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This is a guest entry from The Beautiful Kind as part of the month-long blogathon to support and raise awareness for Scarleteen. I was a teenager in the 80’s, but before that I was a kid who got molested. When I was 8 or 9, my teenage adopted brother asked me, “Do you want me to show you something…

This guest post from the wonderful Anne Semans at the Moms in Babeland blog is part of our month-long fundraising effort for Scarleteen. Thanks, Anne! One day about 20 years ago I was walking down Haight Street with my 6-year-old niece. This was long before I had kids, but well after I started selling sex toys for a living. It was San Francisco in the early Nineties, and Salt n’ Pepa’s song “Let’s Talk About Sex” was blasting out onto the city streets. My niece looked up at me and asked what the song was about.

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…

This is a guest entry from I, Asshole for the month-long blogathon to help support Scarleteen! I was raised in an environment where I felt like I didn’t belong. This wasn’t really anyone’s fault. I just really didn’t belong. I was given some innocuous labels: outgoing, loves to entertain, a social butterfly. There were the less-positive ones, too: wasted potential, weirdo, voted by my graduating class as Most Likely to Relocate to Mars (hey, it turns out Seattle is Mars). I did not know what to call myself, I just knew that I was a little different from all my friends. My precocious age-inappropriate-novel-gobbling self even knew from reading that this feeling was kind of part of the human condition: everyone feels like they are alone sometimes.

This is a guest entry from Dangerous Lilly for the month-long blogathon to help raise awareness and financial support for Scarleteen! At 15, I was still scared of boys, sort of. Sure I’d “date” them, and yeah I’d make out with them, but everything else? Terrified. It was because I knew next to nothing about boys, sex, *whispers* penises, and all that good stuff. You learned about sex in one of three places: 6th/7th grade so-called-sex-ed lectures; your equally uninformed friends; your parents (so. mortifying.).

The excitement of everything early in a relationship can be one of the most amazing feelings ever. Everything is perfect! Your partner is adorable! Everything about this person is endearing! You always get along! Everything feels so easy and natural! You both have permanent goofy grins pasted on…

I want to first make some short, essential statements. What I’d like you to do is read each of them, maybe more than once, and just sit with them. Try and really absorb them. Understand that when it comes to what those of us who work in these fields know about healthy relationships and healthy…

It’s great that you’re looking for information for your friend. Hopefully, we can offer some both she and you will find useful. This month, we have the benefit of a some extra hands to help with this section of the site, including some wonderful sex educators, writers and activists. For this…

This is a guest post from Figleaf at Real Adult Sex, and part of the month-long blogathon to support Scarleteen! Ugh! I’ve got the worst cold today. And here I am writing an entry for the Scarleteen Sex-Ed Blog Carnival. Instead of feeling like an all-American male sexpert I feel roughly as sexy as room-temperature jello. But that’s actually a perfect hook for this post! When you’re sick, a track coach or personal trainer might be able to give you some good advice, but really, the best person to talk to is a doctor. Similarly, when you’re trying to start a business it’s fascinating to talk to an accountant or patent lawyer. But you’ll get much better advice from your local Small Business Administration. Well, it’s the same thing with sexperts vs sex educators.

This guest post is from Anita Wagner at Practical Polyamory, and is part of the month-long blogathon to help raise funds for Scarleteen! I grew up in an area that is pretty much to this day an exceedingly conservative part of the United States. When I came of age, good parents zealously guarded their daughters’ virtue by attempting to control the what, where, when, and most importantly, who, of their daughters’ social lives. Sex ed, after a fashion, was taught in health and hygiene class in about the 7th grade, but this was largely limited to “the birds and the bees,” i.e. reproductive system ed geared toward gender, with boys and girls taking separate classes. Certainly there was no mention of sexual anatomy or sexually transmitted infections, and information about birth control would be unthinkable, including how to use a condom.

I thought you might appreciate hearing from another guy on this one more than from me, so I asked one of our favorite sex educating dudes, Justin from Bish Training, who has been a youth worker for 15 years, who’s been working in sexual health and advice for nearly 10 years and who, from what I can…

I think there’s a sounder, healthier solution than trying different sexual positions or doing more kegels. Because the problem here isn’t your vagina. I don’t think the problem is your partner being uneducated about vaginas, either. I’m not even he is even earnestly feeling the physical differences…

This is a guest post from Wendy Blackheart, at Heart Full of Black, for the Scarleteen blogathon. Ah, Scarleteen. I can actually remember a time before Scarleteen – they started up in 1998, when I was in 8th grade. See, I went to a school where 99.9% of our sexual health information was from an abstinence only program.

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.

One of the most amazing—and, at times, confusing—things about the world is how there are so many people and also so many different opinions and values that people hold. What seems right and good to one person just may not work for another. There’s no single way of being or one way of thinking that…

This guest post from Arvan at SexGenderBody is part of a blog carnival to raise awareness and funding for Scarleteen. In terms of group politics - there are large groups of people who are fighting to prevent you from learning any facts about sex. Facts that can effect your health, income, present, future, career, happiness, ability to have or enjoy sex, choice of sex partners and even the ability to have sex. People get elected by using sex to scare voters - queer sex, teen sex, unmarried sex, kinky sex, fun sex, sex of any kind. Cultural practices and commonly held beliefs about sex punish or shame people for even discussing sex, much less teaching it to a classroom.

This a guest post from Shay at The S Spot for the Scarleteen Blogathon I remember one time when I picked up my younger brother from school, I asked him about his day and he told me that there had been an assembly about sex ed. I asked him if he had learned anything interesting and if he had any questions about anything they talked about (figuring that he might be more comfortable talking to me, his older sibling rather than a “real” adult like mom or dad). He did have a few comments about funny things the teachers had said and how uncomfortable many of them had looked. Then he said, “I didn’t know that condoms don’t protect you from infections or AIDS”. I was flabbergasted.

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…

Part of the 2010 Blogathon to help support Scarleteen. This entry is courtesy of Tess at Urban Gypsy. If I earned a dollar each time I’ve heard the statement, “I’m surprised you’re so strict,” in relation to my parenting, I’d be basking on a beach in Tahiti now rather than on a Metro North train whisking me off to do a sex ed consult on the Lower East Side. I’d probably be doing sex ed consults in Tahiti; you can take me out of NY but you can’t kill my desire to help people learn more about their sexuality. But back on point, I can always hear the implied, “you with your pierced nose, tattoo, open marriage and non-stop sex talk.” The funny thing is, my friends may have been surprised but my daughter was not.

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 can’t make these choices for you, and I think it’s really important you make and own your own choices in relationships and in sex once you start choosing to have them be part of your life. What I can do for you is to try and give you some extra information and perspective, based on what you’ve…

What a person wants and enjoys in media – including pornography – may or may not have any relationship to what they want and enjoy in real life. That’s often particularly the case with fantasy media, which pornography usually very much is. A big part of viewing, reading, or otherwise engaging in…

In hindsight, I knew when I was around ten or eleven that I was queer: that I had and was experiencing growing sexual and romantic feelings for people of all genders, not just those of one of for those of a different sex or gender than me, feelings I’d continue to have throughout my teen years and my adult life to date. I didn’t have the language for it then, though, even though there were queer adults in my orbit I could have gotten it from, adults I naturally gravitated towards without realizing a big part of why was because I saw myself in them and I really needed them.

morphobutterfly’s question continued: I’ve finally found myself in a place where I feel a lot more comfortable with myself, men & sex, & I felt ready to sleep with someone. I didn’t have any love & rose-petal fantasies in mind; on the contrary, I felt that I wanted to do it without the drama of any…

I’m not going to be able to tell you exactly what happened here, because I wasn’t in your head or his, I don’t know what the dynamics of this relationship are or have been like outside of this context and I don’t know your sexual history, including with this person. This is one of those posts I wish…