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We’ve been receiving and answering a lot of questions like yours lately, but I think it’s really important to keep talking about if people keep asking. Because we keep hearing girls asking questions like this about guys, it seems clear there are a lot of people who aren’t getting some things we…

My best advice is to just try and let yourself go there. I think the safest way to do that, emotionally, would be to first try that in whichever sexual situation you tend to feel safest in, whether that’s alone, in your masturbation, or during sexual activities with a partner. More people than not…

I don’t think making condoms available is “condoning” sex. If providing condoms, all by itself, sends any primary message, I think the message is that were he to engage in sex, you think preventing unwanted pregnancy and the transmission of sexually transmitted infections is really important. I don…

With proper use, condoms actually break very rarely. The common mythology that condoms are flimsy and break all the time is just that: mythology, not reality. Different studies on latex condom breakage tend to reflect a breakage rate of around .4%, or only 4 breaks in every 1,000 uses.

Have you been through a breakup? Maybe more than one? If you have, you know how awful it can be, and how incredibly rough, especially when you’re new to romantic or sexual relationships. Breakups between friends can be just as awful, too. You probably also know that learning to deal with and get…

You know, our gut feelings are usually very trustworthy. When we find we feel very scared and nervous, it’s usually because we have good reason to be. Those kinds of feelings are usually excellent cues for making our best choices. I’m not 15. I’m in my 40s. I’ve been engaging in sex for a very long…

Assuming that you’re engaging in manual sex – hands or fingers engaged with your genitals, fingering being one term for that – to express or explore your sexual feelings or desires, fingering IS sex. Just like intercourse can be sex, just like oral sex can be sex, just like full-body massage can…

I thought your question would be a great one to pose to Jaclyn Friedman, a Scarleteen colleague and supporter who is making the internet rounds with a blog book tour right now. I think you’ll find what she had to say and share around this very helpful, and I also think her book is one that would…

One of my big challenges in life has long been that I have a very hard time when I mess things up or I don’t do well, even though, intellectually, I know that’s bollocks, and that it’s okay to mess up sometimes. Growing up, one of my favorite things to do with my Dad was to go to Cubs games. Even though I left Chicago over a decade ago now, I remain, and always will, a diehard Cubs fan. If you assume I care at all about baseball, or even understand how the game is supposed to be played, you may be wondering why anyone would continue any fealty to the worst team in baseball. I have my reasons, but one of them is that the Cubs provided me — and provide me still — an amazing lesson in owning your suckitude.

More and more, new users come to Scarleteen reporting experiences of bullying and other forms of harassment online or in their offline lives. Often enough – and understandably – users new to the site will feel fearful and wary that they might experience that here, too, especially since we address…

I’m not concerned about you looking desperate by doing anything to try and convince your partner to have sex it seems he’s made clear he’s not comfortable having. What I am concerned about with any situation like this is, instead, your partner possibly not having his limits and boundaries respected…

Many men – and people of all genders – will not and do not wait until marriage to engage in various kinds of sex with partners. That’s as true now as it was 20 or 50 years ago. For at least the last 100 years in the west, most people do engage in some kind of genital sexual activities with…

The last section of our recent demographics survey (click here and here for data from the previous sections) was an optional, open section where we simply stated, “If you have any comments you’d like to add about this survey or Scarleteen as a whole, please feel free to add them here.” Of the 419…

Starting in 2006, for NOW’s Love Your Body Day, our volunteers, staff and users have been creating haiku about body love and acceptance on our message boards. It’s resulted in some fantastically cool pieces over the years, so we figured we’d share a few of them today as it’s that fine day yet again…

Feeling like you didn’t “get anything in return” sounds very troubling to me. That strikes me as a huge deal, and like something that’s probably bigger and about more than sex being a first-time for you and not for him. Someone with partners before you isn’t limited in their ability to do their part…

I want to focus this entry on the second of the optional questions in the demographics survey. The question was this: Since using Scarleteen, which of any of the following has changed for you, and by how much? What we most wanted to see was not the areas where we may have done a good job or where our users already felt things were going very well for them, but areas where it would seem sound to say we currently are not having the impact we’d like to with positive changes. In other words, this question seemed likely to be most useful in identifying our potential weak spots, rather than our strengths, and could give us a clearer sense on how and where we should look most to improve our content and approaches.

Every day, around 20,000 to 30,000 people come to Scarleteen online. This summer, we created a new demographics survey as part of a potential partnership with a fellow organization, and to get an additional, fresh source of information for ourselves. There’s a lot to look at and talk about, so I’m going to share this information in three or four posts. Today, I’ll fill you in on some of the most basic demographics from the survey.

Intimacy is often awkward. And that isn’t a bad thing. In some ways, I’d even say it’s always awkward, in the sense that it’s never really something that’s exactly easy, especially when we’re just starting to get intimate with someone, rather than when we have been for a long time. Getting and being…

There are gay or bisexual men who love or like anal sex, it’s true. But there are also gay or bisexual men who don’t like it, or who just aren’t interested in it. There are heterosexual men who don’t like anal sex or aren’t interested in it, either. There are also heterosexual men who like or love…

Just because someone might want something from someone else doesn’t mean it’s right for that other person, either person, or that the time when they want it is the right time for it to happen. Few people in their early teens have a lot of what is needed in order to have healthy and satisfying sexual…

This is our final installment of stories and photographs from “I’ll Show You Mine”, a book by Wrenna Robertson and photographer Katie Huisman, and by all of the women featured in the book, collectively. Yes, the picture you are looking at is my vagina. When I look at this picture, I feel alienated. I will tell you why. Here is my story.

This is the seventh installment of stories and photographs from “I’ll Show You Mine”, a book by Wrenna Robertson and photographer Katie Huisman, and by all of the women featured in the book, collectively. I had never seen another woman’s vagina up close and personal and I had only used a mirror a few times to check out my own. I started to take a closer look at mine, comparing it to the only reference I had - porn - wondering how I should improve the appearance of my vagina.

antogone68’s question continued: I think this was probably for a number of reasons: being busy at university and perhaps having a naturally low sex drive after the honeymoon period of a relationship. However, I also think my sexual assault had something to do with it. I still find physical intimacy…

If you feel crampy and bloated, and you didn’t miss your last period, it’s more likely in terms of those symptoms and the timing of things that you’re experiencing PMS symptoms rather than pregnancy symptoms. However, if you’ve been having unprotected intercourse, pregnancy is a very real…

I’m so sorry that you’ve found yourself in what sounds like some big time bad-news dynamics. There are some things where not being in agreement isn’t a big deal, or is problematic, but not massive. However, having conflict about sex and reproduction like this, especially if one person refuses to…