Hollender Meika - Get on Top: Of Your Pleasure, Sexuality and Wellness: a Vagina Revolution

Advance praise for Meika Hollender and Get on Top

Imagine your high school sex ed class (if you even had one) flipped on its head. We cant get enough of the sex-positive, normalizing way Meika writes about sex and sexual health and shares relevant information that you can actually use.

Laura McQuade, President and CEO, Planned Parenthood of New York City

Meika Hollender is making sex healthier for everyone.

Girlboss.com

Meika Hollender has a way of turning topics that make some blush into conversations that we can all join. Only a woman that has the foresight to build Sustain and the Get On Top national campaign would have the insight to write this book. From one #Girlboss to a world of #Girlbosses, Get on Top answers REAL questions, is accessible, informative, smart, and necessary.

Skylar Diggins-Smith, WNBA All-Star

Meika Hollender has taken everything she has learned building Sustain and created sex ed for the #Girlboss generation. Meika is the ultimate #Girlboss who empowers us all with her rally cry to Get On Top. Im buying one for every woman (and girlboss in the making) I know!

Christy Turlington Burns, Founder and CEO, Every Mother Counts

Meika Hollenders Get on Top is not only a guide to sexual health for millennials but a call to action for all women to take control of their bodies.

Jeanne Rizzo, RN, President and CEO, Breast Cancer Prevention Partners

Meika has written an invaluable resource for women in an age of misinformation and uncertainty. As founder of Sustain Natural, shes sparked a candid dialogue around safe and all-natural sexual wellness, and Get on Top furthers this important mission to destigmatize sexual health.

Katherine Ryder, Founder and CEO, Maven

With #GetOnTop, Sustains founder, Meika Hollender, is aiming to squash the stigma surrounding women and sexual health, and elevate a national conversation to encourage women to take control of their sexual experience.

Womens Health

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M y name is Meika, and Im on a mission to destigmatize female sexuality. Entirely. To connect women to their sexual health and help them care for and get to know their bodies. To hold them up. To normalize what should already be normal.

The primary way Im doing this is through Sustain, a sexual-wellness company I founded with my dad, because who didnt grow up dreaming of selling condoms with their father? OK, not me, but I do just that.

I know. Its a jarring bit of information, or so people tell me. It begs context, so lets back it up.

A few years ago, when I was finishing business school at NYU Stern, my dad approached me with an idea he had many years ago. He wanted to start a sustainable condom company. I know most people find a family condom company kind of weird, but stay with me here. My family has deep, deep roots in the sustainable products world. More than thirty years ago my parents founded Seventh Generation. We also have a long-standing commitment to womens health. When Seventh Generation introduced organic cotton tampons, Ithen a teenagerwas super involved. By that I mean I, among other things, drove around in the Seventh Generation tamponification mobile for an entire summer (think green tampon fairies painted on a white Prius). I got passionate about reproductive health and involved with Planned Parenthood at a very young age. Womens sexual health became part of my DNA. Now more than ever I feel like we all need to be talking about it. All day, every day. Were under siege.

Ill spare you the business details, but I do want to explain why condoms were of particular interest. Oddly, the manufacture of and ingredients used in sexual-wellness products, including condoms and lubricant (Sustain makes that, too, plus organic cotton tampons, pads, and personal care products), can harm rather than help bodies. There are potentially harmful chemicals and residues in the resulting products, which is of particular concern considering these intimate products are going inside our bodies. So my father and I saw an important opportunity to create better, safer, healthier products. Then I decided to follow my passion and focus on women, like no other condom brand has done ever.

I arrived at clarity around this mission for our business over time. It went something like this. First off, when I approached the condom market from a female perspective, in our earliest days of founding the company, I learned some pretty terrifying statistics.

Did you know:

Only 21 percent of single women use condoms regularly.

48 percent of pregnancies are unplanned.

One in four college freshmen contract an STI.

I also learned that 70 percent of women feel uncomfortable buying condoms, which is pretty wild because 40 percent of condoms are actually purchased by women.

Have you ever been in a condom aisle? It for sure feels anything but vagina-friendly. I felt fire-under-my-feet compelled to fix that. I cant even explain how incredibly important it has been to create a brand and a movement that empowers women to feel proud of their sexuality and to get on top of their sexual health, with no stigma attached.

The initial reaction to Sustain was thrilling: retailers responded to the first brand of female-focused, natural sexual-wellness products by saying it was addressing a hole in the market. We were filling a need!

Right around then something crappy happened, and it was the best type of gut check. Just before Sustain officially launched, in 2014, we landed a piece of press on a major media website. The minute I got the link from our PR agency, I clicked through to the article, and excitement flooded over me. That was a super brief moment because then I scrolled down to the bottom of the article, and started reading through the comments.

You cant see me right now, but I have a not-small freckle on my lower lip. The first comment was: Whats that on her lip? Is that an STD? Clearly she should be using condoms, not selling them!

Verbatim.

And you know what? This painful/idiotic response and the sexism inherent in it were not isolated. There was that time on a plane when the guy next to me mistook what I did as selling real estate because he just couldnt believe a young woman would sell what I sell. I had to inform him that, sir, sorry, I sell condoms not condos. I cant believe people are still so awkward about sex. Our culture is overtly sexual while also sexually repressed in so many ways. I guess it shouldnt be a surprise. Weve been repressing women for centuries in every country around the world. So many women dont even know what their own vaginas look like, or how best to take care of them. Sex, even safe sex, is a taboo subject. All of these experiences have strengthened my resolve and boosted my drive to do my work.

Im here to shift the dynamics. I want women to be familiar with their own bodies, and to make sex un-taboo, especially as, due to a combo of not enough and horribly laughable sex education in America, rising rates of STIs, including HIV (particularly among young people), and the patriarchy, our country appears to need a major wake-up call when it comes to womens health. The more I travel and talk to people about Sustain, the clearer it becomes: our societyeven todaystill labels a girl who carries a condom a slut and a guy who does the same a hero.