(hell, yeah) Scarleteen

Many people — and probably most — don’t grow up knowing how to arrange for or manage their own healthcare. For some, that’s because our parents, guardians, or other family members did it for us. For others, it’s because we never got regular healthcare so we could learn how it works. Some of us only went to the doctor, clinic, or emergency room when something was very very wrong; some of us had yearly check-ups with the same doctor, in the same place and knew we (or more likely our parents or guardians) could call the doctor’s office any time we were sick.

Whatever your healthcare was like growing up, you may be responsible for it now or very soon. Sexual healthcare is a kind of care that people don’t want parents or guardians involved in, so it may be that seeking out sexual healthcare is where you find you first need to navigate your healthcare on your own.

We know that can be daunting or intimidating. But managing your healthcare mostly just comes down to the following things:

• Doing some research.
• Being and staying organized.
• Communicating clearly and respectfully, asking questions and taking responsibility for gathering and keeping the information you’re given.
• Recognizing that your health matters and is very important, and keeping that strongly in mind, and in practice, in all your interactions with healthcare providers.

Those are the barest of basics. What follows are specifics so that you can hopefully feel more capable and less frazzled as you start managing your own healthcare, or find some helps to troubleshoot care that’s not working out for you in any way. What the healthcare you get, of any kind, is like, and how it’ll go, will depend on your own health, the kind of healthcare you have access to, and your personal preferences about the kind and frequency of healthcare you get. How it all goes will also often have just as much to do with you as it does a provider.

This is the well-being of your own body and mind we’re talking about here: being able to navigate the healthcare system, to whatever extent you choose to do so and are able to do so, is a crucial skill for maintaining or improving that well-being. So, have a read about choosing a doctor, calling to get an appointment, preparing for an appointment and getting the most out of your interactions with healthcare providers and healthcare support staff.

Have a read at Scarleteen here!

sapphire12758 asks:

The guy I’m sleeping with really wants to have PIV sex with me, but he won’t wear a condom because he’s Roman Catholic. Everything else we’ve done has been amazing and I really want to do it, but I’m terrified of getting pregnant and I’ve already had a scare that I haven’t told him about. I’m on the pill now, but I know that it isn’t 100% effective. Would it be really wrong to try and get him to change his mind about condoms? I’m religious too and I’d hate to make him do anything that would go against his faith, but the idea of getting pregnant scares me so much that I have nightmares about it, and since we’re not really together I don’t know what he’d do.

Heather Corinna replies:

He doesn’t want to engage in sex with condoms (or, I assume, anything that would reduce your risks of pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections).

You don’t want to engage in sex without those things.

So, your limit, a limit you need to make clear to him, is that you won’t engage in sex without the things that reduce the risks you aren’t comfortable with: that includes condoms.

You can say something like, “I respect your beliefs, wants and limits here, but this is what I need in order to feel okay engaging in that kind of sex, just like you’re saying going without condoms is what you need. I know your limit, and now you know mine: now let’s talk about where we both want to go from here.”

Then he gets to decide what he wants to do, and what is or isn’t in alignment with his own limits.

It may be that he feels it’s more important to him to have sex without condoms or other risk-reduction than it is to have sex with you — whether or not that’s based on his faith. I say that because Roman Catholicism doesn’t support sex (of any kind, not just intercourse) outside of marriage, sex for purposes besides procreation, or engaging in sex where someone is using the pill, so it’s hard for me to tell how much this all really is or isn’t about religious doctrine, since he’s being awfully inconsistent here.

Regardless, if he decides he’d rather hold his line about sex with no condoms than compromise with that so he can have sex with you, that’s okay (and it’s okay no matter what his desire to not use condoms is based in). He gets to feel that way and he gets to decide to only have sex with people who don’t want to use condoms or other forms of contraception and risk reduction.

Or, it may be that he decides that his desire to have sex with you takes bigger precedence over his belief that it’s not within the bounds of his religion to engage in sex using condoms, and he may decide he’d rather use condoms than not have sex with you. He gets to do that, too, if that’s how he feels and what he finds he feels best about.

(I’d also say that you should figure that someone who insists on not using condoms with a partner probably poses higher STI risks. Because if they have had any other partners before, they probably did not use condoms with them. So, with someone like this, I’d say just from an STI-safety standpoint alone, going without condoms for any oral, vaginal or anal sex is probably a bad idea. Personally, in a situation like this, I’d just be graciously saying it was time for me and someone like this not to continue to be sexual, since what I needed for emotional and physical safety obviously isn’t compatible with what they believe in and want to do. No harm, no foul, everyone is still awesome, but I’m going to just exempt myself from the whole situation and move on along.)

No matter what he decides, you can both set your own lines AND not make anyone do anything they’re not uncomfortable with when you’re just clear that, like they have given lines, so do you, and you want and intend to respect both of them. In other words, he’s set his. Now you’re going to set yours. And so long as you both respect what the other decides, and neither of you attempts to change the other’s mind about each of your limits, it’s all good.

Read the rest here at Scarleteen

likeboom asks:

My boyfriend and I, both 18, are very comfortable with each other. We took things slow, somewhat due to my discomfort in the religious section and partly to make it more genuine. Skip forward a bit and we are delving into the world of sexual activity. I want to steer clear of PIV sex for pregnancy reasons and virginity reasons. But the other day we were exploring each others’ bodies and before we knew it we were having anal sex. Thankfully my boyfriend used much lotion in the absence of lube and took it very slow. We both enjoyed it and were even able to switch positions once or twice with little to no difficulty. My question for the staff of Scarleteen is simply this, is there something I’m missing? From word of mouth anal is supposedly unpleasant, unsafe, and should be avoided; but my boyfriend and I really enjoyed ourselves. We want take a day and just explore the possibilities but is there such thing as too much or things that I should be wary about before we even consider more anal sex? Thanks.

Heather Corinna replies:

You know, one of the neatest, most interesting things about sex, from my perspective, is that what people do and don’t enjoy is so diverse. One person’s least favorite sexual activity is another person’s favorite. I think that’s really cool.

All of our bodies, sexualities and situations are so different that, for the most part, we can only really find out what we like (or don’t) by following our own interests and feelings, then by experimenting and exploring as feels right for us and any of our partners.

Some people love anal sex. Some people love it who are on the receiving end, as it were, others love it who are on the other side of things, and some people love pegging a partner and being the receptive partner. Some people don’t like it at all, again, be they a receptive partner or the person with a body part or toy who’s doing the entry with a partner. Some people have liked it a lot with one partner, but didn’t like it at all with another. Some people like it at one time of life, but not another. Just like with other kinds of sex, there are also some people who just can’t do it, due to certain limitations of their unique bodies.

What other people experience with sexual activities can sure be interesting, and it can tell you many things, but something it can’t tell you is what you like and enjoy.

The real difference with how anal sex is often talked about is generally that penis-in-vagina intercourse has a longstanding cultural stamp of approval while anal sex hasn’t had that, largely due to religious ideas, mythology about the anus and anal sex, and people’s negative feelings about their bottoms. This is also about historical shifts and changes. The way anal sex is often talked about now used to be how oral sex was talked about. Then oral sex became a more common or popular sexual activity, and one more people talked about as something they did in their sexual lives, so the stigma with it decreased. I highly suspect the same will happen with anal sex in time, particularly if we also get less homophobic as a culture, since many negative attitudes and fears about anal sex often have roots in fears and ignorance around homosexuality.

As far as what you hear about pleasure with anal sex goes, we know from many studies and anecdotes that a lot of people don’t find penis-in-vagina intercourse pleasurable, or the best thing of ever. But that cultural stamp of approval versus a cultural stigma also means we hear more about how anal sex is unpleasant for some people than we hear about how vaginal intercourse is (even though I’d say that based on the data we have, just as many people probably don’t like one as people who don’t like the other). It’s way more loaded for people to talk a lot about how they don’t like the one sexual activity (vaginal intercourse) often held up as the only kind of sex, or the only truly acceptable, sanctified or “loving” sex, so we’re going to hear more negatives about other kinds of sex just because people have more cultural permission to say they don’t like those.

And if you’ve heard some stuff about how the anus is only “designed” for “one way,” meaning that it’s only designed for things leaving the body, not entering it, do know that those are value statements, not statements based in sound science or current medical data. Especially since there’s no one on earth who has ever been able to identify, let alone consult with, the designer of our bodies or their parts or see their apparent blueprints that would tell us what a body part like the anus is “supposed” to be used for. Besides, we already know that on top of the anus and rectum being a key part of your digestive system that eliminates waste, is is also a body part people sometimes engage as part of their sexual lives and behaviours. That’s nothing even remotely new.

So, you’ve heard or read that some other people don’t find anal sex pleasant. That’s fine: we all get to like the sexual things we like and not like the things we don’t. Hooray for that!

You’re saying that you liked it, though, and this is about you.

Read the rest at Scarleteen here.

“It just happened.”

This is something I hear often from some readers and users at Scarleteen. That sex, consensual sex, sex they expressed wanting at the time, wasn’t something a person actually, actively made choices with and participated in, but something that “just happened.”

But when sex with a partner, of any kind, is consensual, it doesn’t “just happen” to anyone involved. Consensual sex is something we actively do: if we’re not actively doing it, it can’t happen. It’s something people decide, when they decide to, to actively make together. It can’t “just happen,” just like dinner doesn’t just happen: someone’s got to have made or found dinner for there to be dinner at all.

It’s not like someone is just walking by, then trips onto someone else who was just minding their own business playing Angry Birds, everyone’s clothes magically fall off, and then HOLY CRAP! WE’RE HAVING SEX! Just like eating isn’t something that happens to us, but is something that we do, or writing a book isn’t something that magically happens (if only!) but is something we have to intentionally do, so it is with consensual sex. Consensual sex isn’t whatever songs come up when we have an iPod set on random shuffle: it’s an intentional mix tape we make, bearing in mind what we know everyone listening likes and doesn’t like.

Now, if everyone felt just fine about sex being something that felt like it “just happened,” I’d not be saying anything about this. But more times than not, most of the time, at least one person isn’t left feeling fine at all, or there have been things that happened with that “just happened” sex which created big physical or emotional risks or negative outcomes, which often do, like the absence of contraception or safer sex (and sometimes the result of an unintended pregnancy or an STI), a lack of making sure a person was having sex in the kind of relationship they only feel comfortable having sex within, or the expectation, which turned out to be false, of a certain kind of care, safety or cooperation in managing feelings or physical issues that came about during or after sex, be those pregnancy scares, conflict with family or friends or feelings of vulnerability.

Sometimes what happens is that sex with someone that gets into a pattern of “just happening,” at some point crosses the line from dubiously consensual to being absolutely nonconsensual. In some ways, some of this “just happening” stuff can set a stage or create a general dynamic that’s more supportive of sexual abuse or assault than of a healthy, consensual sex life. It certainly also better supports a sexuality that feels like it doesn’t really belong to you than one which does, and feeling like your sexuality really isn’t yours, or isn’t something you have real ownership of is an excellent recipe for a crummy sexual life you frequently feel crummy about.

There’s a big meme in a lot of our cultures that says that sex is only hot when it feels like it just happened to us and our partners; when throughout, there’s a sense of wild abandon, a lack of control, an effortlessness, or when someone is being, or feels like they’re being, taken or surrendered in some way.

Some of that meme is crap, and some of it is even bullshit of the worst possible kind: the kind that enables and excuses rape and other abuse, that presents sex or sexuality as something that is out of everyone’s control and which we all need to be afraid of, a collective vulnerability some big groups have exploited throughout history — and are still exploiting now, and boy howdy, do you know about that if you’re a young person — to socially control or oppress people.

On the other hand, some of that meme is about some of the good stuff people often want from sex that not only doesn’t hurt anyone, but is beneficial for everyone involved: an escape from the more stressful parts of life, for instance, or from negatives we might often experience or feel about our bodies or minds. An ease. A place or way to feel free or less guarded. A safe way to explore parts of ourselves we wouldn’t bring to dinner with anyone’s parents. A way to be vulnerable with someone else where we and our partners might well be giving or sharing parts of ourselves to each other we often keep just to ourselves. An adult way to play like we played in other ways as kids, where we do things on the fly, forget who we are a little bit, and get totally caught up in the play to the point where we almost forget about everything else, like what time we were supposed to be home for dinner or that we’re not, as it turns out, in an actual castle, but instead are playing inside a cardboard box.

There’s no need to get all judgy about anyone who wants to enjoy or experience spontaneity, or a feeling of surrender, freedom or abandon in their sexual life. There’s nothing that isn’t okay about enjoying those things or wanting those kinds of experiences.

The good news is that whatever good feelings we can have or enjoy from that general feeling of sex “just happening,” are things we can still have when we’re all being a lot more intentional, and when we all have real control in and of sexual experiences and interactions. We have the capacity to have sex that feels like a lot it’s just happening in the good ways — where plenty of it feels spontaneous, and like we can let ourselves go in it, or float in it — while it’s all also what we’ve mutually, consensually and actively chosen, both at the time and in advance. We can feel out of control with something while still actually being in control, and if you don’t believe me, ask a professional skydiver, a musician or a dancer.

Read the rest at Scarleteen here!

“Do you have any children…?”

It’s such a typical question to ask someone, and for many it’s an easy yes or no answer. For me though, I consistently find myself hesitating to respond. Generally when speaking to strangers, casual acquaintances, and even new friends, I opt to answer “no.”

On occasion, I brave the consequences and answer the truth: “Yes, I’m a birthmother.”

This, of course, has to be followed by an explanation that I once was pregnant and chose to place my child in an open adoption, that I have a close relationship with my now 12-year-old daughter and her adoptive family; essentially, I am a mother, I have a child, but I am not parenting.

My decision to plan an adoption did not come instantly, nor did it come out of any disapproval of abortion. Early in my pregnancy, my daughter’s birthfather and I were deeply in love and felt that despite our age, limited resources and our families’ disapproval, that we could parent. We didn’t want to consider other options at that time, we just wanted to parent. For nearly eight months, that was the plan I worked towards – that was 8 months of doing all I could to navigate through the world of pending parenthood, but continuously feeling that what I could give emotionally, physically and financially was not enough to be the kind of parent I wanted to be. By the time I came to open adoption, I had explored every possible avenue and option, and I knew with absolute certainty that adoption was the best choice for me, my daughter, and everyone else involved.

The process of choosing a family to parent my child, of meeting and getting to know them, and of working together to plan what our families would look like as we blended them into one was both empowering and reassuring. Granted, the placement of my daughter was decidedly the most difficult and heart-wrenching experience I have had, but it came with equal amounts of joy and excitement, knowing that I would always be a part of her life, watching her grow and thrive, and being included in her family that I respected and admired. Our relationship has grown over the years – her family is my family, our time together is always special and yet totally natural, and my daughter has grown up knowing exactly who I am and what my place is in her life. For my daughter, her brother, her parents, and myself, adoption has created our family, and there is nothing strange, scary, secretive or shameful about it.

So why is it so difficult to talk about my adoption experience (which was amazing, positive, and has continued to feel like the best possible choice I could have made at the time) outside of the adoption community?

Read the rest here.

I mentioned this phenomenon to an acquaintance, Lisa, who said she, too, was getting it from all sides. Two out of three of her closest friends have IUDs, which once turned a dinner conversation into a two-on-two conversion mission. Meanwhile, a cousin tipped her off to a Planned Parenthood program that offers free IUDs to qualified women. Lisa wasn’t looking for a new form of birth control. But, like a line on a room in a rent-stabilized apartment or a too-good-to-be-true sample sale, the benefits of the IUD appear to be too great to keep to one’s self. “Women who have IUDs seem eager to defend them and argue in favor of switching to them,” she said.

They begin by explaining that the T-shaped device (“Smaller than a penny!”) is inserted by a doctor or nurse (“You’re in and out in fifteen minutes”) and remains in the uterus (“I’m part bionic”), preventing pregnancy for up to ten years with minimal side effects — other than the quasi-religious fervor.

I moved to Seattle around four years ago from Minneapolis, where I lived for six years after leaving my hometown of Chicago. Growing up in Chicago, living in Minnesota and after an early childhood on the east coast, I was used to old things, to history, to a total lack of shiny-and-new. Growing up poor and in a number of far less-than-ideal living situations, my normal in how and where I lived was often pretty rough around the edges, and often involved a lot of effort from me, typically more than my fair share.

Seattle, however, is kind of the land of shiny-and-new. Almost every place I looked at when I was apartment-hunting felt sanitized and kind of like Barbie’s Dream House to me: without my kind of character and so already-finished that I didn’t see where there was room for my own stamp in them. The allure of the fixer-upper was nowhere to be found. I’ve always liked fixing places up that anyone else would see as hopeless: it’s a challenge, and a situation where I might have the ability to feel like I’m awesome because I took something shitty and made it fantastic. I’ve always felt more at home in places that were a bit of a disaster, probably because that’s just what I was used to, but whatever.

As it turns out, I found this house to rent that seemed amazing: it was over 100 years old, and in a neighborhood that at the time, had more old character and charm than new stuff. It had a ton of kooky little quirks I found really charming. It needed a bunch of work done to potentially make it nice, but it had the raw materials to be something awesome with work. I didn’t think twice about how quickly the landlord rented it out to me, because I wanted it, so that just seemed like serendipity. Like this was meant to be my house, to the point that I had this idea that had anyone else tried to rent it, it would not have been so easy for them.

I did do a lot of creative work with it, though not as much as I’d have liked to. I just didn’t have the time or the resources to do so much of it mostly on my own. As well, even from the start, I should have seen some red flags I just didn’t. For instance, while I was so into working on it, my housemate wasn’t as invested in that as I was. I should have recognized that when a landlord says you can just do whatever you want with a place with no limits, they’re either not being truthful or just don’t care much about the place. I also had to pay some of the costs of fixing it up, rather than the landlord paying me to do labor he should have done himself.

As the years went by, more things kept falling apart and breaking. I tried to keep up with them mostly on my own, especially since when I asked for help, what was given was either substandard or radio silence. Within a year, my lease also got shifted to a month-to-month lease, meaning that the landlord could ask me to go pretty much anytime with very little notice. Having survived that exact situation more than once in my life, and so barely, that felt horribly unstable, but I just accepted it instead of trying hard to assert my needs. Still, I felt more comfortable here than I thought I would have felt moving, both because moving or any kind of big start-over is so hard, and because this place felt so familiar, not just with its style and age, but with it’s whole vibe: I’ve lived almost all of my life in places that were falling apart or neglected. I was used to that, and however uncomfortable that as, something about that did feel like home.

Last year, it finally became clear that I could drive myself batty trying to keep this place liveable and it just wasn’t going to happen. I spent a winter without working heat in half the house, wrapped up in blankets all day working in front of a space heater. The basic fixtures kept breaking. There were leaks, including one that nearly took down my kitchen ceiling, and a lack of insulation that cost me more money in bills than I have to spend. One day, I was so frustrated with two things that broke that I just gave up, went to get myself a glass for some wine, and when I opened the cabinet, the door fell off in my hand. On top of my house falling apart all around me, I didn’t even like the city it was in very much, and my neighborhood had also changed radically during the time I lived here in ways I did not like at all, and was not going to change back. I sank to the floor in a pile of tears, already upset due to building stress from managing work and some other huge changes in my life. It all felt so hopeless, and I so felt trapped in it, especially since at the time, moving wasn’t an option I felt I could handle financially or practically.

But why was I staying in a city I didn’t really like in the first place? Why was I staying in a house that was falling apart all around me more and more? Why did I keep trying to convince myself I could fix everything when I knew I couldn’t, or that my landlord would suddenly do all kinds of things he’d never done? Why did I keep focusing on the small things that I loved about the house when the big things were so awful? Why was I investing more and more money, effort and love into something where getting a real return on that investment was about as likely as a million dollars falling from the sky? Why was I staying so focused on what this house could be, rather than focusing on the way it actually was and was most likely to remain? Why was I accepting a total lack of help from the people who should be helping me with it while ignoring some potential help others could have given me to be somewhere better? I’m a smart person: why on earth was I being so stupid?

Ultimately, I think it came down to the fact that I was so bogged down and overspent with a lot of things in my life, including this damn house. On top of everything else I was dealing with, the idea of feeling displaced from any kind of home at all, even a poor one, just seemed like too much. I had taken part in digging myself in deeper and deeper into a pit: having to take responsibility for the place I was keeping myself in was harder than being unhappy, but being able to pin it entirely on what the house was doing, what my housemate and landlord were not doing. I had gotten attached and stayed so attached to the “what-ifs” and had invested so much time, money and heart into this place: I was having trouble accepting my hopes for it were simply never going to come to fruition because it seemed like such a waste. I had gotten scared of making a change, and had strangely managed to forget that I was capable of making it and had done so many times before in my life, even when it was harder than this was now. I had become comfortable in being uncomfortable.

In a few weeks, I’m moving out.

I’m leaving this house and this city for one of the beautiful small islands just outside of it. For many years no, I’ve talked about how I’ve spent almost all of my life in very urban areas, yet when I needed peace, it’s rural areas I’ve gone to to find it, and so I felt I might actually be a lot happier living rurally. The way my workday most often is, I can actually get away with only needing to go into the city a few times a month for work, so it is doable. Because it’s just a short ferry ride into the city, I can be rural here while also having easy access to the city. I found a place to move to with almost the exact same rent as I’m paying now, but where everything works and nothing is broken. Sure, it’s only 20 years old, so that feels and looks unfamiliar to me, but it’s beautiful inside and out. I will literally get to wake up every day and walk out into the forest, which is heaven on earth to me. As is often the case, if we can shake ourselves out of our miasma, we can usually identify not only ways to get out of it, but ways that getting out can be part of pursuing more of what we’ve wanted and had as goals all along.

Of course, this means my having to pack up everything and move again. It means money spent on moving and resettling, which is always a major strain. It means all the practical, tiresome crap you have to do to relocate. That means risking that a new place or space may or may not be better than the old one in some ways, even though it most certainly will be in other ways. That means having to deal with change, which even when it’s positive, is often uncomfortable and scary.

You may perhaps be wondering why I’m going on here at Scarleteen about my move. I’d be wondering, too.

I only just realized one of the big things that got me to these realizations about my house were conversations with some of you about your unhealthy, abusive or otherwise crummy relationships. So, I figured the least I owed you for that epiphany was the possibility of doing you the same turn, especially since your bad relationships have the capacity to screw you and your life up you a whole lot more than my bad house has the capacity to screw me and my life up.

Read the rest at Scarleteen here.