Heather is the executive director of and lead educator at Scarleteen.com, the inclusive online resource for teen and young adult sex education and information which she founded in 1998. She is the author of S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-to-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College; a founder of the All Girl Army; director of the CONNECT teen sexual health outreach program for King County through the Cedar River Clinics/Feminist Women's Health Center, and a sexual health consultant for the young women's site orb28. She is also a member of the editorial advisory board for the American Journal of Sexuality Education and a contributor to the forthcoming 2011 edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves.
Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in online and print publictions including the anthologies Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape, Viscera, Aqua Erotica, Zaftig: Well-Rounded Erotica, The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 1 & 2, Shameless: An Intimate Erotica and in the forthcoming anthology Breakthrough Bleeding: Essays on The Thing Women Spend A Quarter Of Their Time Doing, But No One's Supposed To Talk About, and her photographic work has been shown in several gallery shows and publications.
She was the founder of Scarletletters.com in the nineties, the first online sexuality and arts hub for women online, and has the either laudable or embarrassing reputation of having one of the longest running personal journals online. Also a lead plantiff for the ACLU in the case against COPA, in 2007, she was recognized for her activist work in sexuality and sexual health by the National Sexuality Resource Center with a Champions of Sexual Literacy Award. In 2009 she was awarded the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, Western Region's Public Service Award and an Our Bodies, Ourselves' Women's Health Heroes Award. Previous to her work in sexuality, Heather was a Montessori and alternative classroom educator for several years. A Chicago native, she now lives and works in Seattle, Washington.
You had a sexual experience you enjoyed and felt good about, and you want to tell your friends about it. But you’re afraid they’re going to judge you about it. What to do?
Do you want to be with someone who would only stay with you because you’re having the sex they want to have?
It either hurts or feels like nothing. You don’t know what to do, or what’s wrong, and your partner is handling it really poorly. Here’s some information and advice to the rescue.
Dating someone who’s trans and feeling uncomfortable? How to look at what’s going on and figure out what’s really best for both of you.
Feeling anxiety or shame about one’s own genitals happens. Here are some things to consider and some approaches to learning to accept and embrace these body parts.
Can a heterosexual woman have a healthy, happy sexual and romantic relationship with a queer man? You bet. But it might not be right for everyone.
Working with young people and sexuality daily, we frequently see users who have pervasive fears about becoming pregnant, even when they aren’t taking risks to begin with.
Feeling interested in sex with a partner, but unsure and fearful about what other folks might think or say about it? Here’s some help in figuring if you’re up to that part of a sexual life.
There’s no “should” for when and if we feel ready for any kind of sex, or want to engage in any kind of sex. And no one knows better than you when, and if, that time is.
The expectation that men will always go for sex or don’t have sexual boundaries is super problematic. So, how do you deal with men who feel challenged, and how do we move toward a mindset about men’s sexuality that’s better for everyone?
