Sexual Identity
Sexuality: WTF Is It, Anyway?
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?
Driver's Ed for the Sexual Superhighway: Navigating Consent
As it is on the road, being attentive to and giving clear signs and signals is a big deal between the sheets. If consenting feels complicated or confusing, here's a guide to clear it up.
What's Sex?
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.
With Pleasure: A View of Whole Sexual Anatomy for Every Body
Usually sexual anatomy is taught through the lens of reproduction, so it’s only about penises and vaginas, testes and uteri. Seen through the lens of of pleasure, sexual anatomy looks different.
Impurity Culture: Masturbation Is Self-Care
Masturbation is a topic you might need to do a little extra work on defining your values around if you grew up in purity culture being told that it was a sin—and that’s especially true during the pandemic, when pleasurable touch from others is not always safe or accessible to us and self-care has become more important than ever as we try to process all the painful things happening in our world. Self-pleasure can be an extremely important aspect of self-care even during non-pandemic times, and right now that is especially true.
Hi, Bi Guy: Coming Out to Your Girlfriend
Even when you're with a supportive partner, coming out as a bisexual guy to a girlfriend or another kind of woman partner isn't always easy and might feel awfully intimidating. Adam England has some support, help and solidarity to spare.
Connecting with LGBTQ+ Elders
There’s this feeling of smallness - that your world is confined to secrets you tell in your diary, or to the few people you know in real life that are brave (or perhaps foolish) enough to come out - that I identify as a part of my theory on queer orphanhood.
You spend so much time contemplating your identity that you don’t have time to wonder about people out there. There’s a kind of spiritual displacement in being queer and young.
Machismo: How Toxic Masculinity Harms Latinx People - an interview with Laura Carlsen
Machismo is an expression of exacerbated masculinity that has caused lingering pain and trauma to generations of Latinx people. Many young people are still struggling with it today.
A Sexual Miseducation
Sex positivity should have given me the courage to ask for what I wanted. Instead, I thought it meant accepting what I got.
We Are Currently Living in an Active Trauma State: An Interview With Jimanekia Eborn
"Those of us that identify within the QTBIPOC community cannot take off our skin the same way we cannot remove our gender and/or our sexuality. We have to continue to have conversations about all of the disparities that are going on. There is not just one way we are affected."
A Series of Letters I Wish I Could Send to My Younger Queer Self
Letters from the author to himself in his teens and early 20s, as he tries to sort out multiple facets of his identity.
Staying Seen: Being Bi in Relationships with Straight People
When you identify as queer but enter into relationships with heterosexual people, or those with of a different gender to your own, it can feel odd to consolidate these two parts of your identity. You’re not straight, but society can perceive you that way – where do you fit in, exactly?
How to Celebrate Pride From Home (even if you can't be out)
Social distancing has introduced new challenges into Pride month. Here are some tips on how to celebrate safely at home, including what to do if it's not safe for you to be out yet.
What I Didn’t Know About Having a Queer Daughter
When a young person comes out, the adults in their lives can have all sorts of reactions. If you're trying to be a supportive parent, here are just a few of the ways you can help them navigate those moments.
Hookup Culture and the Impact of COVID-19: An interview with Lisa Wade, PhD
Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, many higher learning students are having to put their sexual lives on hold. To talk about casual sex in college life and the effects COVID-19 might be having on it, Scarleteen spoke with sociologist Lisa Wade, PhD, visiting scholar at Tulane University and author of the groundbreaking "American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex On Campus."
This Isn’t Going to Be Your Forever
Because of the global COVID-19 pandemic, in many households, the strains of closed schools, lost jobs, health issues, and close quarters mean that tensions are high, tempers are short, and privacy has become a luxury. If you’re a young queer person who is now isolated with trans- or homophobic family members, you probably know that better than anyone. Here are a few ideas to help you stay as physically and emotionally safe as possible during these difficult days.
Sex on Screen: Reality-Checking Mainstream Porn
Part two of Alice O's exploration of mainstream porn to help increase your sexual media literacy. Includes information about sex positions, orgasm, consent and communication, boundaries, birth control, safer sex and more as they exist (or don't!) in mainstream porn, and how this can or should all go in real-life-sex to compare and contrast.
Well, F*ck Me! It's a Scarleteen Zine!
Say hello to our new zine, F*ck Me! It's a (free!) flight of super-helpful fancy that can help you -- or your intimate companions, your platonic friends, your students, the people who come into your clinic, your younger brother, your favorite cousin, and maybe even your parents -- identify the basics of what you really want and need when it comes to sex with others, and give you a foundation for clear, candid, and meaningful sexual communication.
Bare Bodies: Reality Checking Mainstream Porn
A clear-eyed, in-depth exploration of mainstream porn that can: amp up your sexual media literacy so you can better suss out what's really going on with and in porn, fill you in on how it may or may not -- and sometimes just plain shouldn't -- match your expectations or experiences of sexuality offscreen, and tell you more about its politics and behind-the-scenes realities.
Becoming Out: a totally non-exhaustive, step by step guide to coming out
We hope every time you open up to someone about your truth they respond with love and kindness. But we also want to make sure you're prepared in case they don't, and give you some practical strategies and tools to look after yourself if that’s what happens. With that in mind, here's a new, totally non-exhaustive, step by step guide to coming out.
Embracing Newbiehood: How to Approach Dating and Sex in Your 20s With Little or No Experience
It can feel like the world will end if you haven’t had sex or a sexual or romantic relationship by your mid-twenties. There are countless ways in which our culture puts pressure on young people to gain experience in romantic and sexual relationships. But truthfully, if you don’t have much, or even any, experience with dating and sex, you are not doomed to never experience romantic and sexual connection. The world also will not end.
How to Reconnect With Your Body In Spite of the Impact of White Supremacy
We've all been influenced and impacted by white supremacy for longer than anyone alive can recall. Throughout history, white supremacy has idealized and normalized dominant identities and behaviors, and has shamed and oppressed those outside of them. Here's some ways this has manifested in our bodies and some ways you can start to dismantle that impact and reconnect.
Man to Man: On Sex, Masculinity, and Being Yourself
Gender norms are really hard, but are much easier to deal with when we learn we’re not alone. When we can talk openly about the pressures we’re feeling, and realize that those pressures don’t have to control their lives, we can start figuring out ways to resist them.
Impurity Culture: Surviving Virginity
Maybe you grew up in purity culture. Even if you didn’t, you’ve probably encountered and have to live with its ideas about virginity. I want to unpack some of those things, and consider what’s true and what isn’t.
This Place
I’ve changed dramatically because of this place that never insisted I change. This place where it didn’t matter how—or even if—I was sexual gave me sexuality as something I could live. Sex became something I could know about, talk about, do, enjoy and choose. My body became livable. Imagine that.