A collection of pleasure products, goods, and services found in Panama City, Panama, curated by pleasure concierge Deborah Porter, with sensual articles and essays.
C an I be honest about something? I wasn’t always on a pleasure journey.
For years, I treated pleasure like a decadent dessert—something I snuck to eat when no one was watching. Mostly because I wasn’t sure what this new desire was. But slowly, I started paying attention to what was actually happening to me when I let myself enjoy things that felt good and brought me delight. Turns out my body knew things my mom never taught me, things I was just discovering about myself. How, as a married woman, did I not know about these pleasure principles?
And I wasn’t imagining it. Pleasure isn’t fluffy, woo-woo feelings—it’s chemistry. It floods us with dopamine—that warm rush of reward. Pleasure also releases oxytocin, which quietly lowers stress, reinforces learning, and even sharpens creativity. Pleasure pays us back: research confirms that women who made room for affection and intimacy reported lower stress and better moods the very next day.
All I knew was that whether it was touching my own body, having deep belly laughs with friends over good food and wine or wearing sexy lingerie under my jeans—those things made me feel alive. After having my very first orgasm a year into my marriage, I knew I had to follow this new road that opened to me.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but a fire had been lit in my belly. I set out to create spaces for women to discover their own pleasures so that they too could feel this energy of life. Because when women make room for affection, for things they love/enjoy, intimacy and sexual freedom, they gain the clarity to become more powerful, more intentional. It gently brings us back to our authentic divine selves. Initially, my two daughters struggled to share what mommy did at her events, but they, along with my closest friends, supported me unconditionally.
He brought the artform of erotic storytelling and laid it at my soul's doorstep.
But oddly enough, what pushed me off the fence I had been straddling started almost thirty years ago, on a dating website, of all unglamorous places—long, long ago, when dating sites were a cool place to meet cool people, a fun, online portal that didn’t harbor bots, scam artists and criminals. But I digress.
I matched with a man who, instead of opening with the usual small talk or love bombs filled with compliments, sent me a story. Not a pickup line, an actual story, written just for me, slow and deliberate and erotic as hell. The kind of tale that made you forget you were reading words on a screen. I remember thinking, not since my divorce had anyone ever intrigued me so much. He wasn’t describing a body. He was describing a scene of anticipation—creating the sexual tension before a touch, the electricity of a glance held a second too long. That man didn’t just flirt with me. He brought the artform of erotic storytelling and laid it at my soul’s doorstep—something that caused me to drift into orgasmic places I didn’t know existed. I wrote back using phrases that escaped from my deepest core—and so began our erotic writing dance that lasted months. The mysterious man and I never chatted by phone, never met up and never dated. But I never stopped chasing that euphoric feeling, and I've been writing erotic short stories ever since.
When I arrived in Panama in 2022, much like the U.S. and many other countries, I found a pleasure-starved country. A vibrant city, but one where years of patriarchal and religious controls had formed a stifled culture hiding its very spiritual erotic essence—a surprising dichotomy for a country that has legalized prostitution, has a plethora of gentlemen's clubs, and an array of 'push button' motels. But now, I’m watching things gradually shift. While Panama still lags slightly behind, the whole of Central and Latin America is waking up to pleasure as a part of its historical culture, not a dirty little secret that recently migrated to town. Women in particular are showing up, curious, hungry to reclaim a birthright they never knew was theirs—discovering pleasure as I did years ago.