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Wait! Not the band KISS. The action! You don’t need to have a four piece rock band to have a rockin’ kiss. You only need consent!

Here’s the short answer: personally, what I call it is just being alive. The world can be a really beautiful place, and so can all of the people in it. When we’re observant, open, and not feeling horribly bitter or distraught about ourselves or our world, we tend to notice and appreciate beauty…

If you’re anything like me you probably put off things you don’t want to do for a long time. Especially those things that I really don’t want to do, like my math homework. This type of procrastination gets even worse when it comes to things that I know I could get in trouble for. What if I was putting off something more important than a test grade? What if I needed to tell my parents I was having an abortion?

What do we know about teen parents? Take a moment to make a mental list (or, if you’re motivated to get out a pen and paper, I won’t stop you) of all the facts and statistics you’ve heard. In case you’re coming up short, I’ll give you a few: Most teen parents drop out of high school. Only 2% of teen…

Virginity isn’t a term used in sexual health or defined medically, anatomically or by any one sexual activity. It’s a word some people use to determine when they or others have or have not had sex, based in either personal or cultural ideas or experiences of what they consider sex to be. I can’t…

Hey everyone, and welcome to Activism with Max! You might have seen me around Scarleteen in the past but if you haven’t, I’ll give you a quick background on me. I’m Max Kamin-Cross, and I’m 17 years old from a Conservative area of Western New York. I’ve been working in reproductive rights and…

Depending on your view, the answer to that question might seem really obvious or very tricky and hazy. At a recent conference I was part of in London, Alan McKee presented Healthy sexual development: a multidisciplinary framework for research. What McKee and his colleagues determined to be the core parts of healthy sexual development had me jumping up and down in my seat with joy (literally: I may have disturbed my fellow attendees with my bouncing). It summed up the things we try to support, encourage and inform our users with and keep core at Scarleteen so well, and so much of what I think – after many years of thinking hard about and working with these issues, and being fully and broadly immersed in them with a very diverse population – truly is central to healthy sexual development. I’m delighted to have permission to excerpt and reprint this framework here.

Depending on your view, the answer to that question might seem really obvious or very tricky and hazy. This is a subject that’s talked about all the time, however, when it is, there’s often little to no clear definition about what healthy sexual development is. Many easy assumptions get made, and…

Let’s talk about what’s real when it comes to the size and shape of the labia and mons first, then address harassment. There’s nothing ridiculous about asking this, and nothing ridiculous about looking for comfort and reassurance after you’ve been sexually harassed. Harassment tends to leave us…

Feeling low about your body and how it looks? Thinking about, or already doing, some drastic things to try and change it? You’re not alone. But you can get to a better place with your body and how you feel about it without doing anything that keeps you feeling just as bad, or puts your physical or mental health at risk. Here’s some ways to ditch the die(t)s and go for the happy, healthy do’s.

Is what you want from sex with a partner realistic, or is it impossible, unlikely or out-to-lunch? Take a trip with us to go visit our pal reality.

You know, thinking about periods before they happen certainly can be a bit scary. It absolutely doesn’t help anything that passed down from generation to generation is a series of alternate names for a period… things like the rag, the red flag, dead week, Aunt Flo, crimson wave, and probably the…

Fairies’ question continued: 99% of the time I don’t feel bothered about it. But recently I had my first flare-up since I was infected two years ago and I feel so embarrassed that I let myself contract it. Worse, I row with my boyfriend about it because I feel like he wants to deny he gave it to me…

We get asked about this a lot; about whether once you have a more effective method of contraception than condoms, like a hormonal method or IUD, if they’re still needed to prevent pregnancy. The only right answer to that question, no matter who asks it, is that it really depends on what you and your…

Words for gender, sexual or other kinds of identity don’t usually mean the same things to all people. In fact, they very, very rarely do. Those words also can never tell us all or even most of what someone is comfortable with sexually, what their sexual boundaries and limits are and what they are…

I want to start by debunking a few things, especially one thing you said which anyone who helps people with sexuality for their job hears all the time. That’s what you said about the rest of the human population enjoying sex. When we talk about sex as something people usually do because they enjoy…

I host consent workshops professionally, and at one point during past workshops, when the audience is generally settled and feeling comfortable opening up, I have asked, “Who here has ever had something silly and awkward happen during a hookup? Even slightly awkward.” Hands have shot straight up and we all ended up getting a good laugh out of it. It just goes to show how awkward connecting with sex can be, whether you’re in bed, thinking about it, or just talking about it! I think a lot of these awkward moments happen because of the conversations we are having around our romance, or, should I say, the conversations we aren’t having.

helovesme31’s question continued: He used to smoke weed but he stopped cause I didn’t approve. I’m thankful he made that change but now I feel pressured into having sex with him. I lost my virginity to a big ass sleazy guy and then kept having sex with other men, they really were mean telling me I…

Good on you for aiming for social grace even when other people are being clumsy. You probably already know this, but it’s going to happen in your life that people are going to have feelings for you that you don’t share; have interest in doing things with you that you don’t have an interest in…

What our identity is in terms of our gender isn’t about what someone else decides or presumes–it’s up to us to reflect on our experiences and feelings about who are are on the inside, and to label that (or choose not to label it) in whatever way feels true to us as individuals. What feels right and…

That’s one of the best questions I’ve received in a long time. I wish more people would ask it! But. Umm. I can’t actually answer it. I can’t answer exactly what you’re asking because human sexuality is one of the most diverse things there is, and that diversity includes how different everyone is in…

I asked my hands-down favorite writer about sex and disability, Cory Silverberg, to answer this one for you. Here’s what Cory had to say: It already sounds like you have a good sense of what’s happening with your body since the spinal cord injury and one of the great things about having incredible…

When it comes to sex and sexuality, I was a very, very, very late bloomer. Raised in a Pentecostal Christian home where sex and sexuality were rarely discussed beyond, “No sex until you are married,” as a teen I assumed I would not have sex until my early- to mid-twenties, after I had finished undergrad. I assumed any boys/men I met would share my religious beliefs about sex. I assumed my values would never change. And I assumed my husband and I would know how to sexually please one another, in spite of having no sexual experience before our wedding night (which, of course, would be a night of unbridled passion and ecstasy).

I had a favorite line, in high school, when debating people on the subject of abortion. It was “Hey, that thing in your stomach’s not gonna come out a toaster, right? It’s a baby!” Oh, I thought I was really, super clever with that one. Because I loved talking about the babies. I talked about the…

Before I say anything else, I want to make sure you know how typical it is to not reach orgasm from vaginal intercourse for receptive partners. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here since we’ve addressed this a lot, so I’ll just give you basics on that, followed by some links if you want more…