Sexual Health

Sexually transmitted infections are one part of sexual health, but that’s not all! Any aspect of health or healthcare that is related to sex and reproduction is about sexual health: menstruation, common infections like yeast or bacterial infections, birth control and abortion, health conditions like endometriosis, PCOS or phimosis, vaccinations, pain with sex, safer sex and other preventative sexual health practices and yep, STIs, too.

a couple o' peaches

Articles and Advice in this area:

Advice
  • Heather Corinna

If you took your pregnancy tests two weeks after your last risk, you can feel pretty confident in the negative results you got. If you did not wait that long, you’ll want to retest when it has been two weeks since your last risk. It would be early to have pregnancy symptoms already from a risk two…

Advice
  • Heather Corinna

Condoms are designed and tested – each and every one of them, by every manufacturer – to be able to withstand ejaculation (what you’re calling “erupting”) as well as to contain a single ejaculation: the amount of semen a person with a penis emits when they ejaculate. They test them by blowing…

Advice
  • Hollie West

Hi there, I am so sorry you had such a negative experience for your first PAP test. I promise you, it is not always like this, and it certainly doesn’t HAVE to be like this. First off, your doctor TELLING YOU that you have to have a PAP test is wrong. A nurse practitioner (NP) cannot tell you what…

Advice
  • Hollie West

Hi Kayla, While you can be sure that YOU have been faithful, there is no absolute way you can know that your partner has been faithful. Has your partner been tested for gonorrhea or chlamydia in the past? If not, there is no way for you to know that he didn’t have it when you started dating. If your…

Advice
  • Heather Corinna

Delilah: what you’re describing is most likely a completely normal physiological response to being sexually aroused. Part of female sexual arousal, much like erection for men, is swelling of the genital tissues due to blood pooling in the pelvis: the clitoris (both externally as well as internally)…

Advice
  • Heather Corinna

How about something like this: “Hey, I know we should have talked about this before, but since we’ve been having sex without condoms, I need us to talk about safer sex now. I don’t want either of us to be taking risks when we don’t have to, or when we should reduce them, so can we talk about this a…

Advice
  • Heather Corinna

As a product of the withdrawal method myself, you can imagine why I’m not too excited about it. But even if I wasn’t, what I know is that it’s one of the least effective methods in typical use (only 73% effective), and that even with perfect use (96% effective), it’s still less effective than most…

Advice
  • Heather Corinna

No method of contraception is 100% effective, even with perfect use. Please understand that when any two fertile, opposite-sex partners are having genital sex where genitals meet genitals, pregnancy is always a possibility. Birth control methods and practices reduce the risk of pregnancy – more or…

Advice
  • Stephanie

This is actually a question that we see very often around here, and it’s understandable that you’d be worried about this if you don’t want your mother right now to know that you’re sexually active. Doctors actually have an ethical responsibility in keeping what’s called doctor-patient…

Advice
  • Heather Corinna

It depends on when you start taking your pills for the first time, and on what level of protection you want. If you start the pill on the first day of your period, it’s likely – so long as you take every pill in that cycle during and after that week perfectly – that you will be have the full…