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’ve got rights, for crying out loud. If you’re of legal age to get emergency contraception over the counter, you cannot be lawfully refused on the basis of age.
My very best advice for anyone, when it comes to any kind of sex, is to only engage in what you truly want to, for yourself, not just for someone else because it’s what they want from you.
Anyone, of any gender or any age, may not feel like it is best for them to choose to be sexual in a given situation, even when presented with an opportunity for sex, even when that opportunity is with someone they have a strong desire to have sex with.
The FBI finally changed its defintion of rape, and while that may seem small, it has the capacity to change things for the better by quite a lot for a majority of rape victims and survivors.
Should a mom provide condoms for her son or not? What about dealing with times she knows her son and a girlfriend will have a house to themselves? Where’s the line between “condoning” sex and being a sexually-supportive parent?
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Want to do your part to help prevent the spread of HIV this World AIDS Day? One of the easiest ways we can all do that is to use condoms correctly and consistently, avoiding common mishaps which can result in rips or breaks.
What to do when what’s supposed to feel like a sexual milestone feels more like a raw deal, including sorting through feelings of upset about a partner’s sexual history.
Have a partner who wants to step away from sex with you or take a break? If you’re wondering what to do to change that, the only right answer is nothing at all. We need to always respect a person’s sexual limits and boundaries, whatever their gender.
For someone choosing to hold off on sex until marriage, what to do about the fact that most other people, including potential partners, will not have made the same choice? How much should your own sexual ethics and values hinge on those of others?
What to do when you’re worried about physical intimacy with someone being awkward? Try to embrace it. Intimacy is often awkward. And that isn’t a bad thing.
