Sex & Sexuality

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…

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…

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…

Intimacy is often awkward. And that isn’t a bad thing. In some ways, I’d even say it’s always awkward, in the sense that it’s never really something that’s exactly easy, especially when we’re just starting to get intimate with someone, rather than when we have been for a long time. Getting and being…

Just because someone might want something from someone else doesn’t mean it’s right for that other person, either person, or that the time when they want it is the right time for it to happen. Few people in their early teens have a lot of what is needed in order to have healthy and satisfying sexual…

These are excellent questions, and I don’t think it’s surprising at all that this all feels confusing. We unfortunately have a very, very long history of some profound misunderstandings of sexual anatomy and sexual response and a relatively short history of study and comprehensive education and…

If by “normal” intercourse you mean vaginal intercourse, and both of these kinds of sex were unprotected, then yes, this is an easy way to potentially develop a vaginal bacterial infection. That’s why it’s advised that for couple who want to engage in both kinds of intercourse, they use condoms…

(I’m going to assume that when you say female, you mean person-with-vulva, since it sounds like when you talk about men, you mean people-with-penises. If I went the wrong way with those assumptions, let me know and I’ll have a do-over with this one.) I think it’s not a great idea to try and do this…

I think you just said two things you could tell him right there. “I am very uneasy about this,” or “I am very uneasy about this because I have been sexually abused.” Whichever you feel most comfortable with, both of those things are fine things to say, things I think we should be able to say with…