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A sweeping social history of heterosexuality from its origins in nineteenth-century Germany to the sex-scandal headlines of today.

This empowering exercise guide is big on attitude, giving plus-size women the motivation and information they need to move their bodies and improve their health.

The big emotion that comes through what you’ve written here isn’t love or loyalty. It’s anger. Big, big anger, in giant waves, in what you’re saying and in how you’ve said it. There is so much here – far more, I think, than your boyfriend using porn, or what’s in the porn he’s looking at – that a…

Our volunteers are a huge part of Scarleteen, and I call them superstars with very good reason. They’re all incredible. They play a big part in providing our direct services at our message boards and through our text-in answer service. They are our invaluable collective editorial board: even when…

The term “sexuality” can be used a lot like the word “sex.” They’re both terms we say and hear a lot, but which often aren’t clearly defined. We take for granted everyone knows what sexuality means, a heck of an assumption to make with something that covers so many important things and can feel as murky as Lake Erie. So: what’s it all about?

I realized that I was uncomfortable associating myself with genital herpes. Will people think I have it? Why else would someone write about genital herpes and risk that association if they didn’t have it, right? So I pressed on, putting myself at the center of an itty-bitty social experiment that resulted in some pretty big stuff.

It was probably obvious yesterday that we earnestly thought the FDA might finally turn around a longtime decision, one largely against all advice, information and recommendations from sexual, reproductive and adolescent health and rights experts and advocates, when it came to unfounded restrictions long put on teen access to Plan B. I don’t think we can express enough how tremendously and deeply frustrated and infuriated we are here that our optimism was in vain and was so outrageously gutted.

You may have heard that the FDA may finally remove age restrictions for the morning-after emergency contraception pill in the United States. If you’ve heard that, you may have started to hear some panic or fear-factoring, not just gratitude and relief. Currently, in the United States, someone must…

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.