Heather Corinna

From Reuters, today: A large real-life test of birth control methods found more U.S. women got pregnant while using short-acting methods such as pills, patches and vaginal rings — and the failure rate was highest when they were used by women under 21. “We found that participants using oral contraceptive pills, a transdermal patch or a vaginal ring had a risk of contraceptive failure that was 20 times as high as the risk among those using long-acting reversible contraception,” said the research team.

I’m most interested in how you feel now about this, and separate from how you think everyone else would feel. Hopefully, if you haven’t identified your own feelings yet, my answer can give you some help doing that. So, values. Here’s the thing about values: they aren’t universal. They also aren’t…

First things first: you need to take a pregnancy test. ASAP. You don’t have to save up for that: pregnancy tests will be free for you at many public health, sexual health or abortion clinics or providers, including most Planned Parenthood branches. As well, home pregnancy tests you can purchase at…

I wish that I knew more about your relationship and your boyfriend than just this particular conflict. It’d also help to know what a word like “slutty” even means to him. After all, slut is one of those words that’s a lot like the word god: what it means to one person can be radically different than…

You know, anytime anyone says or feels that they literally hate someone’s body or body parts, my advice is going to be that it isn’t a good idea for the person with those feelings to be intimate with the person with that body. If we deeply disdain someone’s body parts, or anything big like that…

If it’s wrong for people to engage in sex with someone without knowing and disclosing all of who they are, might be or become, or will be, in any respect, including sexually, for all of their lives, then every single person on earth who has ever engaged in sex has been doing wrong. We could say…

Well, I don’t think vaginas or vulvas (or penises or anuses or mouths or ears or eyes or fingers or kidneys: any body parts) are gross. I think they’re really freaking cool and totally fascinating, whether I’m talking or thinking about my own, or all vulvas or vaginas. But you’re making quite clear…

Sauce’s question continued: He would stop me by telling me how much he loved me and how I should give a chance. I met him at university and he led me to a dark place and forcibly kissed me. I say forcibly because I was in shock, unresponsive and had backed up to the wall. It was my first kiss, a…

Today we’ve got the whole of a short interview that was excerpted in small part for a piece over at Ms. Magazine yesterday, Future of Feminism: Sex Education As a Human Right. The added bonus of aiming for truly inclusive sex education is that it can also inform people about the sexualities, bodies, identities and lives of others different than their own, helping them to understand that even if and when their own rights aren’t or don’t seem to be impeded, the rights of others are and that needs to matter.

Yeah, we meant to say that. Boy do we wish we didn’t. Here’s the spiel: it’s Back Up Your Birth Control Day today, but as you may have heard, or personally experienced, here in the states, we’re still having a lot of trouble with pharmacists refusing over-the-counter Plan B (emergency contraception, the morning-after-pill, or whatever you like to call it), for a whole bunch of reasons, including because of age, even though most of those asking for or about it are of legal age to get it over-the-counter, and without a prescription.