sex

First and foremost, no matter what we call it, if masturbation (or any other activity, for that matter) feels pleasurable, that’s the most important thing. Regardless of the names we give things to put them in categories, our bodies are so unique in the way they work that these tidy little...

Life has scripts. Little socially-agreed plays that we enact rather than trying to figure out all our interactions from scratch every time. Many of them are very simple. There's also scripts for sex. Unfortunately, the most common script out there is terrible.

If cunnilingus isn't an activity he enjoys, and he's made clear he doesn't enjoy it and doesn't want to do it, in my book you don't bring it up again as something you want. He's made clear it's just not for him right now, and he tried it twice to see. He knows you're interested in it, so he's...

I'm most interested in how you feel now about this, and separate from how you think everyone else would feel. Hopefully, if you haven't identified your own feelings yet, my answer can give you some help doing that. So, values. Here's the thing about values: they aren't universal. They also aren't...

You know, anytime anyone says or feels that they literally hate someone's body or body parts, my advice is going to be that it isn't a good idea for the person with those feelings to be intimate with the person with that body. If we deeply disdain someone's body parts, or anything big like that...

This doesn’t sound weird to me at all. Many of us have grown up getting a lot of direct and indirect messages that our own sexuality is the one thing we’re all just supposed to know how to do. We see variants of this question a lot, and I’d venture to say that there are many, many more people who...

Once, in a sleepless night of Netflix marathoning, someone said something on a show that stuck with me, despite the rest of the night being an unmemorable haze of insomnia. That was, "What's so wonderful about being young is that there are no mistakes, only research." As someone who works with young...

Assuming that you're engaging in manual sex -- hands or fingers engaged with your genitals, fingering being one term for that -- to express or explore your sexual feelings or desires, fingering IS sex. Just like intercourse can be sex, just like oral sex can be sex, just like full-body massage can...

Many men -- and people of all genders -- will not and do not wait until marriage to engage in various kinds of sex with partners. That's as true now as it was 20 or 50 years ago. For at least the last 100 years in the west, most people do engage in some kind of genital sexual activities with...

I want to first tell you a few things you should know are true. Whatever it turns out your sexuality and relationships are like, whatever it turns out you want from them, they're about much, much more than your abuse. Because we've been abused doesn't mean either or both of those things will be all...