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As it is on the road, being attentive to and giving clear signs and signals is a big deal between the sheets. If navigating consent feels complicated or confusing, here’s a guide to clear it up.

Anyone who knows me or who knows anything about me usually knows that my pre-teen and teen years were incredibly difficult. I dealt with neglect and abuse in my family, starting from about the time I was 10. I was sexually assaulted twice before I even became a teenager. I was queer. I was suicidal and was a self-injurer. I struggled to find safe shelter sometimes. Few people seemed to notice, even though after I gave up trying to use my words, I still used my eyes to try and tell them constantly. I’m 40 now, and in a whole lot of ways, I felt older at 16 than I feel now. Some days, I am truly gobsmacked that I survived at all, let alone with my heart and mind intact and rich. A lot of why I survived is about having gotten support.

There is a lot to unpack here, but I first want to make sure we’re on the same page with some basics, particularly since my sense is you don’t have an answer to this because you’re not asking yourself the right questions. You’re saying you can’t have an orgasm from sex, but want to. But you’re also…

How can you separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to sex educators, sex education services and online sexuality spaces for young people online? We walk you through it so you can be more sure that wherever you’re talking, you’re getting good information in a space that’s safe for you.

This is a guest post from alphafemme, part of the blog carnival to help raise awareness and support for Scarleteen. My mother reads Dear Abby religiously. She’s done it for as long as I can remember, always picking out the “Lifestyle” section of our local daily paper and turning to page B2. Some…

From what I tend to observe, when someone like you is worried about what you’ll say exerting sexual pressure, but is coming from the wonderful, thoughtful kind of place that you are, these worries are often displaced. In other words, I’d say it’s highly likely that with how you feel about this…

This is a guest entry from Dr. Ruth Neustifter – who we know here at Scarleteen as Dr. Ruthie – for the month-long blog carnival to help Support Scarleteen. Can we get your support? I remember it very clearly. I was a senior in high school and we were all noshing together in the lunch room when Darla, who was two years my junior, blurted out that she had seen her boyfriend naked and that they were planning to have sex soon. It would be her first time, although we thought he probably had more experience. ”I sure hope it gets smaller before it goes in, because my hole isn’t that big!” she declared and we all laughed together.

This is a guest entry from The Gaytheist Gospel Hour as part of the blog carnival to support Scarleteen. “In this life, things are much harder than in the afterworld/ In this life, you’re on your own!” —Prince High school is a laugh riot. It’s a jolly funhouse where the unpopular and the unusual are punished for their crimes against conformity with a topsy-turvy ridicule. Here, overweight boys have “due dates”, homely girls are proposed marriage by homecoming kings, underwear waistbands are wedgied into easy carrying handles for Special Ed students, and exchange students, (regardless of country of origin) are addressed in mock Chinese. In this swarming mosh pit of ha!rassment, powered by sweaty insecurity and raw, smelly fear, homophobia stands as the indisputable height of hilarity. At least that’s how I remember it.

Sometimes when we’re in a really horrible spot, on top of being supported, an unexpected gift can help, too. So, I got the best gift for you right now I could think of and that I had access to. It’s Kate Bornstein! If you don’t know about Kate already, know that she’s one of the most amazing people…

This is a guest entry by Max Kamin-Cross, originally published at abortiongang, that’s part of the month-long blogathon to help support Scarleteen! Sex ed. We hear that word a lot, but who really knows what sex ed is? It’s short for “sexual education,” but what’s that? According to my handy dandy dictionary, sex education is: “education about human sexual anatomy, reproduction, and intercourse and other human sexual behavior.” Lots of words, but it’s pretty much learning about the human body and its reproduction. Pretty much straightforward, right? Wrong.

Be yourself, even if that means that there isn’t a label for you. Explain to anyone who matters who you are. You’re not your labels.

I researched sex before diving in. Nearly every article and website felt like it carried another warning. Besides worrying me about STIs and pregnancy, my research was showing me that my first time was likely to be painful. I like to mentally prepare myself for things like this and I thought I knew what sex would be like. But, I’m very glad to say that my story is different. It’s good. No, it’s amazing.

I’m a little uncomfortable with how you’re framing this. I’ll do my best to fill you in on why. It’s also really tough for me to answer your question given the way it’s framed. I’ll explain that, too. When someone suggests they want sex with someone, and seems to be suggesting that sex would EVER be…

Do I think you should just suck it up, take these photos and share them? No. First and foremost because, depending on the content and level of nudity, doing so could be as consequentially serious as a felony on both of your parts. So it’s clear right from the start and in a way you can’t miss it: I…

This is a guest post from Dances With Engines as part of the month-long blogathon to help support Scarleteen! Scarleteen is written for young people of all sexes and genders. That they manage to do so with so much consistency and dependability is amazing to me. As I become more conscious of my own binary and oppositional language (men do this, women do that, and only men and women), I get more impressed with Scarleteen. When I recommend websites to my daughter, or to friends with growing children, I am always questioning—is the language and mission of this site going to be inclusive? Is anyone going to be left feeling like they don’t belong or that someone’s wrong with them? I felt like that, growing up. There were so many reasons I wasn’t human, wasn’t visible.

This is an entry from Arianna at Fearfree, one of the many wonderful guest posts in the month-long blog carnival to help support Scarleteen! I throw around the words “fear” and “silence” often when it comes to sex ed. They’re loaded terms, perhaps, but these words best describe my experiences with sex education: my emotional reaction and everyone else’s approach, respectively. These words describe what I feel is not often expressed in the sex education debate.

This is a guest entry from Shanna Katz, M.Ed, as part of the month-long blogathon to help support Scarleteen! Around the late 90s, I was in my “oh em gee, want to learn everything possible about puberty and sex” and after my parents exhausted the info available at the local library, I was lucky enough to discover Scarleteen. It was still quite young back then, but it was knowledge, and that was something I was desperately hungry for. More importantly, it was more than just information; it was interactive. I could learn from older teens, from educators, from people my age. I became obsessive about checking the forums every day. It was a way for me to connect, to get information, to teach myself about sexuality, to have my questions answered, and to get to know my body.

This is a guest entry from The Beautiful Kind as part of the month-long blogathon to support and raise awareness for Scarleteen. I was a teenager in the 80’s, but before that I was a kid who got molested. When I was 8 or 9, my teenage adopted brother asked me, “Do you want me to show you something…

This guest post from the wonderful Anne Semans at the Moms in Babeland blog is part of our month-long fundraising effort for Scarleteen. Thanks, Anne! One day about 20 years ago I was walking down Haight Street with my 6-year-old niece. This was long before I had kids, but well after I started selling sex toys for a living. It was San Francisco in the early Nineties, and Salt n’ Pepa’s song “Let’s Talk About Sex” was blasting out onto the city streets. My niece looked up at me and asked what the song was about.

This month, as part of Scarleteen’s fundraising efforts, we have the pleasure of having some folks we love guest-writing for our advice section. For your question, I was delighted to be able to ask Hanne Blank to answer it for you. Hanne is one of the smartest people when it comes to sexuality…

This is a guest entry from I, Asshole for the month-long blogathon to help support Scarleteen! I was raised in an environment where I felt like I didn’t belong. This wasn’t really anyone’s fault. I just really didn’t belong. I was given some innocuous labels: outgoing, loves to entertain, a social butterfly. There were the less-positive ones, too: wasted potential, weirdo, voted by my graduating class as Most Likely to Relocate to Mars (hey, it turns out Seattle is Mars). I did not know what to call myself, I just knew that I was a little different from all my friends. My precocious age-inappropriate-novel-gobbling self even knew from reading that this feeling was kind of part of the human condition: everyone feels like they are alone sometimes.

This is a guest entry from Dangerous Lilly for the month-long blogathon to help raise awareness and financial support for Scarleteen! At 15, I was still scared of boys, sort of. Sure I’d “date” them, and yeah I’d make out with them, but everything else? Terrified. It was because I knew next to nothing about boys, sex, *whispers* penises, and all that good stuff. You learned about sex in one of three places: 6th/7th grade so-called-sex-ed lectures; your equally uninformed friends; your parents (so. mortifying.).

The excitement of everything early in a relationship can be one of the most amazing feelings ever. Everything is perfect! Your partner is adorable! Everything about this person is endearing! You always get along! Everything feels so easy and natural! You both have permanent goofy grins pasted on…

I want to first make some short, essential statements. What I’d like you to do is read each of them, maybe more than once, and just sit with them. Try and really absorb them. Understand that when it comes to what those of us who work in these fields know about healthy relationships and healthy…