recipes, produce a recipe book featuring those cocktails (designed with tarot-themed visuals), and pay eight people to work on the product. They targeted their month-long campaign to their personal network and turned to cultural figures they knew to be non-drinkers for help promoting it. They raised $40,256 from 553 backers, surpassing their $36,800 goal. When it was almost over, Williams tweeted that she “wasn’t sure” how tired she was, until someone pointed out to her, “You are literally summoning nearly $40,000 from thin air. That is some amazing magic.” Then they went to work filling holiday drink orders and developing a 2020 action plan.

One hundred years after prohibition banned the sale of alcohol in the US (giving rise to illegal speakeasies, bootlegging, and perhaps the Jazz Age), the Temperance duo is jazzed to create new products for a new age fuelled by choice. Says Gnanaratna: “Maybe [our customers] just want to drink less, or not that day, or they’re finished drinking for the night. Or, [like] at one of our recent events, people were kind of staggering back and forth between us and the wine bar because they wanted to pace themselves.”

Williams says they want to make drinks that stand out for their own qualities. “We don’t want to talk about alcohol or not-alcohol all the time. It’s kind of like the men’s rights movement,” she jokes, “where they say they want to help men but, somehow, they’re always talking about women. I don’t want the focus to be on what’s not in the drinks, but on them being their own lovely thing.”

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During a recent Sunday evening at a school gym in Toronto, the Ninja Monkeys, a co-ed floor hockey team comprised of five women and seven men who have played together for nearly a decade, nailed their competition to the wall. Then they headed to a nearby bar to celebrate their 13–9 win with a round of drinks.

Team captain Tammy Symes, a 39-year-old recreational athlete, loves to play sports so much she signs up for two softball teams and two floor hockey teams each year, sometimes adding in ultimate frisbee or soccer for an extra dose of fun. “I’ve made so many friends, it’s unbelievable,” said Symes. She also gets to flex her leadership skills, serving as captain for most of the teams she plays on.

Supporting all that healthy fun and personal growth is a unique business model. Kristi Herold founded the Toronto Sport & Social Club in 1996. She had competed on rowing and ski teams at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., but when she graduated and moved to Toronto, she fell into an accessibility gap in recreational sports—especially for women.

“I thought maybe I could play soccer. But at the time, the only soccer I could find for women was highly competitive,” said Herold during a recent interview at the company’s Toronto office. “I couldn’t play at that level.” Yet she also couldn’t imagine her post-university life without sports. “If you go and play after work, you’re going home happier, you get a little sweaty, you’ve had some laughs on the field. You’re going to be less stressed, and your health is going to be better.”

Herold, who ran two small businesses while completing her commerce degree, seized on the gap in recreational sport for adults as an opportunity to launch her own company. “I realized I had to go out and do something on my own,” said Herold, who sports an athletic build, wild curls, and a ready smile. “I’d heard about these clubs in the US and I thought, well, I’ll give it a try.”

That was back in the analogue days, so Herold called up friends and friends of friends to see if they might be interested in playing on a co-ed sports team in a downtown location. She explained her idea as “intramurals for people who aren’t in university anymore.” By targeting recent graduates who faced the same lack of sporting options she encountered, Herold managed to sign up 52 co-ed teams that first season to play soccer, ultimate frisbee, flag football, basketball, and beach volleyball.

She charged $350 per team for the season, signed Spalding and Wilson as equipment sponsors, and launched a sporting enterprise that, 23 years later, has 130,000 annual participants playing about 30 sports. It employs some 50 full-time and 250 part-time staff, has expanded to eight Canadian cities, and can boast of being one of the largest sports and social clubs in North America.

Even in her first year running the future sports empire, Herold knew she was on to a good thing. “I was out at games every night…and showing up at sponsor bars afterward to make sure everyone had a good time.”

The concept is relatively simple. Players pay to play for a season that runs about 12 weeks. They can join either as an individual or a group can sign up as a team. Sport & Social Club handles all the organizing: matching individuals with a team, providing equipment, setting rules, creating a schedule, renting venues, tracking standings, and arranging social gatherings.

There are single-sex, co-ed and open leagues. The goal is to make it welcoming to anyone, regardless of skill or experience, with an emphasis on fun and making friends. On co-ed teams, there must be a minimum number of both men and women in play at all times. As Symes said, “If you join, you get played, and you have a good time.”

Said Herold: “I wanted to show it was possible to start something that everyone can play.”

When her business proved to have legs that first year, she formed a 50/50 partnership with her boyfriend, Rolston Miller. He had recently retired as a semi-pro cyclist and was looking for flexible work. As the company had no money for stamps, his first task was to deliver printed flyers that promoted seasonal registration. He did that, of course, by bike.

The two married later that year. Miller focused on building a digital platform for the company that would eventually become the foundation for internal and external communications. Herold led the business as CEO. “We were really hustling,” said Herold. “We grew by word of mouth, didn’t spend much on marketing.”

One of the club’s earliest hires was Rob Davies, an operations whiz. In 2007, Herold and Miller invited Davies to buy into the company, which is now run by the three partners, with Herold as CEO, Davies as president, and Miller as director of marketing.

Meanwhile, on the home front, Herold and Miller were struggling to manage a growing family with three young children. They found ways to distribute the workload at home according to practicality, rather than gender expectations. Still, Herold often felt overwhelmed. She’d grown up in Sudbury; her father was an entrepreneur and her mother stayed at home. “I grew up wanting to be both of them, which was challenging,” said Herold. “I felt I was failing, both as an entrepreneur and a parent.”

That crisis led Herold to take bold action. In 2005, she decided to step away from the business for 16 weeks of the year. She did that for several years. It wasn’t easy, but it seemed possible, Herold said, because of her innate leadership style, which she described as “bottom up.”

“I like to think of me as the base of a tree. I’m here to support. I say, tell me what I can do so you can go and do your work. It’s not me, standing on top, talking down.”

She and Miller divorced in 2012 but they’ve maintained their business relationship.

Now, after a decade of focusing on family while Herold placed the business in a slow-growth mode, she’s back in her CEO chair full-time. And she has a new goal of getting one million people off the couch, which means leading the company into an era of ambitious expansion.

Over the past two years, Sport & Social Group has expanded into new markets by buying up clubs that were already operating in Ontario and Michigan. Leaning on the parent company’s infrastructure and its custom digital platform, the newly acquired clubs can sign up and retain more members than they had previously. More acquisitions are in the works.

In the #MeToo era, ambitious growth in the sport industry comes with a responsibility to create a safe place for women. Herold aims to create gender balance—in the workplace and at play. Currently, about 40 percent of the club’s staff is female. And about 45 percent of its membership is female. Herold celebrates those stats in the male-dominated sporting industry.

So far, the company has not faced harassment issues, but Herold wanted to be ahead of the issue and hired an old friend from Queen’s University, Bay Ryley, to deliver online training for employees, teaching them how to identify and report harassment.

Sport & Social Group’s also developed gender policies that are trans-inclusive. Such measures are particularly important in co-ed sport, with teams required to have a minimum number of both genders in play at all times. For example, on the soccer field, two of six players must be women and two must be men. The other two can be any gender.

To register in single-sex or co-ed leagues, players can self-identify as either male or female at registration. Those who don’t identify a gender when they register are welcome to play, though their teams may not count them as either men or women to meet gender requirements. In open leagues, there are no gender requirements.

Within Herold’s expansion plans is a mission to improve access to sport for children. The company has started a foundation called Keep Playing Kids and aims to connect adult mentors—including Sport & Social members—with kids who need sport support. “We know that if you play when you’re younger, you develop a love for it, and you’re more likely to play as an adult,” says Herold. “We want everyone to keep playing.”

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Detroit-based feminist philosopher, doula and social-change strategist Adrienne Maree Brown has written works described as “luminous” in its “imagining the future of climate change, making different worlds through direct action and social movement-building, and creating transformative change through visionary speculative fiction.”

Brown is just as luminous -and visionary-in real life.

Judging by the engagement and enthusiasm from the more than 2000 who attended her recent talk about her new book, Pleasure Activism, at Toronto’s Lula Lounge earlier in May, her work is more compelling than ever.

Pleasure Activism aims to “explode the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work” when, according to Brown, that work can be a source of great personal healing and pleasure. Brown believes it’s important for those choosing to make a living via alternative world-making to take the time to heal from day to day grappling with darkness and systems of oppression that comes with the job.

Going against the grain is heavy lifting and recovery from that intense emotional labour is difficult.  Pleasure Activism is a form of slow-release medicine for those battered by the work.

After the program, LiisBeth had an opportunity to talk to Brown about how and why we need to move beyond reform to radical systems change;  the role of social change organizations, leaders, and individuals in that fight; and her views on implementing feminist ideas as an organizational leader.

You can read the interview below. But you can feel the interview by listening to the audio recording below.

Listening to the audio will take only 12 minutes out of your day and and we guarantee you will be blown away by Adrienne Maree Brown’s powerful and inspiring personality.

Alternatively, the transcript of the interview, edited for clarity and length, is below.

LiisBeth:  You mentioned tonight that you believe our institutions and systems are beyond repair.  What else can we do if what we want is a fair and inclusive world?

adrienne maree:   Your asking me how, right? (Laughing). Revolution [versus reform] is something I’m really committed to, and I try to talk about it a lot. I try to get a lot of people to be thinking about it. I encourage them to be in relationship with the idea of revolution. To me, it’s fine to be involved in activities or reform as long as you understand that they are not the outcome.

A slightly improved system is not actually a liberation for most of us because the current systems are set up to [foster] such an extreme level of inequality that small changes won’t make a difference. I always talk to them [reformers] like, it’s great to be taking steps to have more equal rights. It’s great to be moving towards more equity, but if you have an entire society that is based in white supremacy, an entire society that is based in competition rather than cooperation, then it’s always going to be a marginal [part of the program] to be bringing all identities of all people in when making decisions about the world.

So, a lot of the work that I do is about revolution but, I also really believe in building the new in the shell of the old.

LiisBeth: If revolution is what we need, how can we invite more people in to the be a part of it?

adrienne maree:  I tell people, everyone can be a revolutionary. Wherever you’re sitting right now is a potential revolutionary space. Where you are right now is the revolutionary front line. If you’re a banker [or entrepreneur] what can you do to change the system? What can you do to make it more fair? What can you do to create more access no matter where you sit?

Actually, the greatest changes in the world have happened because people who thought of themselves as ordinary people were willing to develop and [put into motion] subversive strategies within whatever systems they were in.

I also think it’s important to invite people to think about why they exist because all of us are in a lineage of survivors. Everyone can trace their personal lineage back to people who were revolutionary and come to realize that they exist today because of their work. Even if you think you’re too scared to be a revolutionary in this lifetime, your ancestors somewhere along the line were revolutionaries. Somewhere along that life your job is to pick that up and bring it to present.

LiisBeth:  Let’s talk more about fear and the role that fear plays in preventing people from doing what’s needed or right for the world we live in right now.

adrienne maree:  Audrey Lorde is a writer I recommend to everyone [who is thinking about this]. She talks about the fact that we’re going to be afraid no matter what. Why not be scared and try to intervene? We need to actually learn, that being scared is a social control mechanism. As long as you’re scared of creating a change, as long as you’re scared of disrupting the status quo, nothing will change.

LiisBeth:  You served for a while as the Executive Director of The Ruckus Society a small but long-established non-profit focused on supporting activism.  What was that like for you? Was it an easy job?

adrienne maree:  I went into it with a lot of ego. I looked at how everyone else is doing the executive director role, and decided I was going to totally do it differently. I was going to make sure we were super fair, flat structures, all the things. And then I got into the job and I was like, oh, actually, the system of philanthropy actually constructs how things work—not the person leading it. The current system of [funding] makes it almost impossible to have integrity and be a boss. You’re constantly being asked to jump through hoops for what big philanthropy says are the goals of what the work you’re doing should be, rather than trying to make sure the work is actually serving your community.

So as an ED, you get hired because you have all these visions, values and ideas, but then quickly realize, especially in a small non-profit, that you are continually in a desperate financial situation, and, rightly, also need to prioritize the welfare of the six people whose healthcare and income relies on the organization’s financial sustainability, which translates into me getting the resources in.

So, I think being a non-profit ED is an impossible job. When I am coaching others doing that job, I remind them that they have been asked to do an impossible thing. The board expects them to be great at budgets, managing people and fundraising, plus have and be able to implement a great, new vision.

Most people are good at one or two of those things, maximum. So, I think it’s an impossible job. I think we should stop having it as a singular job. In most institutions the strength would come from having two to three people sharing the role.

Lisbeth: When it comes to feminist leadership, what have you found works? And doesn’t work?

adrienne maree: I think it really, really works to have spaces informed by feminism. However, if those ideas are not embraced at the board level, it doesn’t work.

Your board should also reflect the community that you’re trying to serve. If the board is only the rich people and then the community seen as down there, there’s going to be an impossible tension that the organization is trying to hold and manage between what far away funders and the community want. So, a board should be in a space where there’s a balance.

I also think that a lot of times people assume that if a woman is in charge, it signals that it is a feminist institution. I think we have to really challenge that.

It’s not enough to just have literally a woman there. I think that we have to think about what are the aspects of feminism that person is trying to bring in. To me, that means thinking about how the person approaches the Collaborative [ecosystem around you] and the Care. Think about not just being collaborative, but how are we being collaborative with each other. We need to ask how is this person or organization working with others to share limited resources versus how men get trained to be alpha males competing over those same resources.

adrienne maree:  We also must ask how does this leader care for the entire structure? How is this person developing the deep connections needed to withstand the pressures of oppression? How do you deal with all the “no’s” in the system?  Everyone in a feminist organization should be cared for. They need to feel like a valuable member versus working in a type of ‘Top is cared for, but the bottom can be fired anytime’ type of hierarchy.

I think another practice that’s really important is to look at how maternity, paternity and parental leave happens. To me, a feminist institution is a place that says to both parents “if you have a baby, you got a lot of time to go take care of that kid, you don’t have to worry about it, and you get to come back [to work].” In my view, whoever made this baby has to go take care of this baby.

Lisbeth:  Tell us about your new institute?

adrienne maree: I recently founded something called the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute. A few years ago, I put out this book called Emergent Strategy, which is about how do we learn from natural operating systems to do our organizing [and planning] in right relationship with the planet. The institute is basically offering intensive training, facilitation, coaching and mediation to help people who are interested in taking that path, do it as well as they can.

Last year, we held several “immersion” workshops where people would come and play with adaptation, play with fractals, and play with how to create more possibilities. So, this year we’re doing seven that are spread out across the U.S. We are also conducting facilitation training in Detroit. I brought on a team of about 20 people who are all incredible facilitators, coaches and other things who I know are all practicing it, so that I know it doesn’t get bottle-necked with me.

LiisBeth: Amazing. Well, hopefully you’ll be doing services in Canada.

adrienne maree:  Oh yes, oh yes. I’ve got Canadians on my team. I’m ready to come to Canada.

LiisBeth:  So, thank you so much

adrienne maree:  Thank you. I appreciate you (Hugs)

LiisBeth:  I appreciate you, too. (Hugs back)

The post The Revolutionary appeared first on LiisBeth.

Amanda Laird is the founder of the successful Heavy Flow podcast and author of the recently released book Heavy Flow: Breaking the Curse of Menstruation. She transitioned from a corporate career to entrepreneurship via a path that is all too familiar these days: Big education. Career. Marriage. Corporate burnout. First-time motherhood.

Laird wanted a lot out of entrepreneurship: Work with a higher purpose; a second income for her family; time to learn how to be a mom; space for relationships that matter; and a routine that allowed her to look after her own health and wellness.

And she got it—albeit after stumbling along a somewhat meandering path that taught her to trust her own vision and instincts. We share that journey with you in the interview below.

LiisBeth: Why did you decide to pursue entrepreneurship?

Laird: I worked in corporate communications for over a decade and about five or six years ago, I just hit the wall. I was working 12 hours a day. It was all about billable hours. The men were consistently making more than the women. I was sooooo burned out. I started doing the math and realized that, given the hours I was putting in, I was barely making minimum wage. I started thinking that if I was going to work that hard for so little, I might as well work for myself.

But I didn’t jump into entrepreneurship quickly.  I first tried other ways to achieve the life I was looking for.

I left the PR agency to take a low-level job at a bank that was 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. with no after-hours expectations, and no need to be available on my Blackberry 24/7/365. But I soon learned that, while it meant fewer hours and less stress, it was crushing my soul.

I went back to the public relations firm I had left and thought that, because of my previous track record, I could “lean in” and negotiate an arrangement that included the opportunity to work from home two days a week. Or come back as a project-based contractor so I could have more flexibility. They said no. You are either in or out.

At that point, I really started wondering what I was doing with my life—and if I would ever be able to design a truly generative life.

Once you decided to go out on your own, what kind of business did you want to start?

I had an interest in health and wellness, so I decided to go back to school part-time to become a self-employed holistic nutritionist. I took courses for two years. I believed that helping people live healthier lives through better nutrition was a good way to do good in the world. I wrote my exam when I was 37 weeks pregnant. I saw maternity leave as a great time to start my new venture. In between breastfeeding and diaper changing, I started to hustle online as an independent nutrition consultant.

But that didn’t turn out exactly the way I planned.

After spending a year building my venture, and just as my one-year-old daughter was now ready to enter daycare, meaning that I would have more time to grow my new enterprise, I was offered a big corporate communications contract. Though I planned to put more time into my business, I took the cushy contract. I reasoned it was possible to work full-time for someone else and see my growing list of holistic nutrition clients, plus figure out how to be a working parent of a one-year-old!

A year later, I was back in that place where I felt so burnt out. It was like, “Wait a second.” I had chosen this path because I wanted to feel different, and I wanted to work differently, and I wanted to do different work than I did when I was working corporate. I thought entrepreneurship would be easier—but I found myself back in the same place.

From one hamster wheel to another—says something about our systems doesn’t it. What did you do next?

I stopped everything. I decided to put my holistic nutrition business on hold. It wasn’t fulfilling me the way that I thought it would because most people were coming to me just to lose 10 pounds, which is not the point of nutrition counselling. I had just finished my big corporate communications contract. There were no new prospects and I was exhausted, so I thought, “You know what, I just want to take a break and do a project just for fun.”

At that moment, I decided I’m going start a podcast.

Of course, you did! So tell us about the podcast.

I decided my podcast would be a conversation about periods and reproductive health. But it quickly morphed into a conversation about what we think is okay to do to women’s bodies or how to treat women’s bodies.

The first Heavy Flow podcast launched in September of 2017. Within three weeks, I was speaking with a publisher about writing a book.

That’s amazing! Tell us, how do you make money publishing a podcast.

I hate to admit I didn’t have a business plan. It was just supposed to be a fun project. But then, somehow, I was introduced to DivaCup, and they offered to sponsor the podcast. Then I thought, maybe others, like Lunapads, bebo mia, and others will too. I whipped up a sponsorship presentation in PowerPoint and not too long after started collecting money from these sponsors even though, at the time, the podcast was still relatively small. A revenue stream was born!

Has your business grown?

Yes. In September of last year, I decided to bring on a producer to help me edit the show.

How did you fund your entrepreneurial venture?

The reality is that I don’t support myself entirely. I’m married, which I feel we must be transparent about that. My husband gets paid very well and so I have that privilege of being able to kind of feel my way through the dark because, at least, he was bringing in income. I always relied on my skills as a communications and marketing person as backup potential income streams. And so that is a privilege as well because I was well-connected in an industry that I left. And so, when I needed money, it didn’t ever take me that long to write some emails or poke some people on LinkedIn and get a project to work on. So, I was able to bring in some money as I went along. But, ultimately, our family nest egg would be bigger if I just stuck with my corporate job.

Okay, now tell us a little bit about the book

The book is called Heavy Flow: Breaking the Curse of Menstruation. I talk about how and why menstruation is embroiled in so much shame and stigma and taboo, shrouded in secrecy, plus misunderstanding. I define a better period as one that is shame-free and pain-free. We need to disentangle the centuries of period shame that has been passed down from generation to generation.

The second part of the book is really a crash course in menstrual self-care. How to understand your cycle. How to use it as a vital sign. Why it’s important beyond reproduction. Then I give you some tools to help cultivate what Laura Wershler has coined as “body literacy,” in other words, how to read your body.

We need to be able to better read, interpret, and understand our body’s signs and signals. Capitalism has really thrived by telling us we need to ignore the needs and signals of our bodies. Becoming body literate and acting on what it tells us is a form of activism.

What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs?

I wish that somebody had told me that you can kind of get to that [clear] vision by just trusting yourself to do the next right thing, and trusting your own wisdom and capability.

I believe I am starting to experience success because I just allowed myself to do the next right thing. Even though sometimes, that was crazy. Like starting a business in a field completely different from my schooled profession, and then shutting this business, a holistic nutrition practice, that had a waiting list.

What’s next for Heavy Flow?

While attending the Entrepreneurial Feminist Forum, I had a huge lightbulb moment and funny enough, it was in your session. I was in your session and it just dawned on me that here I was trying to align myself with Lunapads and DivaCup or these companies that were niche period companies aligned with the topic on my podcast. But maybe there was an opportunity to broaden my sponsor base! What if I used my podcast platform to create an ecosystem for entrepreneurial feminists?

We would be thrilled if you did exactly that!

If you are interested in checking out Amanda Laird’s podcast, Heavy Flow, we recommend the following two episodes to get you going:

Episode 51: Resisting the Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand with Kelly Diels

Episode 58: Investing in Menstrual Equity with Jonathan Hera

Subscribe today!

The post When Aunt Flo Becomes CEO appeared first on LiisBeth.

Eden Baylee takes a coffee break in her sunny kitchen one recent morning in Toronto’s Little Italy. The diminutive 52-year-old recalls in a soft voice, “I grew up in a conservative, working-class Chinese home, the daughter of immigrants. The message was, ‘Make money, make money, make money,’ so I chose banking.”

After graduating from the University of Toronto, Baylee worked in the banking industry. Decades later, she became a prolific indie author of erotica, flash fiction, and mystery. Baylee’s revitalized career may not be quite what her parents had in mind as a way of making money, but it combines a life-long passion for erotica (she secretly devoured Story of O at age 11, misreading “orgasm” as “organism”) with an equally strong passion for writing. Plus, she enjoys the creative license to weave tales that portray mature, sexually empowered female protagonists and having agency over business decisions, which is not typical of her working life at a bank.

Baylee’s path from banking to feminist entrepreneur took some twists and turns. First, she had to overcome breast cancer and the fear of leaving a secure career behind.

The Path Back to Writing

In 1999, 10 years into her banking career, Baylee defied parental expectations and moved to New York City to become a writer. But in the following months at the age of 34, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She returned to Canada for treatment and, unable to work, had to borrow heavily from her brother as she underwent chemotherapy. Looking back on her exit strategy, she laughs now. “Gee, I didn’t plan this very well.”

Baylee put her writing career on hold again and returned to her banking job to pay off her debts. She was quickly promoted to lead project teams. In this role, she felt a huge responsibility to see those projects successfully through to completion as one project morphed into the next. She often worked past midnight. “If someone on my team was lax, I added their work to my plate. As the lead, I felt any failure would be mine,” she says. Her intent had been to stay at the bank for only two years while she saved enough to quit, but she found herself in the same position 10 years later. “Banking had invaded my life.”

Baylee’s path back to a writing career was made more complicated due to the fear that she would get sick again if she left banking. “I was afraid that I wouldn’t have any benefits and would be broke,” she says. Her husband, who sensed her growing unhappiness as she came home in tears many nights, insisted they confront her fears objectively. “The bank was chopping jobs right, left, and centre. It wasn’t as secure a job as it used to be.” They didn’t have children or dependents, nor an extravagant lifestyle. “I also realized that maybe security or amassing more chachkas isn’t really what I am after. Having dinner with my husband, and spending time with people we care about is what matters. If I have my health and am comfortable, I am happy.”

Finally, at 45, Baylee left banking in 2010 to pursue her dream. “I laid out a five-year financial plan knowing that writing is precarious,” she says. She prepared for the worst-case scenario such as needing expensive drugs again. “I was brought up to save and had saved a lot before I left the bank.”

Applying Corporate Discipline to a Creative Métier

Having worked as a senior project lead at a bank where she solved new challenges all the time, Baylee approaches her writing career as a business. She instills a corporate discipline to her routine, rising at 7 a.m. to meditate for an hour to “set a calm tone to write.” She writes 2,000 words a day, standing up at her kitchen counter, but considers herself a slow worker. “I have a bad habit of editing as I go rather than doing a clean sweep at the end.” Like her banking days, she often works past midnight.

Baylee’s first “coming out” was a self-published anthology of erotica, Fall into Winter, with tales of daring ménage à trois and seduction in New York, Canada, Thailand, and Austria. Her stories often riff off her own extensive global travels, which began with a trip to Asia after university. Her novella, The Lottery, was influenced by her real-life friendships with Thai sex workers in Bangkok’s Red Light district. This experience challenged her own privileged Western assumption that Asian women were doing demeaning work for the enjoyment of predatory men. Like many of Baylee’s stories,The Lottery shows how sexual submission and sexual power can co-exist even though it’s often a tricky feminist dilemma. In this story, the Western woman gradually realizes the power her demure, young, Thai friend has over men. “She can basically get a man to do what she wants, and yet, never has to be heavy-handed in her demands,” says Baylee.

Prior to self-publishing, Baylee had sent her anthology to several publishers including Harlequin without success. “It may have been too sexy for them because they didn’t have an erotica category at that time,” Baylee says. But in the back of her mind, she always knew that self-publishing was the better route. “I was a control freak so I didn’t want publishers to dictate my writing or give up rights or royalties.”

Baylee’s “slow” but steady approach has now resulted in 16 titles, some sold separately, some as anthologies. Her first 15 stories were novellas, but in 2014 she released Stranger at Sunset, her first of an anticipated trilogy of full-length mystery novels. “Erotica tends to be novella length, only 25,000 words, which makes it hard to weave an intricate story or develop your characters,” she says. Stranger at Sunset was her entrée into a larger, more expansive writing canvas. Even though her writing has evolved to a more mainstream genre, Baylee says, “There will always be erotica elements in my work.”

Perhaps the most successful way Baylee markets herself is by supporting other writers. She has published close to 300 interviews with other indie authors, which she promotes on her blog and other social media. In turn, she has been the subject of several dozen interviews. “It’s not about, ‘I help you, you help me,’” she insists. She has great interest in learning from other writers about their craft. “Writing is solitary so I had to develop a network because you don’t get out there to meet people,” she says.

Many online professional connections have blossomed into real face-to-face friendships. While many female erotica writers network primarily within their genre, Baylee purposefully built connections with both male and female authors of crime, horror, and literary fiction. She also follows many male poets and is very influenced by the poems of Charles Bukowski, the contemporary novelist, poet, and short story writer who Time called “a laureate of American lowlife.” “He is so sensual and lyrical. That’s how I wanted my writing to be.” Her strategy has resulted in a large male following, unusual for the erotica genre that has produced books like Fifty Shades of Grey.

Baylee now has an enviable social media reach: 29,000+ Twitter followers, 32,000+ blog subscribers. But she has stopped putting effort into amassing a larger following. “I was more engaged when I had 5,000 Twitter followers,” she says. She realized that having more followers doesn’t sell more books. “Engagement makes the difference.” She spends a few hours on social media every morning. “I equate these touch points to how I walked by people’s desks in the morning to ask about their projects or their families. You have to show your face so people remember you,” she says.

Baylee gets close to 500 e-mails a day and spends a lot of time writing personal e-mails and direct responses on Facebook. “That is much more important than retweeting tweets. It takes a lot of effort but in the long run it’s a better strategy. People like a personal touch. As a writer, I can’t ignore that,” says Baylee. Naturally, some followers think her works of fiction are autobiographical and she receives more than her fair share of direct messages from “stalker” men wanting a sexual conversation. “If people envision me in the role of a dominatrix, there is not much I can do to control it.”

Baylee distributes her novellas and books on many platforms including Amazon, Smashwords, B&N, Apple iTunes, and Kobo, where she retains over 70% of the revenue (traditional publishing offers only a fraction of this). On a daily basis, she averages 70 to 80 downloads. She uses one of her earlier short stories, “Seeking Sexy Sadie” as a loss leader, which gets up to 150 downloads a day. Baylee also uses ad campaigns, which generates 2,000 downloads during their duration. “This will usually have a halo effect for my other book sales for a few weeks afterward.”

A Non-Apologetic Feminist

While Baylee refers to herself as a feminist, she doesn’t write with a political agenda, even if it’s about the emancipation of women in a post-Hillary political climate. “I write as an entertainer. I don’t have an agenda of any kind other than to write a good story, good fiction,” she says.

The femme fatale character in Stranger at Sunset, a respected New York psychiatrist named Dr. Kate Hampton, is typical of Baylee’s strong, mature, female protagonists, which are sometimes composites of the go-getter women she met at the bank. “Many erotica writers write about 20-something, model-type, beautiful, cut-out people, which is how people think of sex. I couldn’t have written what I write now in my 20s. I didn’t have the experience or sexual maturity,” says Baylee.

Adding to that experience is Baylee’s time as a judge at the annual Feminist Porn Awards (rebranded in 2017 as the Toronto International Porn Festival) for more than five years. As a writer, her involvement in these porn festivals has helped broaden her knowledge of different communities and their sexual expression. Her first exposure to transgender people was through her involvement with the porn festival. Now, she has gotten to know transgender producers and actors personally so she feels she is less likely to resort to unhelpful stereotypes if she writes about a transgender character. “I think it’s important to know somebody first-hand if you are going to get a story right, no matter how small a role they play in your story,” she says.

Baylee acknowledges that some feminists are not comfortable with her characters, seeing them as victims who give away their power. Her novella Act Three has a controversial scene where Stella, a divorcee pushing 40 who desires sexual exploration after ending a traditional, sexually unfulfilling marriage, is forced into sexual submission by two men as a result of an earlier admission to her lover that this was a fantasy of hers. Baylee attended a book club meeting with a dozen young, bright, professional women and was surprised how unanimously they enjoyed Act Three. This led to a conversation about fear, sexual arousal, and how writers push the envelope of what is erotic.

Baylee is unapologetic about writing scenes that may be perceived as politically incorrect. Her work is fiction, after all, and what she finds erotic is out of her control. “I think a lot of people feel that if we have sexual fantasies where we enjoy being submissive that we will be submissive in our day-to-day lives. That’s not true necessarily,” she says.

Baylee doesn’t buy that fantasies have to fit into a socially acceptable box, and admits she has her own fantasies of being dominated by men. “It does not make me weak, passive, or against feminism. My erotic imagination and life should not have to conform to my real life, which is built around a specific set of social and moral values. The two lives never have to meet,” she says.

Baylee is set to release the two remaining full-length books in her mystery trilogy later this year and her mind keeps spinning with new ideas. Unlike some of her former banker colleagues who are counting down the days to retirement, Baylee plans to keep going forever. “Retirement isn’t part of my vocabulary. It seems like a dated concept. Retire from what? Retire from life? You need to subject yourself to new ideas and environments. You have to be constantly interested and interesting. This is what keeps us vibrant and energetic.”

Additional Reading

I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde (2011)

Why Erotica Needs Feminism: A 127 Page Thesis in 3 Pages by Ella Dawson

The post The Clarifying and Emancipating Power of Erotica Enterprise appeared first on LiisBeth.

Judy Kaye drinks coffee at a quiet café a few blocks from Oasis Aqualounge, the upscale sex club she and her husband Richard opened in 2010 as the majority owners with other partners. The 48-year-old mother of three is dressed smartly in black with glasses perched on top of her head. She laughs as she calls the creation of the female-positive, sex-positive club “our mid-life crisis business.”

As successful business people, Judy, who holds an executive MBA from Queen’s University, and her husband came up with the idea for Oasis after frequenting swingers’ clubs themselves. “I think entrepreneurs spend a lot of their time looking at other businesses and saying if they owned this business they would do this, this, and this,” she says. For her, the “this” was a club that would be open during the day, offered more than drinks and dancing, and allowed sex on the premises.

They also envisioned an environment that wasn’t just for swingers but that really catered to women—single or with any orientation of partner(s)—who wanted to safely explore their sexual fantasies without judgment or pressure to undress or have sex. “We felt that there was a lot of shame in our world around expressing sexuality for women,” says Judy. “This was an aspect of people’s lives that so many keep hidden and locked up and don’t nurture.” She meets more men than women who are comfortable with nudity and sexuality, perhaps because men have so many more spaces for exploring their desire. Oasis is trying to change that. “We get a lot of sexually confident women, which is absolutely amazing, but we also help women become sexually confident.”

Oasis proved the perfect name for their club since it could also serve as a mini-escape for busy couples with only a few hours to spare. As a parent, Judy knows how hard it is to get out of mommy mode: “It’s like, ‘Who’s got a cough? Where’s hockey? Who needs a snack?’” She felt there was a market for couples who wanted to find a deeper sense of intimacy in a sex-positive environment. She believes Oasis saves marriages because couples who enhance their sex life can deal with problems better. “If you’re not getting along with someone, then every little irritation seems magnified.”

They imagined opening a small place until they came across a 2,700-square-metre dilapidated heritage mansion (formerly a gay bathhouse) east of Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, on the corner of Carlton and Mutual Streets. “We could see the possibilities,” recalls Judy, who negotiated a long-term lease. The club has many amenities, including a heated outdoor year-round pool, hot tub, steam room, sauna, bar, dance floor, and several adult playrooms such as the Shaggin’ Wagon and Dungeon.

What’s the Big Deal about Sex?

Today, Judy and her husband focus mostly on strategic management and building a great team to support Oasis’ rapid growth while their five other partners, all full-time employees, assume day-to-day management and administration. At startup, the sexpreneurs found that swinging deals presented a major challenge. “There was such a stigma against this type of business,” says Judy. Banks shied away, which forced them to finance Oasis themselves, including $500,000 in renovations. “We used our entire savings, mortgaged our house, maxed our credit cards, and borrowed from family,” says Judy.

They also had to secure a second-tier processor for credit card transactions because major banks wouldn’t issue them. “We knew that if we were going to be the premium brand, we couldn’t be a cash-only business,” she says. Finally, TD came on board, even holding the 2016 Pride Toronto press conference at Oasis to recognize the 35th anniversary of the infamous bathhouse raids by police, one of which took place at the very bathhouse Oasis took over. “That was a huge honour for us,” says Judy.

Getting a municipal bathhouse license also proved difficult as this was a first for women and their partners. Previously, women’s events that were held at men’s bathhouses operated under their own licensing. “Everything [the city] knew was based on men,” says Judy. “The municipal licensing people were not sure what category to put us under.” They even had to jump through hoops to get the liquor license, undergoing criminal checks since they hadn’t run a bar before.

Marketing also presented challenges. The Toronto Board of Tourism denied their application to join even though Oasis’ newsletter had a worldwide circulation of more than 20,000 readers. “They claimed they didn’t have an appropriate category to place us even though they have ‘fun things for couples’ and ‘night entertainment,’” says Judy. “We pay our taxes. We pay employees well. We have a health plan. This is not some cash-only, back-door kind of thing.”

It even proved tough getting customers who were “huge repeat customers” to be ambassadors for the club. “We would say, ‘Tell your friends,’ and they would say, ‘Are you kidding?’”

To spread the word, the club created AquaFlirts, a promotional team that marketing director and events producer Fatima Mechtab describes as her “sex-positive, fun, flirty staff.” The AquaFlirts attend trade shows and community events such as The Everything To Do With Sex Show, Sexapalooza, and Pride. Says Mechtab: “We’ve never shied away from who we are, never. We really embrace sex-positive, body-positive, liberal values. We are so open and willing to talk to people.”

Oasis is winning people over, and more and more visitors are now being referred by friends. In the early months, they were only open Thursday to Saturday and averaging 50 paying customers per week. Today, they are open seven days and averaging 1,000 customers per week. Annual revenues grew by more than 20 per cent last year, reaching nearly $2.5 million.

The sex club’s growing popularity is also helped by popular culture such as the 50 Shades of Grey franchise. “I feel like conversations around swinging, polyamory, and sex clubs have really become more prominent in mainstream media,” says Mechtab.

Events + Education = Diverse Fun

It wasn’t difficult to convince swingers—typically heterosexual couples—to try Oasis. “A new sex club? Let’s go,” was the response. But financial viability demanded a larger market and now six years later, customer surveys show that the majority of customers are not interested in swinging. To survive, Oasis has succeeded in creating a social club where folks can chat without pressure to have all kinds of sex, or any sex, without shame. “It’s not just sort of an anonymous sex club with rooms where you don’t see anybody,” Mechtab says. “The whole experience at Oasis is not just about the sex. It’s about the entire atmosphere and vibe.”

The club hosts diverse events that appeal to a wide range of interests. These often have a sex-education component that also acts as an ice breaker. Oasis After Dark, for example, is for BDSM lovers; Down to F*ck serves women craving sex with multiple men; Spectator Sex caters to couples who want to “perform” in front of an appreciative audience.

And then there is Sapphic Aquatica, exclusive events for women and trans people. “That’s my baby,” says Mechtab, who identifies as gay. “There isn’t a lot for women as far as this type of environment goes, but there is nothing for queer people and trans folk.” Stressing that trans men and non-binary folks are also welcome, Mechtab launched Sapphic Aquatica shortly after joining Oasis in 2012. She throws an anniversary party every January featuring such activities as Sybian rides (a high-powered vibrator operated by a trained staff member that is straddled to achieve orgasm) and fundraising for LGBTQ causes.

Sex educator Luna Matatas says Oasis is the only sex club she knows of that integrates education into its events. While some of what Matatas teaches at Oasis is technique, such as how to use sex toys, the more important lesson for women is building sexual confidence. “We are experiencing oppression and shame on multiple levels about pursuing the kind of pleasure we want,” she says. Sexual fulfillment has important benefits for women’s emancipation. “You expand your range of expression and emotion through doing a lot of sexual creative things,” says Matatas, noting that this serves women well in spaces beyond Oasis.

Compassion and inclusion are important lessons, she adds. “It’s not just about you getting what you want. You need to create a safe environment to invite everyone else to get what they want too,” explains Matatas. Unicorn Night, where a “unicorn” or single woman plays with a couple, is Oasis’ most popular event. Matatas has taught couples how to swing with a unicorn so that they don’t regard her as “some sort of stunt vagina” and facilitates “meet and greets” for unicorns so they can feel comfortable and enjoy special pampering such as complimentary glasses of champagne before their sexual encounter.

Matatas also helps women challenge their own self-limiting beliefs. As a self-described “chubby, curvy, queer, brown woman,” she is a role model for how women can embody their own kind of sexy. She makes a point of dressing up to “present sexy” at Oasis’ workshops; some women have even approached her to ask what dress size she wears. She can confidently convey: “Fat people have sex too and we have good sex.”

Turning on to Safety

Clothing is optional at Oasis so people walk around in various stages of undress. But while one may envision an unruly Animal House, there are strictly enforced rules to guide the play. There are 13 rules printed in several languages and presented via video by a stiletto-clad vixen. They’re even read out loud to new guests to make sure everyone understands.

Rule number one is “No means no.” But can’t “no” mean “yes” in a sexual context? “Even if you are acting out a sadomasochistic scene, staff and managers have to see that conversation is happening,” Mechtab says. “You need an affirmation that your action is okay with that other person.” What about hugging? Mechtab admits she’s a hugger by nature, but even that’s a no-no without expressed consent. “We’re a space where people are naked, intimate and maybe haven’t been to a place like Oasis so you don’t know what could trigger them. In our business, only yes means yes.”

Differential pricing also maintains civility and balance in numbers. “It’s an economics thing,” says Judy. Oasis tried gender-neutral pricing but that disproportionately drew more men, causing both men and women to complain. Single men now pay a premium (and are restricted from the club at certain times) while some days, admission is free for women and trans folk. While some men complain about the preferential treatment of women, Oasis is firm they are doing the right thing. “We believe that having a space that is very safe and comfortable for women, and where women’s needs are paramount, is good for both men and women,” says Judy. After all, when women feel happy, confident, and safe, they are less ashamed of wanting sex and exploring their sexuality, which makes men happy too.

Happy Employees = Happy Customers

Oasis’ engaged workforce of 40 people also works hard to create a good vibe. “We don’t hire based on experience,” says Judy, pointing out that you may get a better Caesar elsewhere but having a bartender with sex-positive values and who supports women matters more. Many of the staff frequented Oasis before joining the payroll.

Staff range from university students (the University of Toronto’s Sexual Education Centre’s 2013 party attracted many that would become regulars) to more mature employees such as Teresa, a trim, ginger-haired grandmother who says Oasis is “like home.” She says other sex clubs she visited were “cliquey.” “If you didn’t look pretty enough, they wouldn’t let you in,” she says. Teresa recalls a “bigger lady” asking her whether she would be allowed into Oasis, and she offered this reassurance: “We do not discriminate. We have people from big to small.”

Teresa, who started as a cleaner, now co-hosts an event with her husband called Cum Give it a Shot, which educates people about squirting (female ejaculation at climax). It’s a team effort. Teresa helps women relax (“I will kiss them and play with their boobs”) and her husband demonstrates the right technique. “He’s got the magic touch,” Teresa says, proudly noting that not every guy can make a woman squirt. “I can go about four feet. Last time I did it, I had a target.”

Oasis encourages staff to share interests and propose ideas for new events, such as a burlesque party that was organized for a birthday. Many of the marketing posters feature staff rather than stock images. “We would do more if we had people willing to do more, but there’s privacy issues,” says Judy.

Oasis also organizes staff road trips to check out other clubs—both for new ideas and bonding—and outings such as naked bowling and nude polar bear dips on New Year’s day. “How many staff like their jobs so much that they want to go there when they’re not working?” asks Judy.

Creating a Sexy Legacy

“Finally, this year we feel like we can say this is a successful business,” Judy smiles, emphasizing that it has been a team effort. This optimism serves the entrepreneur well. “You always have to see the good side of something in order to break through all the pain it takes to get there. It’s kind of like having a baby.”

Sticking it out has been hard at times, but they have already established a legacy in creating a space that champions new attitudes about women’s sexuality. Feedback such as “I’ve never felt so comfortable in my own skin” bring tears to her eyes. “Because that’s the point,” Judy says. “Whatever I am, I am sexy.”

Related Article:
Swinging offers sexual freedom, but you have to play by the rules (Toronto Star, Feb. 7, 2017)

The post Revitalizing Women’s Sexuality, One Member at a Time appeared first on LiisBeth.

As countless instances of hatred and discrimination from across the world flood news headlines and conversations, it almost seems like the idea of peace is hanging on by a thread. One thing that remains universal, however, is the magic of music and how it continues to bring people together despite their differences.

Now it’s possible that the world could literally be crumbling before our eyes, but let’s press pause on the panic button and check out 10 songs that promote empowerment, equality, and human rights that may help restore your faith in humanity.

Amaal Nuux, “Who Are We”

Somali-Canadian singer Amaal Nuux shares words of unity through her tantalizing anthem, “Who Are We,” the second single she released late last year after taking a four-year hiatus from music. Learn more about this single at Urbanology.

Austra, “Future Politics”

Toronto band Austra imagines a better future in politics and humanity with powerful lyrics that are just as gripping as the song’s visuals.

TiKA the Creator, “Tenfold”

The very image of radiance, Toronto-based artist TiKA the Creator paints a picture of solidarity for Black female creatives within the city in her single “Tenfold.”

A Tribe Called Red ft. Saul Williams, “The Virus”

Prominent Indigenous music group A Tribe Called Red teams up with poet/musician Saul Williams for a politically charged project filled with climatic drums and a riveting mix of vocal elements.

Kimmortal, “Brushing By Heaven’s Shoulder (Remix)”

A queer, Filipina hailing from Vancouver, Kim Villagante, a.k.a. Kimmortal, combines zealous lyrics with her own animations to tackle issues faced by women of colour for “Brushing By Heaven’s Shoulder,” a remix off her 2014 debut album Sincerity.

Maiko Watson, “Everyman”

Based on a poem her mother wrote, Guyanese-Canadian singer-songwriter Maiko Watson croons over guitar strums while recounting the 2012 fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by neighbourhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida.

Petra Glynt, “Sour Paradise”

Inspired by anarchist and poet Hakim Bey’s T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, musical artist Petra Glynt creates psychedelic yet militant-style visuals that urge for a drastic change in the world amongst the constant displays of discrimination and inequality.

Lizzo, “My Skin”

Self-proclaimed feminist Lizzo is constantly promoting self-love and empowerment in her music and “My Skin” is one of the many that stand out. The Minneapolis artist strips down to a plain bodysuit, wearing minimal makeup and her natural curls to show her adoration for the skin she’s in. To learn more about Lizzo, check out her interview with Urbanology.

Aaradhna, “Brown Girl”

New Zealand native Aaradhna uses her sultry voice in “Brown Girl” to let the world know that she’s more than just the colour of her skin.

Shi Wisdom, “Young Gunner”

Shot in the alleys of Toronto, Shi Wisdom tells an all too familiar story with her powerful song “Young Gunner.” The lyrics and gritty visuals speak to the influx of instances where unarmed black males are gunned down by white men who are often in positions of authority. She spoke in depth with Urbanology about the single.

About the writer: Sadé Powell is a staff writer for Toronto-based publication Urbanology Magazine and gets her kicks from penning stories on various forms of music, technology, and her outrageously extensive list of other interests. Find her on Twitter at @playsade.

The post A Cure for Chaos: A Playlist To Feed Your Heart and Mind appeared first on LiisBeth.

In 2012, Niki Koubourlis had achieved pretty much everything she had set out to get and that made her father, a Greek immigrant to the United States, proud. By the age of 32, she had acquired an MBA, a husband, and a dream job working in commercial real estate for Sheikh Mohammed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi. With the American real estate market still flatlined after the 2008 global financial meltdown, Koubourlis was racking up work experience in the Middle East and “earning tons of money” developing racetracks, theme parks, and even man-made islands.

She was also growing more miserable by the day. “I just wasn’t that passionate about this career and I was spending 80-plus hours a week doing it.” Still, she soldiered on, unhappy, piling on weight, wanting out of her marriage but too afraid to take the plunge, until she finally got the nudge she needed to change. Unfortunately, that came in the form of devastating news: the suicide of a close university friend.

While grieving, Koubourlis read the The Top Five Regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware and realized she could own up to a few of those, namely working too hard and not doing what she loved. She soon quit her job and left her marriage, determined to create the life she truly wanted even though she didn’t really know what that was. She took a job running a tech company in Chile, but soon fell back into her old workaholic ways. On a business trip to Denver, Colorado, Koubourlis fell in love with the landscape and balanced lifestyle. She left her job, moved to Denver without knowing anyone, and lived on her savings while she took a mini-retirement from her career to find out what she really wanted out of life.

Though she had almost no experience in the outdoors, Koubourlis realized adventure had a great deal to teach her. Up to that point, she had made all her life decisions based on security, getting it and keeping it. So instead, she threw herself into a slew of adventures during what she calls “the summer of Niki” in 2013. She climbed mountains, went hiking, took multi-day camping trips, usually alone and often terrified. “You put yourself out there and do it, that’s an opportunity to stretch yourself, push your limits, learn something about yourself,” she says. “Succeed or fail, you always come out the other end a better person. That’s where the growth happens.”

Trip by trip, she was discovering more of what she wanted out of life and what she wanted to do in her next career. In speaking with other women she encountered on various hikes, Koubourlis realized that women faced significant barriers to enjoying outdoor adventures: lack of skills and experience; the high cost of equipment that is often designed for men and “shrunk” for women so it’s usually ill-fitting; jam-packed schedules as women are often juggling careers, kids, and the bulk of family caregiving. All of this leaves little time and energy to plan and organize excursions that occur off the beaten path.

Then there is the intimidation factor stoked by an outdoor adventure industry that glorifies hard-core, macho thrill-seekers and doesn’t seem much interested in appealing to regular women. Koubourlis noticed something else while on a hiking adventure to Machu Picchu: the women who had outdoor experience and were travelling with other gal pals were having a blast. Women who were travelling with male partners—and relying on his experience—were often miserable. She believes that if the women were better prepared, they would feel more confident and in control rather than a tagalong, and can take the lead in decision-making. Also, she saw that men and women tended to experience outdoor adventure differently. For men, it was more about testing themselves, taking risks, and competing to go higher, faster, harder. Women looked to outdoor activities as a break from stressful lives and thrived more in supportive and non-judgmental settings where they could learn new skills while connecting with other women and making friends.

At the end of her seven-month time out from her career, Koubourlis knew it was time to get back to work but she could not muster the enthusiasm for a return to the corporate world, and she could not let go of this business idea: How could she make it easier for women to have confidence-building outdoor experiences that had proved so life-transforming for her?

The Bold Idea

To test whether her idea had legs, Koubourlis started a meetup group for women interested in getting together for outdoor activities such as rock climbing, kayaking, hiking, and rafting. She called it Bold Betties. “I wanted to see if enough women were experiencing the same problem of being intimidated by the outdoors and wanted to try out a variety of activities in a very inclusive, non-intimidating, and non-competitive environment. The group just blew up. The reality is, most people are moving [to Colorado] to experience the outdoors and they say, ‘I see it but then there’s a list of barriers to experiencing it.'”

That was 2014. Just two years later, Bold Betties had 18,000 members and there were meetup groups or chapters in nearly a dozen American cities. Members in Bold Betties were finding their tribe, women like Koubourlis who “do epic shit” to get unstuck, to embolden their transition out of stale relationships or careers, and grow in ways they could not imagine. The blog on the Bold Betties website is full of such stories.

Koubourlis had not only created the life she craved but launched her female outdoor adventure enterprise and enticed two founding partners to help her build it into a lifestyle brand with the goal of being as recognizable and profitable as CrossFit or SoulCycle.

Members in Bold Betties were finding their tribe, women like Koubourlis who “do epic shit” to get unstuck, to embolden their transition out of stale relationships or careers, and grow in ways they could not imagine.

A Meeting of Bold Betties Minds

Sommer Rains, who joined as chief operating officer, calls herself a serial entrepreneur, having started a human resources company catering to the health care field in her 20s, then helping launch her husband’s successful business in the Boulder area seven years ago. While searching around for what to do next, she says about five people in her networking group told her she had to meet Koubourlis. “I finally emailed her and said, ‘Hey, I think the universe wants us to meet up.'”

Arezou Zarafshan joined as chief marketing officer in a similar fashion. Born and raised in Tehran, she came to the United States at 17 to study electrical engineering. After working her way into senior positions at several large tech firms, she realized that male-dominated corporate environments and data-driven analytics no longer fuelled her creativity. While taking a pause in her career to develop consumer and creative marketing skills, she connected with Koubourlis via Twitter.

The founders came to the conclusion that there were multiple ways to grow a business. Their challenge was to chart a unique path that protects and enhances Bold Betties’ core values: to make outdoor adventures accessible to all kinds of women by creating a supportive and inclusive community and providing a variety of affordable adventures.

How to Big the Betties?

The founders admit they are still very much in the early stages of building their for-profit company and still feeling out their path for growth.

They never really considered the franchise model, of making one Bold Betties chapter financially sustainable and then replicating it. Indeed, rather than figuring out ways to monetize their business, they have made growing their community of adventuring women the priority. Their goal is to reach 100,000 members within the next year and open new Bold Betties chapters in cities across North America.

In tandem, the founders are exploring and developing ways to engage their growing community of members through their website and e-newsletter, free and inexpensive local adventures, international trips, online and tech-based tools that help women plan, book, and pack for outdoor adventures and, of course, meeting up with other Bold Betties to enjoy those adventures.

At present, the company generates commissions on international trips and professionally guided adventures such as rock climbing and rafting as well as equipment and clothing sold on their website. But that’s hardly paying the bills let alone the founders’ who are still not drawing a salary and mostly work from home.

But they are not in a hurry to monetize their business. Rather, their strategy is to follow the long-term vision of social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter, who built a community of users then figured out how to monetize that traffic. That may include a low membership fee once they develop a suite of benefits members want to buy into. It could include developing a line of Bold Betties equipment and clothing and partnering with an outdoors retailer to sell it. It most definitely will include more online tools and communication vehicles to make outdoor adventures more accessible to women.

Says Koubourlis: “There will always be a free way to engage with us because that’s our mission, to get women to try these things. If we start creating barriers and costs then we’re not solving the problem we set out to solve. We’ll become part of that problem, so we’ll always have a free entry point.”

They’re even feeling their way on how best to grow their membership and local chapters. At present, they choose local volunteers—Alpha Betties—to organize and lead local events and reward them with “Betty Bucks” that can be used to buy trips and equipment. Koubourlis says they are investigating how best to retain and remunerate Alpha Betties as the business starts to generate income while keeping Alpha Betties focused on the core values of making adventure travel accessible to women and creating a supportive, non-competitive community of female adventurers.

The Next Bold Step

Focusing on building community rather than generating revenue presents a significant challenge for attracting investors who can help them grow.

Rains says a lack of female investors who may be more willing to support female entrepreneurs is a definite obstacle. “It’s a huge problem. A lot of women decide to bootstrap for that reason. I see myself in the future hoping to solve this problem and want to help encourage more women investors into the pool,” she says.

Rains says they are reaching out to build relationships with venture capital investors, but they’re too early in the game to attract that kind of growth money. “Our first goal is to build and engage our community before monetizing,” says Rains. “Some don’t get that, but others will say, ‘Hell yes, that’s great.’ But they also want to know five years from now how we are going to monetize [our business] and we don’t entirely know that yet so we’re a bit early for VCs.”

Their immediate goal now is to attract an angel investor who wants to support the ideals of the company. And that is? “We’re not so naive as to say we’re empowering women,” says Koubourlis. “We’re offering outdoor adventure as a tool women can use to empower themselves. We’re about offering enabling experiences that will help women live their best and boldest lives, and we want them to go after a life of adventure whether that’s in the mountains, on the river, in the home, in the office. We want to help them to develop the courage to go after the things they want.”

Koubourlis says reaching out to potential investors requires a lot of relationship building, which is time-consuming, especially when the three founders are running the business on scant resources. “I’m not going to lie about it. It’s going well, but it’s a slow process,” says Koubourlis. “Your average entrepreneur is not a patient person, and that’s certainly true of the three of us.”

What does not worry them is competing for venture capital among other startups in the tech hubs of Denver and Boulder. Tech giants are located in the area because compensation alone can’t lure talent. Employees want the outdoor, laid-back lifestyle that initially attracted Koubourlis. She compares the potential of Bold Betties to lifestyle giants such as CrossFit and SoulCycle and says there are plenty of VC firms with an appetite for investing beyond tech and in “brands with enthusiastic communities who are passionate about the ethos, activities, and lifestyle of what that company does and what that brand stands for.”

As for her own life-changing move, Koubourlis is not looking back. “There’s a ton of stories of women who came out on a Bold Betties adventure and went on to make a transformative life change. What’s interesting about outdoor adventure is you learn these lessons that make you a little more adventurous and willing to take on risk and try new things. I get to meet a lot of smart, interesting, passionate people and that is so different from my past corporate life where people were smart but maybe not so passionate about what they were doing. Being around people who are passionate and engaged wears off on you and it feels great.”

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Dimple Mukherjee, founder of Whole Self Consulting, didn’t plan on becoming an entrepreneur. She grew up in a largely traditional South Asian household and observed that starting and running a business was men’s work. However, modern life intervened. Separated with three kids and looking to finally build a life she could love, the answer for her became entrepreneurship, learning to speak, being heard and seen, and connecting with inspiring entrepreneurial women.

We loved speaking with Dimple. Her story is an example of the transformative power of entrepreneurship, and how successfully crossing the river towards entrepreneurship is often a matter of feeling for the stones.

LiisBeth: Tell us about your journey.

Dimple Mukherjee: I was born in India but raised in Taiwan. We moved to Toronto when I was 12. My mom was a homemaker, but my dad was an entrepreneur. He started at age 16. Growing up in a household where my dad and his brothers had built a life for themselves around their business, I always felt that that was not a possibility for me. It just seemed very male-dominated back in the ’70s and ’80s. Instead, I chose to become a health care worker, a healer. It wasn’t by intention that I became an entrepreneur, and I still have a hard time calling myself an entrepreneur.

It was by chance that I stumbled upon entrepreneurship as a path because I was coming from a place of wanting to be of real service to others, not just making money. Then,I read about Jadah Sellner, founder of Simple Green Smoothies. She said the way to think about entrepreneurship is to think about it as a way of creating and offering the world an important service. When I wrapped my head around that, I was comfortable calling myself an entrepreneur. I am all about service.

L: What did you do before starting your company?

DM: I worked in a hospital setting for about eight years. The job there gave me a little bit of understanding of how the world of business and entrepreneurship works. I was learning how to market myself within the medical industry, creating a name for myself, a reputation, which is all part of the entrepreneurial world. My job provided me with a stepping stone into the world of entrepreneurship.

L: Tell me a bit about how you decided to start Whole Self Consulting. Was it one of those aha moments that happen late at night?

DM: I think the journey began with a pivotal point in my life when I realized I was in a marriage that was no longer healthy for me. Still, I stayed in it because: a) I didn’t realize what was going on; b) due to the cultural programming that I grew up under, divorce was not an option; c) my kids. Growing up, I was programmed to believe that if you got divorced, the kids would suffer. I was struggling to find a way forward and didn’t know where to turn.

Meanwhile, I had also developed a passion for holistic living. I had begun pursuing a more holistic way of living when my kids were born, and I was finding that medicine didn’t have a lot of the answers for some common problems like ear infections and things like that. I started searching for other ways. I started seeing a naturopath and started living more holistically myself.

Then one day, I was in a natural food health store and I picked up this book Crazy Sexy Diet by Kris Carr. She is an entrepreneur and a cancer survivor. Carr’s website then led me to Marie Forleo’s website. She is a female entrepreneur who has a program called B-School. It helps and inspires women to start online businesses. That was very intriguing to me, but I still didn’t understand why at the time.

But that was in 2012. As I became more involved in B-School, I found I was really attracted to her teachings about how to become a creative entrepreneur, but I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with it. During this time, I had thought about doing my MBA. While preparing for the GMAT, one of my peers said, “Why are you even bothering with an MBA? You’re trying to build a life. Build on your passion for holistic living. Develop entrepreneurial skills.”

She also encouraged me to take an integrative nutrition course. So I joined the Institute for Integrative Nutrition online. From there, I decided that I wanted to become a health coach. I got my certification in health coaching, separated from my husband, and Whole Self Consulting was born.

L: Why did you choose to immerse yourself in an online entrepreneur program for women (B-School)?

DM: I think it stems from how I was raised and just being very comfortable around women and not around men. Intuitively, I felt drawn to women and the feminine energy based on my intuition. If I look back to my upbringing, I was brought up in a home where the male figure was dominant. We were three girls and a boy, and my dad’s mentality was that once a girl is married, she is gone. She belongs to her husband. Her duty is to service her husband and her husband’s family.

I didn’t learn to speak, metaphorically, until I left my parents’ home and went to university. I was always very uncomfortable in school, very shy, very withdrawn, very much an introvert, and I felt uncomfortable around men. I think I was drawn to these female leaders because I felt safe to speak openly in their presence.

L: You talked about the value of women’s spaces. Some argue that we don’t need that anymore or we shouldn’t need to have that. What’s your sense of why women feel safer and more comfortable talking when there are no men in the room?

DM: Every woman’s experience is different. We all come from various backgrounds. Some of us have been subjected to all kinds of domestic violence, sexual violence. I think because of the years and years of oppression, women have learned how to connect with each other in women-only spaces. I think women-only spaces thrive because women feel a sense of safety in them.

Also, many South Asian women are often uncomfortable allowing themselves to be “seen” or heard in co-ed settings because, traditionally, women have assumed the background role of being mothers, nurturers, or homemakers. If they push to be seen or heard, they feel as though they are being disrespectful to men, even if they are around men who don’t think like that. The result is that many women find it hard to take on leadership roles in groups. They want to keep themselves small to make others feel comfortable.

L: Do women behave differently in women-only spaces?

DM: Mm-hmm. Women actually want women’s spaces so they can be themselves and talk freely about their issues. Research shows that when you have men in the same room as women, men silence women just by their presence. They tend to set the agenda and they also tend to talk over women.

Also, I found that women actually thrive under the company and the social support of women. Being in a women-only space enhances the women’s ability to bring forth what they need to in the world.

L: Tell me about Bindi Parlour.

DM: Bindi Parlour was brewing in my system, like everything else, for a long period. Bindi Parlour, on a surface level, is like a girl’s night in at a friend’s home with eight to 12 of your closest friends. It could even be people that the hostess may not know well, but that she has decided to invite into her home for a Bindi Parlour. During the first two hours of this party, I facilitate a women’s circle and it takes the form of experiential learning.

There’s a different theme to every Bindi Parlour depending on what the women want. One of the themes that have been popular with women has been self-compassion. Some other topics that have come out of this is the art of gratitude and the importance of daily rituals. Women are responding well to the learning that happens in Bindi Parlours but beyond the learning, they’re establishing deeper, richer connections that are serving a need that’s lacking right now in our society: connections with themselves and with other women.

L: After a Bindi Parlour, what do they take with them into the real world?

DM: I got a few testimonials and have done feedback sessions with them as well. The words they used were that they could release. By releasing, they were able to tap into those barriers within themselves. Once they’ve released that, they felt inspired to take action.

At that point, I encourage them to identify one little action that they might take back into their lives, or one little thing that they can share with a friend. They leave feeling very inspired, uplifted, and able to relieve emotions that they didn’t even realize they had until they were within the power of a group of women.

L: Who’s the target market?

DM: Women between the ages of 30 and 60. I get a lot of women from my generation whose parents are immigrants to this country. Women, in general, are really hungry for something like this.

L: When you’re crafting a Bindi Parlour, do you recommend that everybody know each other? Or is it better when they don’t know each other?

DM: I like women that don’t know each other, simply because it is difficult for a woman to open up when she has friends there that she has known since she was a child. You never know what’s going to come out in the group. Lately, there are themes that have been coming up such as infertility, which I had never thought would come up.

Infertility is a very sensitive topic for a woman, and it touches every core of her being: body image issues, guilt, and shame. She may wonder if something is wrong with her. It makes sense that that would come up when you’re talking about self-compassion, but I didn’t think that women would dig so deep. It just goes to show you what that power of sisterhood can do. When one person in the group decides to open up, it gives permission for the other women to open up.

L: What does it cost to attend a Bindi Parlour?

DM: It’s $40 per person. It’s not making money right now, but that’s not a big concern for me. One of my beliefs is that the money will come if you’re doing something you love and you’re being of service and it’s coming from a well-intended place.

L: From an entrepreneurial perspective, where do you want to be with Bindi Parlour or Whole Self Consulting in five to 10 years?

DM: I’d like Bindi Parlour to be accessible to as many women as I can make it available on a global level. For that, it’s going to have to take on the shape of an online program. However, I don’t want to lose the intimacy of an in-person women’s circle. That will mean that I have to somehow keep the spark of the in-person circles alive while creating and holding space for women online. Eventually, I would like Bindi Parlour to be a community of women who gather together, whether in-person, online or at a retreat, to become the best versions of themselves.

L: What’s one book you would recommend to our readers?

DM:  That’s easy! Pussy: A Reclamation by Regena Thomashauer.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Related Readings: “Why Shecosystem Is My System”, by Marni Levitt

The post Dimple Mukherjee Finds Her Voice—And Founds A Business appeared first on LiisBeth.