culture

I'll Show You Mine: Jayla

This is our third installment of stories and photographs from "I'll Show You Mine", a book by Wrenna Robertson and photographer Katie Huisman, and by all of the women featured in the book, collectively.

My vagina history contains culture shock, a single father, religion and terrible experiences with men. It confused, sexualized and controlled most of my life.

Male Bodies Vs. Female Bodies: Why Go There?

r89
asks:
I don't mean to ask a silly question, but is there anything that makes being female good in terms of sex? It seems to me men have all the biological luck - they are aroused more easily, they orgasm more frequently, they can orgasm regularly from both oral/manipulative sex and intercourse, their is more square inches of erectile tissue to play around with, etc....

Wrenna Shows You Hers (and mine, and yours, and hers, and hers, and...)

If you’ve been reading Scarleteen for a while, you might already know that for many years now, we've heard from a good deal of young women who are deeply ashamed of and disgusted by these parts of their own bodies.

We take this very seriously, and have always wanted to do everything we could to try and help dispel all kinds of body shame or hatred, including that of the vulva. Over the next couple of months, we’re going to go ahead and take the risk of publishing some photos of real-person vulvas, because we’ve found something we think is beautifully done, very much needed, and that we think can be of great benefit to many of our readers, whether they have vulvas themselves or not.

Sp[ace] Exploration: What Sexual People Can Learn from Asexual Communities

Asexuality saved my sex life. No, seriously -- I mean that. I will declare it from the middle of a courtroom, with one hand on Our Bodies, Ourselves. Asexuality, as much as sex-positive feminism and far more than any amount of "hon, you just need to get laid already," helped me to access a confident, positive, and excited relationship with my sexual self.

Living In a World of Prudes, Sluts and Nobodies At All

In my experience it feels like there are two crowds, those who are 'cool' and have frequent sexual activity, hookups etc both in and out of relationships (or at least portray themselves as doing so) and those who are 'pure' who have decided at this point to abstain from sex until marriage, who are frequently Christian or otherwise religious. I think there's pressure to fit into one of those groups, either to go out and have lots of sex or to not have sex at all.

How Do We Best Define Sex?

When we're quality sex educators; when we are or aim to be inclusive, forward-thinking and do sex education in ways that can or do serve diverse populations, we will tend to define sex very broadly, far more so than people who don't work in sex education often tend to, even if and when their experiences with sex and sexuality have been broad. Often, the longer we work as sexuality educators, and the longer we also just live and experience our own sexual lives, the more expansive the definition becomes. If we live and/or work on the margins, like if we or people we serve are queer, gender-variant, culturally diverse, have disabilities, the diversity in our definitions of what sex can be will become even greater.

Sex Ed and Bleach

This is a guest entry by Max Kamin-Cross, originally published at abortiongang, that's part of the month-long blogathon to help support Scarleteen!

Sex ed. We hear that word a lot, but who really knows what sex ed is? It’s short for “sexual education,” but what’s that?

According to my handy dandy dictionary, sex education is: “education about human sexual anatomy, reproduction, and intercourse and other human sexual behavior.” Lots of words, but it’s pretty much learning about the human body and its reproduction. Pretty much straightforward, right? Wrong.

Sex after FGC

Anonymous
asks:
I was just wondering...can a girl have sex if she has undergone genital mutilation? Because I know a girl who has, and she said it was a TYPE 1 circumcision and that she couldn't have sex EVER. Also, is there any way she will ever be able to reverse the mutilation? What limitations will she face, compared to a person who hasn't been mutilated? Thanks a lot for your answer!...

How are we supposed to know what’s wrong if we don’t know what’s right?

Sexuality in ColorSade 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.