myths

Dear Scarleteener, congratulations on being such an active participant in your own health care, and for doing your best to take care of both your physical and emotional well-being. That can be hard to do, particularly when life and school get crazy (as they tend to). I’m hoping that the gynecologist…

It sounds as if you’re concerned about your performance abilities, and whether your partner is going to get pleasure out of intercourse. From what I’m reading, it also sounds to me like you’re already having “actual sex”—indeed, oral sex, manual sex….it’s sex! And with sex comes the need for good…

Let me start by just filling you in on some realities of rape. Most rapes do not occur with strangers unknown to the people they rape. They occur with people known to a victim: a friend, a neighbor, a spouse, a boyfriend or girlfriend, a family member. Stranger rape only accounts for around 25% of…

Know what? Even if NO other woman besides you in all of human history (which you and I know isn’t anything remotely close to the truth) needed or wanted other sexual activities before intercourse, the fact that YOU do should be all a partner needs to know. With someone who is being a good partner…

For men or women, sex is over when one or both partners don’t want to have it anymore, either because they both feel satisfied with the sex they had, or just because one partner or both, even if the sex didn’t result in orgasm, or feel like they wanted it to, just feels done with the whole works and…

First things first: really, partnered sex doesn’t make anyone more mature or grown-up, and it’s not necessarily a stepping-stone to greater maturity or “real” adulthood. Driving a car to school instead of a bike doesn’t make someone more mature: it could just mean one person is wealthier than…

It’s actually, in my book, not grey at all. I’m a very talented cook, and my friends love it when I cook for them. Some crave my meals intensely. If I have a friend over, and I have them smell some fresh basil I picked up at the market, show them a beautiful tomato from my garden, does my doing that…

One of the biggest problems with all of the information out there about sex is that there are quite a lot of myths surrounding the subject, and it’s very difficult to know what’s safe to believe and what isn’t. First, it is not bad for someone to abstain from having sex of any type for a while or…

No, it isn’t. It’s not always true for men either, nor is there a sound reason why it would be more true for women than it would be for men. As well, if women have a female first sex partner, or men a male first sex partner, there also is no golden rule or given about if any of us will have long…

Well, if the woman in question took a pen and wrote “I’m a virgin!” on her forehead, that might tell you something. However, otherwise there are not any signs one can look for to determine virginity short of asking the person in question. Virginity is not really a physical issue so much as it is a…