Heather Corinna

Whether your friends are your boyfriend, your dog, your best friend from almost the minute you were born, your third cousin, your booty call, your Dad, your guitar teacher, your downstairs neighbor, your brother, your girlfriend, your iguana, your teammates, your band, your Mom, your gaming group, your sister, your cat, your uncle, your cool new friend from work, your lover, your secret crush, your guardian, your gerbil, your stepmom, the kid you mentor, your choir director, your sponsor, your lab partner, your co-author, that cool person you always talk to the whole way home on the bus, your training buddy, the lunch lady, your locker next-door neighbor, or anyone else, this one’s for them. And for you, friend.

Real-deal consent requires clear, open and honest communication. And if we’re going ahead and actually being sexual together in some way, that also means an ongoing, nuanced and pretty highly situational process of communication, not just one or two super-quick, super-basic exchanges. Not only is communication as a process essential to keeping it consensual, it’s a big part of sex actually being any good for everyone involved.

You are not being unreasonable. I don’t think his response and behavior about the lube is fine. I don’t think it’s okay for him to tell you that not having sex isn’t a big deal for you, or to tell you how important sex is to your relationship for both of you. I don’t think it’s fine for him to be…

Scarleteen turns 20 years old today. Twenty. For two decades, we’ve delivered our unique and innovative brand of sex education, despite many financial, legal, political and practical barriers and battles. That kind of tenure for anything on the internet is unheard of, let alone for a grassroots, feminist sexual health, sex and healthy relationships initiative and alternative education project for young people, and one that was (and still is) queer, working class and woman-led. Centering and serving young people, sexuality and relationships like we do, with inspired quality, care and vision, and doing so independently — and for free — for so long is so rare. Very few organizations and resources have consistently delivered all of what we do, as well as we do, and to as many as we have, for this long.

What’s that shiny graphic there? Why, that’s just a lovely little commemorative doodle we asked artist-in-residence Isabella Rotman to do for our TWENTIETH FREAKING ANNIVERSARY. For real, we turn 20 on Saturday. TWENTY.This queer, scrappy, irreverent little sex education engine that (sometimes barely, but still) could…well, somehow actually did.

No matter what you call it, masturbation is one of the few things that almost everyone does, has done or will do. Here are some of the basic things to know.

You know it’s time to go, and you know it’s also time to start letting go. You probably have a whirlwind of different feelings about it. You may be leaving the worst relationshipyou’ve ever had, you may find yourself having to let go of what felt like the very best one. Maybe it’s a friend, maybe it’s a love, maybe it’s a FWB, your town, your family, or even just a way of thinking or believing. No matter what it was, what you know it’s got to be now is over and what you’ve got to start to get is over it.

In fact, like an awful lot of people, especially women, especially trans and nonbinary people, especially queer people, and especially survivor-people and survivor-advocating-people, we are furious; we are furies. We are mad as hell. Come rage with us on Apple Music or Spotify.

Meet Emily Joy and Hannah Boning, the columnists behind Impurity Culture, a new biweekly feature on Scarleteen.

The second of this month’s batch is all about moving in together: the agony and the ecstacy, the joys and the woes, the ups, the downs, the argh of who drank the last of the milk again for crying out loud and the ahh of the very sweetest of first-thing-of-a-morning-even-though-your-breath-is-actually-kind-of-rank smooches. We’ve got your soundtrack for everything from bringing daily life sweetness to another person to learning to clean up your own damn mess to the deep and amazing joy making a home with someone who already feels like home for your heart can be.