desire

Plenty! Without more information than that, it’s hard for me to know what’s been part of your sexual activity. For instance, if by sexually active, you just mean with partners – for any activity – then I’d suggest going back to your own drawing board, with your own two hands, and finding out about…

I’m going to suggest you look at reciprocity in sex – the idea that one person gives something, so the other should get something of equal value back – in a different way than you might be used to. (Excerpted and adapted from S.E.X., the Scarleteen book.)

Having sex with someone else is really intimate, and we’re all vulnerable in that space, and double for both when we have strong feelings for the person we’re with. So, in order to make our own best choices – including in terms of our emotional safety – we need to understand that. Does this person…

Any way you do it, however you define it. In other words, what “sex” even IS varies pretty widely from person-to-person and day-to-day, and can be or include ANY number of sexual activities. Intercourse is sex, but so is oral sex, anal sex, manual sex, making out, frottage, role play, cybersex…

Hanne Blank is not a virgin. (She’s almost 37 and she’s been living with her life partner for nine years – we just thought we’d get that out of the way.) But she is a historian, a writer, and an expert on virginity, having written the first-ever history of the subject, “Virgin: The Untouched History.”

There are certain physical, hormonal and psychological mechanics that come into play when it comes to human sexual response, and understanding those is essential to lay the foundation for understanding how sex works for ourselves and for our partners. Once we understand how our bodies work when it comes to sexual response, we’ve won half the battle of learning how to enjoy that and incorporate it as a healthy part of our lives, both alone and with others.