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

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Articles and Advice in this area:

Advice
  • Heather Corinna

Take a big breath. It’s all going to be okay, and there’s just no reason for you to be so scared. For starters, it’s totally normal for ejaculate to run out like that after intercourse where the partner with the penis ejaculates without a condom. That’s plain old gravity: when you’re laying down or…

Advice
  • Heather Corinna

It really depends, because there are a few possibilities, and it could be any one or all of them. Most commonly, that’d just be a person with a vagina’s usual vaginal discharges. At nearly any given time, we have vaginal discharges and cervical mucus which are part of our monthly fertility cycle…

Advice
  • Sarah Riley

It sounds like you’ve got your body pretty confused here! Let’s talk a little bit about how the pill works, because that may clear things up a little bit. Birth control pills are essentially doses of synthetic hormones. What this does is sort of re-order the way your body is functioning with regard…

Advice
  • Sarah Riley

Generally speaking, when you start missing pills in the middle of a cycle (especially if you miss lots of pills) some weirdness with your withdrawl bleed is to be expected. By not having those extra hormones in your body, it’s impossible to guess what was going on with your natural hormone levels…

Advice
  • Heather Corinna

Joe, I’m going to be pretty straight with you, here. The “circumstances” aren’t determining your behaviour. You are both, every time you don’t use condoms properly and consistently, making an ACTIVE CHOICE to take the risks that are causing you this stress. You have every possible ability to make…

Advice
  • Heather Corinna

If the condom broke – which is the only way semen would be coming out of the bottom of the condom – then you were at a high risk of pregnancy. On the other hand, if your boyfriend seemed to think the condom looked intact, but just had fluids on the outside/bottom of it, he may have been mistaking…

Advice
  • Heather Corinna

Hi, Morgan. As I explained to another user here, it’d be pretty unusual for a period to come in such a small window of dates for more than a couple of months. It doesn’t sound to me like there has been anything unusual in your cycles if for a little while, you had periods from the 12th - 15th, and…

Advice
  • Susie Tang

For what it’s worth, I’m not Heather, but I am a health department professional. And I’m sorry you’re stressed out with this BV and testing and so forth. I hope you can take some time out and chill, get the moral support you need for all of that stuff. Got a truly trusted friend who can talk to you…

Advice
  • Heather Corinna

Implantation bleeding is actually fairly rare. More to the point, spotting when you’re taking BCPs continuously is incredibly common. So, it’s far more likely that that is why you’re seeing the spotting. If it hasn’t happened until now, that doesn’t mean that’s not why it is happening now. In fact…

Advice
  • Sarah Riley

One of the most common side effects of injectable birth control is that withdrawal bleeds (remember, you don’t have real “periods” on birth control) may lighten or disappear entirely. A second extremely common side effect is spotting (sometimes called breakthrough bleeding) throughout a woman’s…