Culture

This month, as part of Scarleteen’s fundraising efforts, we have the pleasure of having some folks we love guest-writing for our advice section. For your question, I was delighted to be able to ask Hanne Blank to answer it for you. Hanne is one of the smartest people when it comes to sexuality…

Sade is 17 and works as a youth activist for YWCHAC, a program for and by young women of color that helps foster their development in advocacy training while providing them with the skills to be effective peer-educators to youth on the subject of sexual health. Their mission is to address the increasing rates of HIV infection in young women of color ages 13-24. I got the chance to ask Sade about what she does, why she does it, and what she thinks about some of the issues that impact HIV and young women.

Good question! I wish I had an answer to give you as succinct and simple as your question. The answer is that it depends. Many countries have age of consent (AOC) laws that are federal, or the same throughout a whole nation, so it just depends then on what country you’re in. If you’re not in one of…

Annie’s question continued: What I would like to do is approach administration about implementing a sexual assault awareness session for all students at the beginning of the year and I am anticipating resistance. So, my question is, what is the best way to go about doing this? I would also like to…

I grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis Missouri in a mostly white neighborhood. One of the first things I noticed was that my hair was different. My fellow students would run their hands through their hair, flip it from side to side or pull it back into ponytails. Their hair moved… my hair didn’t…

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.

I am a volunteer abortion clinic escort. This means I am there to walk with women coming into the abortion clinic. It’s usually no more than a minute’s walk from their cars to the front door of the clinic. Under normal circumstances, my help would hardly be needed. Except the circumstances outside an abortion clinic are rarely “normal.”

There is little in the world that varies as much as human sexuality does. So, even when we have a couple common variables – let’s say all 18 or 19-year-old women: both an age and a single sex or gender there – we are still going to see a huge variety within that group based on all the other…

I’m writing this because someone told you that you can’t understand or experience love at your age. If no one did yet, they probably will soon enough. I’m writing to tell you that if you’ve heard that, I just don’t think it’s true.