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Maybe you know what safer sex is. But do you also know what it isn’t? Take a minute and fact-check your ideas about what can protect you from STIs and what cannot.

As you may know, at Scarleteen we do not yet endorse suppressing menstruation/continuous birth control – using a hormonal method of birth control in order to skip withdrawal bleeds/periods – for women under 18, because there still is yet to be any study done or published with adolescent women to evaluate if it is safe or medically sound for those in that stage of physical development.

I want to first make a few things clear about any judgments you may be making about yourself or might assume will be made in my answer to you. I don’t like terms like “easy” when they carry derogatory judgments, for the same reason I don’t like terms like “prude” used or internalized that way. If…

Recently, I’ve been talking about men and feminism a fair bit, and not just in what I write, but in other places online and in real life. This is pretty normal for me, but what’s a bit interesting is that a lot of these conversations have been around the relationship of men to feminism and in particular, what role men can play in supporting feminism and women in general.

To: Stephen Harper (a.k.a. the Prime Minister of Canada, a.k.a. That Guy With the Questionable Judgment) From: Me (a.k.a. A Concerned Citizen, a.k.a. Someone Who Thinks You’re a Bit of a Twit) Dear Stephen, I have to confess, I am not, nor have I ever been, one of your biggest fans. I have never…

Here are some other questions we’ve had like this one recently: I’m a newly married man. I was suspecting my wife was a virgin but the result came opposite then what I was suspecting. When we had sex for the first time there was no bleeding and I did not feel the vagina is so tight. It means is my…

Condoms have been my BFFs. All the same, I know there are people who experience them as a drag. I was prepared to discover that walking into a change in my sex life where condoms absolutely were not needed, and also where I had a new birth control method that was as reliable as it gets and totally foolproof might give me some new insight on why some folks feel that way. I was prepared to be wrong: to find out that suddenly what I perceived as no interruption at all had been, in fact, more of an interruption than I realized. Bzzzzt. So far, that’s not what’s happened.

Let’s say I decide I want to learn to bake bread, so I decided to try and make bread every day. But what if in doing that, every day I had the oven set at the wrong temperature, was using the wrong measuring tools for my ingredients or kept using yeast which wasn’t active anymore? I could keep doing…

You probably hear the term “healthy relationship” a lot. But what does that mean, and how do you create – and keep building – one of those?

I tried several times to leave a comment at the National Campaign’s blog on this, but alas, it wouldn’t let me. I’m pretty savvy with web forms, so it’s probably just some kind of temporary technical snag over there. Since it wouldn’t let me do so there, I’m doing it here. After hearing complaints…

In case you haven’t already heard, the female condom (FC) has had a recent redesign. Yippee! (And how much do I love “put a ring on it” as a slogan for female condom use? I love it a whole lot.) I was able to catch up with Mary Ann Leeper, the Female Health Company’s Senior Strategic Advisor and…

You and your partner have talked about your sexual and relationship history, and it sounds like you’ve also both tried to be honest in voicing your wants and needs when it comes to sex. That means that you two understand how important communication and honesty are when it comes to having a healthy…

This morning, I picked up my mother’s copy of “Brigitte”, a German woman’s magazine geared at women between 30 and 50. I often borrow the magazine from her, because it tends to have pretty interesting articles. More recently, I’ve declared myself an out-and-out fan after Brigitte became the first magazine to stop using professional models for their photo spreads. However, what caught my eye today was one of the titles on the cover: “The sex I didn’t want – Confessions from a Gray Area”. In my mind, I immediately flashed to the infamous Cosmopolitan article by Laura Sessions Stepp ( A New Kind of Date Rape ). With a funny feeling in my stomach, I flipped to the article.

Our sexual development is a lifelong process, one we actually start before we’re even born. Our sexuality and sexual development isn’t the same at every stage, mind: infant or early childhood sexuality is a very different thing than adult sexuality. But it’s still almost always present in some…

Debates about “hooking up,” swinging from genuine concern to hysteria on both sides of political spectrum, have been raging throughout the 2000s. And this week, it’s seemed to bubble up to the surface again.

Just Curious, I’m so glad that you wrote in with this question! I remember Enrique Iglesias made news back in 2007 when he voiced his concerns with condoms that fit too loosely, and LifeStyles immediately responded with an endorsement deal and the promise that they would have a condom in his size…

That question probably either sounds like a really important one or a really stupid one, depending on your view. But I want the answer regardless, and am seriously tired of waiting for it. That’s why I went ahead and asked it myself. As an organization that provides information on all methods of…

The title above refers to a famous series of fitness and bodybuilding advertisements from the 1940’s & 50’s. The not so subtle suggestion in these ads, and many male-targeted ads and products since, is that masculine identity is primarily about being strong, about having power; often, masculinity is seen as something literally embodied. But that’s not the case: masculine identity is so very much more than what can be seen, about so much more than expressions of power and dominance. And it cannot be bought from the back of a magazine.

Nimpup’s question continues: I know I could go down there and check but, I get too turned on when I see inside it and I just to want to have sex right then and there, so it’s very hard for me to look for her. We’ve tried burning incense that is supposed to help stimulate us but it seems to only…

It’s obviously important if you’re here for information that you know what we mean when we say “sex,” so we thought we’d make it clear.

Count me in as one more voice in the choir saying that I highly doubt G-d is punishing you for having sex outside marriage by somehow making you not want sex within it, or making your sex life in a marriage unhappy. My own spiritual belief system doesn’t involve a god, but I did more than my fair…

Teenagerhood should be a time of dreams and expansion. We should be allowed to open our inner selves up and absorb as much light and life as we possibly can. We should be, but other people are often too often invested in what they think we should be to let us be what we are.

It’s not actually accurate to suggest most cis women–or other people who have vaginas– have trouble reaching orgasm. A majority of people with vaginas do have trouble reaching orgasm through vaginal intercourse and simply cannot orgasm that way. It’s also true that many people with vaginas have…

Making out with an ex whom you still have feelings for isn’t really an issue of being right or wrong morally: I’d say it’s more about being honest with yourself and doing what’s right for you. Right now this arrangement doesn’t seem to be a good match for your needs and wants. Casual sex generally…

I wish that I could give you one simple, short and objective answer for what love is, but unfortunately, I can’t. That’s a question people have been asking for probably as long as there have been people, and as of yet, while there have been millions of answers, I don’t think anyone has arrived at…