Heather Corinna

I’m so sorry that this is how you have been feeling about yourself, and that you’re hurting so badly and feeling so fearful of yourself. I’m beyond sorry to hear that you hate yourself. Those are all terrible, debilitating ways for someone to feel. But I’m very glad that you’ve asked me for help…

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…

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…

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.

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.

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…