Can biomimicry break the taboo?

Part 1 of our series; Undressing the myths of sexuality

This is part one of our blog series on the unspoken myths of sexuality that persist in 2026. While our business structure includes a lubricant product, our original intention was to undress the narrative around sex and pleasure.  These articles help us explore, unpack, and expand our understanding of sexuality and pleasure in a discreet, safe manner.

Taboos beyond the bottle

First up, let’s explore how using lube doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something wrong; it’s also definitely not something to be ashamed of. Lack of natural lubrication can come about for multiple reasons, be it nervousness, certain times in a woman’s menstrual cycle, age, underlying health conditions, or even dehydration. When a personal lubricant includes probiotics and is pH neutral, it isn’t there to flat out replace natural lubrication but rather to supplement and support it. Some people incorporate lubricant almost always, while others like to use it occasionally and others still say they won’t touch lube because it means you’re ‘not turned on’. Still, the taboo about lube points to a bigger imbalance about how we think about sex, and feminine physiology, this goes much deeper than a bottle on the bedside table.

Feminine sexual wellbeing is still under researched and underfunded

Women’s sexual health and enjoyment remain such a mystery partly because of persistent social taboos, misinformation, and urban legends, but also because research into health conditions that only affect women have been historically disregarded and underfunded. Even outside of female sexual health, research participants in many general medical studies have been mostly male, leaving women with incomplete or inaccurate ideas about how their bodies function, in particular with respect to sexual and reproductive health.

One of the biggest misconceptions, especially in exercise science is that women function like smaller men (Sims, 2024) – but when you consider sexual and reproductive health, and everything that goes along with it, nothing could be further than the truth.

Feminine cycles are more than just the period

Throughout history, many cultures have viewed masculine and feminine archetypes not as opposites, but as complementary halves that together create a whole. Looking at it this way, everyone has some masculine and some feminine qualities. You can contrast the masculine that thrives on simplicity and directness, while femininity represents complexity, raw creativity, and natural cycles. However, physiologically men typically have a consistent daily hormone cycle lasting 24-hours, testosterone peaks in the morning and wanes through the day. It is, physiologically speaking, relatively simple and predictable. While women typically go through the menstrual cycle from menses (or period), follicular phase, ovulation, and finally luteal. To think about this in simple terms, in each of these phases, different hormones (oestrogen, progesterone, LH, FSH) rise and fall in complex, interrelated patterns. This means women end up having different nutritional, recovery, and yes, even lubrication needs at different times of the month. The body a woman inhabits on day three of her cycle is, hormonally speaking, a different body than on day seventeen. Additional stress, intense exercise, or even travel can all have an impact on sexual function.

In the follicular phase and around ovulation, elevated oestrogen tends to support increased sexual desire and natural lubrication. In the luteal phase, as progesterone rises and oestrogen dips, many women notice reduced vaginal moisture, lower libido, or a heightened sensitivity to stress. None of this is a malfunction. It is the body faithfully following its own complex intelligence.

What we don't tend to inherit from our culture is the understanding that this cyclical nature is not a liability. It’s an expression of the kind of richness and depth the feminine archetype represents. When we frame natural rhythms as a deficiency, for example by seeing luteal-phase dryness as failure rather than physiology, we’re applying a rigid ‘always on’ framework to a body that was never made to work that way. The body is not separate from the life being lived inside it.

Many women now in their early 30s, can recite the story of going into the Dr’s office for a 15-minute appointment and being put on the pill indefinitely for any number of reasons including acne, weight loss, painful periods, or pregnancy prevention – whether or not they were actively having sex. This left so many of us entering early adulthood with a strange and perhaps overly clinical relationship to sexuality, our physical bodies, and pleasure. A lot of what has passed for sex education falls under the un-nuanced advice of don’t have sex and don’t get pregnant, which while simple to deliver, leaves out almost everything that matters; bodily autonomy, diversity of desire, the role of pleasure in wellbeing, and the fundamental right to understand your own physiology. It disempowers, and it leaves individuals to navigate shame, confusion, and disconnection from their own bodies in private.

The architecture of shame

Shame around sex is not natural. It is constructed — built slowly over centuries through religious doctrine, legal frameworks, cultural norms, and the quiet but powerful force of what goes unspoken. When something is never discussed, it becomes secret. When it becomes secret, it becomes shameful. When it becomes shameful, people carry it alone. The taboo around lubricants is a small but telling example of this broader pattern. In the cultural imagination, using lube is conceding that something is wrong: that you are not aroused enough, not young enough, or not normal. But this framing only holds if we accept the premise that sexual response should be effortless, mechanical, and immune to the conditions of real life. It only holds if we agree that bodies (especially female bodies) should perform on demand, without context, and without sufficient care. The truth is messier and more interesting than that. Sexual response is profoundly relational. It’s shaped by stress and safety, by trust and time of month, by what happened in the body earlier that day and what happened in your life so far. Arousal is not a binary switch. It is a conversation between the nervous system, the endocrine system, the emotional body, and the environment. To engage with that honestly is where intimacy begins.

The shame runs deeper than lube, of course. It runs through the way women have been taught to be objects of desire rather than subjects of it — to be appealing rather than to feel pleasure. Unpacking it requires more than information. It requires permission — to be curious, to be honest, to be in a body that is complex and cyclical and entirely your own. We want to see the cultural relationship to sex transform in our lifetimes, even if it means having some uncomfortable conversations. Sex is a thing that adults do. Sex is something adults think about. Everyone’s sexual history, preference, and experience is unique, but is shaped by our collective attitudes, social norms, and expectations. We want to see integrative, reparative, respectful narratives around sexual wellbeing and pleasure.

A question to sit with:

When did you first learn that your body's needs — in the bedroom or otherwise — were something to be explained away rather than listened to? And what might it look like to start listening instead?

Next time, we’ll talk about ways to communicate sexual preferences in the bedroom – whether with a new or long-term partner.

 

References:

Sims, S. T. (2024). ROAR, Revised Edition: Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Unique Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong Body for Life. Rodale Books.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44222-024-00253-7

https://academic.oup.com/jsm/article/20/4/498/7035572?guestAccessKey=

Santiago Palacios, Sarah Hood, Temitayo Abakah-Phillips, Nina Savania, Michael Krychman, A randomized trial on the effectiveness and safety of 5 water-based personal lubricants, The Journal of Sexual Medicine, Volume 20, Issue 4, April 2023, Pages 498–506, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsxmed/qdad005

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3948026/